I Do Not Trust Netanyahu. I Still Trust Biden.

And trust ultimately matters more than agreement

I haven’t written much recently about the war in Gaza, in part because I feel like I’ve said what there is to say. From the beginning I worried that Israel would not be able to “destroy” Hamas, and that if it was not utterly destroyed Hamas would claim victory even if it had achieved nothing but ruin for the Palestinian people. From the beginning as well, I worried that Israel was conducting this war without any clear political objective, and that without such a political objective the war could not possibly be successful. I haven’t changed my mind at all about either of those fundamental worries.

The latest turn of the screw revolves around the efforts to achieve a cease-fire and the release of at least some of the hostages still being held in Gaza—which briefly looked like they might have been successful—and, in the wake of the failure of those negotiations, the start of Israel’s promised campaign in Rafah. There’s been a lot of news and commentary flying around regarding these events. Was there a real prospect of a cease-fire? If so who is to blame for torpedoing it? Is Israel softening its opposition to letting an international and largely Arab force into Gaza as part of a post-war plan for governing and rebuilding the territory? Or, on the contrary, are they laying the groundwork for the return of Israeli settlers?

Some of these debates are on minute points and others implicate much larger background issues, but what they have in common is that, as Yair Rosenberg ably delineates, they are matters that outsiders like myself are in no position to evaluate, among other things because all parties are actively trying to spin the people who report the news as well as foreign politicians and supra-national entities who might be inclined to intrude with their opinions. Even people in the room where it happens may well lack full information; folks like myself can’t even pretend to know enough.

Which means that we, perforce, fall back on the question of trust. Everyone involved is going to spin, of course, to make themselves look as good as possible and to advance their goals within an ongoing situation; nobody can be trusted to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The question of trust doesn’t relate to that, but rather to their policy objectives. Israel, for example, says that their objectives are to reduce Hamas to a non-functional military force, restore security to the Gaza envelope, and free the hostages. Do I trust that, in fact, these are their objectives, and that their actions in both negotiations and in using military force are driven by their honest assessment of those objectives?

My answer to that is, unfortunately, no. I do not trust that Israel is doing what it is doing in order to achieve its stated objectives. That doesn’t mean I affirmatively believe it has secret and nefarious motives for its actions. I don’t, for example, affirmatively believe that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu intentionally scuttled the hostage negotiations because he feared a cease fire agreement would bring down his government. But I’m open to that possibility in a way that don’t think I would have been of any previous Israeli leader—because I do not trust him.

I didn’t trust him before October 7th—indeed, I have never trusted him, not at any point over the thirty years that I’ve been aware of him. But there’s a specific reason why that mistrust has metastasized into something that dominates the way I interpret every action by the Israeli government: Netanyahu did not resign after the unprecedented debacle of October 7th, nor has he promised to do so as soon as conditions permit a change of leadership. Any leader with a normal relationship to democratic accountability and the need for national unity in a wartime context would have done so. The fact that Netanyahu has not is reason enough in and of itself to distrust every policy decision he makes as motivated be something other than his government’s stated reasoning. It doesn’t matter whether the real reason is an unstated policy agenda that a more popular government would not advance (like annexing the West Bank or bringing Israeli settlers back to Gaza) or (more likely, in my view) simply the determination to personally remain in power whatever the consequences to the country.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that I affirmatively believe Israel is pursuing its current course in the war simply because Netanyahu remains the Prime Minister. The war has the overwhelming support of the Israeli public, and if Netanyahu were to step aside the next government would almost certainly be an alternative center-right or right-wing coalition, one which might well include a post-Netanyahu Likud (though not its far-right partners). Moreover, the major decisions the government has made, like the move into Rafa and, potentially, to expand that operation, have had the support of the other members of the security cabinet.

But I am saying that those facts are not enough to reassure me that Israel’s actions are at least being taken based on their honest assessment of what is necessary to achieve their stated objectives, as opposed to Netanyahu’s personal objectives. Among other things, the other members of the security cabinet and even the leader of the opposition are aware that, in the context of Biden’s delay in arms shipments in protest of the incursion into Rafa, Netanyahu might use a split in the security cabinet to his own political advantage, and may be factoring that into their own decision making to support the government’s actions.

So whom do I trust in terms of their decision making—that is to say, whom am I inclined to believe is making what they think are the right decisions as they see things, and are not being disingenuous or pursuing an undisclosed agenda? Right now, my answer is the Biden Administration.

That’s not to say that I think the Biden Administration has made all the right calls or even has a clear idea of what to do next. I actually think they are a bit at a loss over what to do about the war in Gaza. Their overarching goals are to avoid America becoming directly involved in another war in the Middle East without sacrificing American power and influence, and to that end they want to bring America’s regional allies together into a united front to check Iranian power and influence without, in the process, triggering a full-scale war with Iran and its proxies. Those objectives may not be achievable without a change in the Israeli government (they may not be achievable at all, in fact), and Hamas’s attack on October 7th is blunt proof of why. But at this point overt pressure may make a change in government less likely at least in the short term. So the administration has been moving very delicately. As a result they’ve borne substantial diplomatic and political costs with little to show for it so far.

But I trust that those are the administration’s objectives. I trust that President Biden is not making decisions based primarily on short-term political considerations or fear of how he will be perceived, but rather based on his understanding of America’s national interest and what he believes is right. He may be wrong in his understanding—even egregiously so. But I trust that he’s not acting out of pure cynicism. Specifically, and right now, I think the administration’s decision to withhold arms does not reflect either concerns about Biden’s political vulnerability on the Gaza issue, or a profound change in their assessment of the war itself, but that continued delicate effort to prod Israel away from the most catastrophic decisions it might make—which is to say, to prod Netanyahu, who still holds the bulk of the cards, politically, toward something resembling caution.

Once again, I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that Biden isn’t a politician, that he isn’t concerned with his reelection or that he is always does the right thing as he sees it. Among other things, what “the right thing” is can’t be divorced from political factors that shape whether what abstractly seems right is practically possible. But there is a vast difference between maneuvering within political constraints and being fundamentally cynical and self-interested. It’s a character judgment, ultimately, and I simply think that Biden is a political leader of vastly superior character to Netanyahu. And that is the reason why I trust the former and not the latter.

And I think trust matters. I would always rather be led by someone whose views I share more than someone who intends to lead in a direction I disagree with. But, at a deeper level, I would rather be led by someone who I think can be trusted than someone who I deeply believe cannot be.

I have friends who are strong supporters of Israel who have said to me that they are supporting Trump in 2024 in substantial part because they think he will not be subject to the political pressures that Biden is, and will therefore be even more unequivocally supportive of whatever Israel does. I also have friends who are extremely critical of Israel who have said to me that they may sit out 2024 because in the context of the Israel-Gaza war they see no difference between Biden and Trump, or even believe that Trump might be better because however bad he is, if he were in office then the Democrats, in opposition, would be free to take a more critical stance. What these apparently divergent views have in common is that they implicitly agree that the character of leadership doesn’t matter, that leaders are, or should be, merely vessels for pressure, and for that purpose the emptier the vessel the better.

I strongly disagree with that conception of leadership. It’s in times of real trial that you find out what someone is truly made of—whether, in fact, they are made of anything. I blame Netanyahu’s poor leadership substantially for the disaster of October 7th—over a long horizon for having turned his back on any effort to resolve the political status of the Palestinians, and therefore convincing himself that Hamas’s control of Gaza was not only no threat but a practical benefit; over a shorter horizon for having torn the fabric of Israel’s polity apart, and thereby encouraged Israel’s enemies to see an opportunity to attack. But his conduct since October 7th has been even more damaging, and therefore more revealing of just how dangerous it is to be led by an empty vessel, even when you think the balance of pressure acting on that vessel is coming from your “side.”

I hope enough Americans can learn that lesson indirectly before they have to learn it through direct experience.