In public at least, it is difficult to get a cigarette paper between the US and Israel.
President Biden has put his arms around Binyamin Netanyahu and promised Washington’s “ironclad” and “unwavering” support. Billions of dollars have been set aside to finance the war against Hamas.
There is no talk in Washington of supporting calls for a ceasefire, as there is in Europe.
Yet in private, strains are showing — not just over Israel’s conduct of the war, but also its desire to press on quickly with a ground incursion into Gaza.
Biden is concerned for Hamas’s hostages, a handful of them Americans, and what any full-scale invasion of Gaza might mean for them. He is also worried about the safety of US troops stationed in the Middle East and wants time to prepare their defences in case the war spreads.
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There is worry too within the Pentagon that the ground incursion has not had time to be properly considered. Gaza is teeming with tunnels that the Israelis have little knowledge of and despite vastly superior numbers and fire power the Israel Defence Forces has the disadvantage of not knowing the terrain.
It was caught unawares by the attack on October 7. That worrying failure of intelligence also casts doubt on the wider preparedness for a war. US officials have talked of parallels with Afghanistan — even if, as Israeli generals point out, there is a big difference between sending your troops to a large country on the other side of the world, as the US did after 9/11, and an operation in a strip 25 miles by five miles on your own border.
In a broader sense, the Biden administration also wants to salvage its grand plan for the Middle East. Just days before the attack, Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, told a conference that the Middle East took up much less of his time than that of his predecessors.
Biden’s White House wants its foreign policy agenda focused on China, and what time Sullivan and his colleagues did devote to the Middle East was consumed by attempts to secure a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
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Treading delicately, the White House nevertheless believed that if its two biggest allies in the region could set aside decades of mutual distrust, they could act as a bulwark against militant Islamism and the threat posed by Iran, reducing the need for Washington to act as the Middle East’s policeman.
That may seem doomed for now but US officials still hope that once this war is over, something can be saved from the wreckage. They gave a positive read-out this week of a call between Biden and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
But the harsher the Israeli response, the harder it will be to get the Gulf states back round the table. US allies in the region, including not only Saudi Arabia but Bahrain, Jordan and the UAE, all of which have diplomatic relations with Israel, issued another fiercely worded condemnation of Israel’s campaign in Gaza on Wednesday.
Biden has therefore made gestures in their direction. He said that he continued “to be alarmed by extremist settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank ... They’re attacking Palestinians in places they’re entitled to be ... it has to stop now.”
The settler movement is high up on the Gulf states’ list of concerns, as more settlements make their preferred “two-state solution” ever more unlikely.
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Netanyahu privately regards much of this as Democratic Party hand-wringing, though he would not openly snub Biden, a long-term “friend of Israel”, in the way he once did Barack Obama.
Netanyahu presented himself in a televised speech on Wednesday night as he always does: as the resolute protector of Israel’s security, determined not to be put off from doing what is necessary, ignoring the squeamish concerns of the rest of the world for Palestinian civilian casualties.
This time, though, as he knows well, is different. With war threatening to set the region on fire, and with US protection vital, Netanyahu cannot afford to ignore what the White House tells him.
