Whether Bibi Stays or Goes, the ‘Special Relationship’ Must End

Israel Tuesday’s election shows why Israel continues to be a strategic liability for the United States. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) Israelis have voted in their first election since the attacks of October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza. The poll was widely seen as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, and while the prime minister’s opponents appear to have denied his coalition an outright majority, pro-Netanyahu parties won several more seats than the Jewish anti-Netanyahu grouping (at least as of this writing; precise results are still in flux). The balance is held by the two Arab parties, who, being Netanyahu opponents, should make for natural allies of the Jewish opposition bloc—except that, being Arabs, their participation in any coalition is a matter of intense controversy. Viewed from the United States, all this is interesting. Israel’s electoral system is quite different from our own, and its politics is famously convoluted and unpredictable. (Get two Israelis talking across a table, an IDF colonel once told me, and you will hear three opinions.) But there are also, unfortunately, vital stakes for us here. For the plain fact is that the Israeli government exercises tremendous influence over U.S. foreign policy. For decades, the concerns and priorities of Israel have played an outsize role in keeping America militarily engaged in the Middle East. Eight months ago, we saw the risks of this metastasize spectacularly when our government launched a ruinous and illegal Mideast war “at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally” (to quote from the State Department’s own legal rationale for the conflict). Nor is this influence limited to external affairs: The Israel lobby is a significant, if weakening, force in our domestic politics, which retains considerable ability to sway election outcomes. (Just ask Thomas Massie.) So for Americans, it matters who leads this small country 6,000 miles away, and I would submit we have a rooting interest in a leader prevailing who is not named Benjamin Netanyahu. But the vastly more important issue is the fact that this matters. The problem with the “special relationship” between America and Israel is bigger than one man. This is not to say that things wouldn’t be better for everyone with Netanyahu gone. Indeed, his conduct in the run-up to the vote showcased the Israeli premier’s singular ruthlessness and his willingness to set the entire region ablaze if it could benefit him politically. Last week, Netanyahu ordered Israeli warplanes to fly near Iranian airspace, apparently in the hopes that Iran would open fire and supply a pretext for a renewal of the war. Then, the weekend just before the vote, he reportedly issued a directive to the IDF to launch unspecified military action against Iran, which appears to have been thwarted thanks to heroic resistance by the military’s chief of staff. Netanyahu also leaned into increasingly desperate fearmongering in the last days of the campaign, sharing hysterical warnings about the imminent disaster his loss would bring about (notably including a post that depicted a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv and suggested Israelis who voted against him would be “condemning themselves and their family to the danger of a second Holocaust”). Then, too, there is Bibi’s close personal relationship with Trump, which he has leveraged both to harness American power to the Israeli government’s ends and to secure Trump’s full-throated backing for his re-election campaign. More than any other Israeli leader, Netanyahu has touted his ability to influence U.S. decisionmaking as an indispensable political asset. Yet consider what else the election tells us. Yes, Netanyahu lost his majority. But even after the domestic bruising taken by the Israeli premier for his failure to prevent October 7, his penchant for corruption and blatant power grabs, and his embrace of the ultra-Orthodox and their wildly unpopular exemption from military service, his coalition appears to have won the most seats of any of the three major political groupings (53 as of this writing, compared to 48 for the anti-Netanyahu bloc). Netanyahu’s Likud party also significantly outperformed any other single party. Thus the prime minister could say Wednesday morning that: There are two things that are clear. The first thing is that the Likud is the largest party in Israel…. There’s no doubt about it. The second thing that’s been made clear is that the right bloc has a major decisive majority among the Zionist public, a decisive majority. Whether one credits this as a victory or not, it’s undeniable that Netanyahu’s Weltanschauung has immense and enduring purchase among Jewish Israelis. And, increasingly, it appears to be the future of Israeli politics: A poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 just before the election found that around three-quarters of Jewish first-time voters described themselves as right-wing or center-right. There is also the composition of the anti-Netanyahu bloc to reflect upon. It relies on noted hawks like Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett, both of whom take hard-line stances on Iran, Gaza, and Israeli foreign policy more broadly (taken together, the parties of Lieberman and Bennett account for two-fifths of opposition seats). Even the de facto opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot, who has been critical of Netanyahu’s obsession with regime change in Iran and his tolerance of settler violence in the West Bank, is nonetheless in basic agreement on issues like the war against Iran, the future of Gaza, and statehood for Palestinians. (Indeed, the former general is largely responsible for the Dahiya Doctrine, under which the Israeli military deploys disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure to achieve deterrence.) What this means is that the broad arc of Israeli foreign policy is unlikely to change, no matter who leads the country. Nor will Israel's efforts to enlist the United States in the brutal subordination of Gaza and the West Bank, the maintenance of low-grade anarchy in southern Lebanon, and, most critically, the continued confrontation with Iran. There is a broad consensus across Israeli society that these are now nonnegotiable requirements for the country’s continued existence. But whatever their relationship to Israeli security—and I believe that, over the long term, these commitments will do far more to undermine than to shore up Israel’s safety—they do not advance U.S. interests. Quite the opposite, in fact: By destabilizing the region and making conflict endemic, Israeli actions impose economic costs on the United States and throw up major obstacles to completing the vitally important work of retrenchment from the Middle East. Because of what it reveals about Israel’s trajectory, the election presents an opportune moment to reassess the U.S.-Israel relationship. The conditions that led the Israeli government to successfully push for the Iran War, and for all of the other deleterious fruits of the partnership—the military aid (both direct and indirect), the integration of our respective national security establishments, the continued commitment of U.S. resources to a theater increasingly peripheral to our grand strategy, the diplomatic cover for war crimes—are structural in nature. No plausible change from within Israeli society is going to end them. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox In addition to what the election results reveal, they may also make it easier to revise the relationship, at least in the short term. Despite the overperformance of Netanyahu’s coalition, the legislative majority formerly enjoyed by the prime minister is no more. This could create room for an immediate break with either a weakened Netanyahu or, better, a new leader bereft of strong personal connections to the Trump White House. (In fact, if Trump’s own remarks on the matter are to be believed, Bibi’s departure would make the president “not inclined” to continue the fight against Iran.) But this situation is not without its dangers. As my colleague Andrew Day trenchantly observed in these pages yesterday, Netanyahu losing his majority but remaining at the head of the government creates a real risk of renewed war with Iran. He may remain as a caretaker PM for weeks, and in that time will have extremely strong political incentives to launch an attack that will “finish the job” and bolster the case for a unity government with himself at the head. There has thus never been a more urgent or propitious moment to listen to the American people and reform what has become a one-sided and intensely disadvantageous partnership. It’s time to end what the great diplomat and historian George Ball called “the passionate attachment”—and treat Israel like a normal country.