Democrats increasingly suspect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics by ignoring President Biden’s calls to negotiate a peace deal in Gaza and by confronting Hezbollah and Iran weeks before the U.S. election.
The rapidly escalating confrontation between Israel, Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s ally, Iran, has undercut Biden’s efforts to achieve peace through diplomacy.
The growing threat of a broader conflict has opened the door for former President Trump to argue that the world is “spiraling out of control” on Biden’s watch.
Biden’s polling numbers with Muslim Americans continue to deteriorate amid the mounting violence in the region, which poses a serious political liability to Vice President Harris in Michigan, a must-win state for Democrats.
Trump traveled to Michigan on Thursday to speak at a rally in Saginaw.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s relationship with even the most pro-Israel Democrats has becoming increasingly confrontational.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made headlines in March when he called Netanyahu a “major obstacle” to peace and urged Israel to hold new elections. Around that time, Biden called Israel’s offensive in Gaza “over the top.”
“I certainly worry that Prime Minister Netanyahu is watching the American election as he makes decisions about his military campaigns in the north and in Gaza,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN’s Erin Burnett in a Tuesday interview.
“I hope this is not true but it is certainly a possibility that the Israeli government is not going to sign any diplomatic agreement prior to the American election as a means, potentially, to try to influence the result,” Murphy said, alluding to divisions among Democrats over the war.
A poll of 500 Arab American voters conducted Sept. 9-20 showed Trump and Harris in a virtual tie, with the Republican leading slightly, 42 percent to 41 percent.
It reflects a huge erosion of support for the Biden-Harris administration compared to 2020, when Biden had the support of 59 percent of Arab American voters.
A senior Senate Democratic aide backed Murphy’s claim, noting Netanyahu has long had a reputation as a “meddler” in American politics.
“I don’t think for a minute that Bibi’s not doing it just to impact domestic elections. I think he thinks he can get the Jewish vote to swing, but he may get the Arab American vote to swing,” the aide said.
The Senate Democratic source pointed to Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress in July, when he vowed “total victory” and denounced American anti-war protesters, many of whom are progressives, as “useful idiots” who help Israel’s enemies.
“He understands American politics. They are 100 percent involved in American politics,” the aide said, adding that the view is widespread among Democrats on Capitol Hill.
“Look at everything that’s been happening,” the aide said, pointing to the entry of Israeli troops into southern Lebanon in recent days. “One hundred percent interference into domestic politics. He’s done it his entire career.”
A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Alon Pinkas, a onetime adviser to former Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres and the former Israeli consul general in New York, said Netanyahu has played in American politics stretching back to the 1990s.
“Netanyahu has a track record of meddling in American elections. He’s been doing it since the 1996 election when he was elected [as Israeli prime minister] and played against [then-President] Clinton,” he said.
“He meddled several times during the Clinton administration when he aligned himself with [then-House GOP Speaker Newt] Gingrich,” he said.
Pinkas said Netanyahu supported fundraisers in Israel for then-GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election, though he didn’t actually attend the events.
He said Netanyahu kept a low profile in the 2016 election amid widespread expectations that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump, but “in 2020 he was all-out for Trump.”
He also noted Netanyahu was outspoken in his opposition to then-President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, blasting it as “a very bad deal” during a 2015 speech to a joint session of Congress.
David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and the former CEO and editor of Foreign Policy magazine, said Democrats have good reason to view Netanyahu’s latest military moves in the context of how they may affect the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
“I think it’s a reasonable concern based on conversations I’ve had with Israelis. They understand that [Netanyahu] is a Trump supporter and feels it would be more in his long-term interest to have Trump in the presidency. Therefore, it might in some way affect the decisions he’s making over the course of the next five weeks,” told The Hill.
Asked about how Netanyahu’s potential impact the election, Rothkopf noted the Biden administration’s inability to broker a peace deal despite months of concerted effort, which has become a sore point with members of the Democratic Party’s progressive base.
“Their theory is that unrest in Middle East might not reflect well on the administration. But having said that, if people go back, they’ll also find there were problems to which Trump contributed. It will affect different voters differently, but that’s the underlying theory,” he said.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have pressed Netanyahu for nearly a year to negotiate a cease-fire deal, and U.S. officials say that the Israeli prime minister largely agreed to one privately before later backing away.
Instead of lowering the temperature in the region as Biden had asked, the Netanyahu regime has escalated the situation by killing a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut in July and allegedly assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran.
Then, last month, Israel stepped up its offensive against Hezbollah by detonating explosives inside pagers and walkie-talkies controlled by Hezbollah members, killing 32 people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.
That was followed by an Israeli airstrike Beirut last week that killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, along with members of his inner circle.
Israel then ratcheted up its offensive again by launching a ground offensive into southern Lebanon on Tuesday and followed that with an airstrike on a medical center in central Beirut on Thursday, prompting the Lebanese government to accuse Israel of targeting civilian infrastructure.
Biden responded warily to last week’s strike on Nasrallah, calling his death “a measure of justice for his many victims,” including hundreds of Americans killed by Hezbollah over four decades.
But the president reiterated that “ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means,” noting his administration is pursuing a cease-fire deal in Gaza that would include the release of hostages, as well as a broader peace deal “that would return people safely to their homes in Israel and Southern Lebanon.”
Asked Saturday if an Israeli ground invasion into Lebanon would be inevitable, Biden told reporters: “It’s time for a cease-fire.”