Netanyahu Thinks Joe Biden Is Already a Lame Duck

Is Joe Biden already turning into a lame-duck president? There’s evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks so — and is betting on former President Donald Trump as the next occupant of the Oval Office.

In the last couple of weeks, Netanyahu has flagrantly delayed the Gaza cease-fire talks in Doha, creating new demands. He is doing this even as Biden has waxed positive about an imminent deal — as recently as his July 11 press conference — that would free the Israeli hostages and pause hostilities in the nearly 10-month-old war.

There are several reasons Netanyahu is slow-rolling the negotiations, according to a senior Middle East diplomat and experts familiar with the negotiations. One is that he needs to appease two far-right cabinet members, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have threatened to dissolve his government if he makes concessions to Hamas. Another is he believes Hamas has been significantly weakened and is on the run, thanks to devastating Israeli airstrikes in Gaza that killed senior Hamas officials — including possibly Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’ military wing.

But a key reason for Netanyahu’s latest delay tactic that has received less attention appears to be his calculation that the U.S. election is shifting rapidly in Trump’s favor.

With the U.S. presidential election now a little more than three months away, Netanyahu may believe he can escape the pressure he’s getting from Biden to stop the war and that Trump will go easier on Israel and also be far tougher on Iran and its proxies, especially Hezbollah in Israel’s north. In 2020 Netanyahu described Trump as “the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

“Our assessment is that Netanyahu wants to buy time until the November election,” said a senior foreign diplomat from a Middle Eastern nation who is in close touch with the negotiators, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to reveal his government affiliation. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar reported last week that a separate intelligence assessment provided to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi also concludes the Doha talks may not progress until November because of Netanyahu’s belief that he’ll have more maneuvering room under Trump. (The Egyptian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The fact that Biden is embroiled in controversy at home over whether he should run again because of his age — with a growing number of Democratic Party leaders calling on him to step aside — is also helping. “I think Netanyahu is feeling less pressure from Washington,” said David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has conferred with the Doha negotiators. “He feels Biden is in no place to pressure him.”

As Netanyahu heads to Washington to meet Biden and address Congress, the Israeli leader’s delay of the cease-fire negotiations — despite enormous pressure from his own public to free the hostages — marks only the latest frustration for the U.S. president, who has sought to tout his leadership and long experience on the world stage.

At the NATO summit on July 11, two weeks after his disastrous debate with Trump, Biden repeated earlier assertions that a cease-fire deal was imminent, saying he had proposed a framework “now agreed on by both Israel and Hamas.” Biden said, “We’re making progress, the trend is positive, and I’m determined to get this deal done and bring an end to this war, which should end now.” On Monday, according to the White House, Israel “affirmed its full support for the deal as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, G7, and countries around the world.”

But at about the same time the White House was touting Israel’s cooperation, Netanyahu was changing course, stunning his own negotiating team by issuing new demands in the past week. Even before Biden’s current political troubles Netanyahu was engaged in regular slow-walking of the cease-fire talks, according to many Israeli critics such as Nimrod Novik, an Israeli commentator who once served as senior adviser to former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. On some occasions, the prime minister delayed his war cabinet deliberations; other times, he prevented the Israeli negotiating team from traveling to Cairo or Doha. But Netanyahu was always prodded back into action by the Biden administration.

“Time and again it was mounting public pressure and American urgings that forced him to restore the momentum, only to slow it down again,” said Novik.

Critics say Netanyahu’s latest diplomatic monkey wrench — thrown into the works at the moment of Biden’s greatest political vulnerability — was more brazen and disruptive than anything he’s done before. It came after Hamas delivered a big concession by dropping its demand for a full resolution to the war in “phase one” and instead agreed to leave the paramount issue of when the conflict would finally end to further negotiations, giving Netanyahu much of what he wanted.

Israel agreed to the U.S. framework on May 27. But in the last couple of weeks, in a move that even Netanyahu’s chief negotiator, Mossad head David Barnea, opposed according to Israeli news reports , the prime minister abruptly reopened an issue both sides thought was no longer an obstacle. Netanyahu insisted on keeping an Israeli military presence in two corridors: along the border with Egypt, the so-called Philadelphi corridor; as well as along the Netzarim corridor that cuts through the center of Gaza. The aim, he said, would be to prevent any armed Palestinians from returning across the border with Egypt and traveling to the cleared-out areas in the north.

Previously the cease-fire plan that the Israeli side had agreed to did not address military control over those two corridors, nor did the Israelis insist on inspecting people returning to the northern Gaza Strip. Prior to Netanyahu’s intervention, Israeli negotiators had also tentatively agreed to a U.S.-brokered compromise in which electronic surveillance and additional physical barriers would suffice to block any new Hamas tunnels across the border between Egypt and Gaza. Netanyahu’s new demands forced Israel to pause the talks .

“Bibi’s bombshell really set the clock back,” said Makovsky. “This was a bigger deal than [previous delays]. Until now there was a sense that [the cease-fire] was actually going to happen. People could taste this one. There was such optimism that Hamas had delinked phase one from phase two,” Makovsky said, that some negotiators felt they could start talking about the specifics of prisoner exchanges to bring out the hostages.

“It seems likely Netanyahu and his inner circle figure they can basically run out the clock until Trump gets back to the Oval Office in January,” said Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum, a peace advocacy group in Washington. “Then they’ll have any options they want. There won’t be any pressure on a ceasefire or hostage deal or anything else.”

According to Israeli news reports, Netanyahu told his security cabinet Tuesday that the government “shouldn’t be anxious” about the drawn-out negotiations for a hostage release and cease-fire deal. “Hamas is the one that should be anxious. The hostages are suffering but they are not dying,” he said. Barnea, by contrast, has warned that the female hostages in particular may not have long to live, and he has said publicly that Netanyahu’s new demand for rigorous monitoring of Palestinians traveling from southern to northern Gaza may upend negotiations.

As a result, public dissension has erupted within the Israeli negotiating team —Netanyahu and his own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, aren't even on speaking terms — and many Israelis are furious at the way Netanyahu is “delaying a hostage deal which seems to be in an utmost critical stage,” says Gilead Sher, the former chief of staff to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a senior peace negotiator.

“There is a broad public sentiment of gross neglect by Netanyahu, due to his flying out [to Washington] before completing a hostage deal and while the bloody war with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in the north still goes on,” Sher said in an interview.

U.S. politics has even entered into the often furious debate inside Netanyahu’s security cabinet. According to the newspaper Ha’aretz, one of the far-right members who opposes any deal with Hamas, Ben-Gvir, said in a cabinet meeting this week that "making a reckless deal now would not only endanger Israel, but would be a slap in the face of Trump, and a win for Biden."

Novik says that what he calls “the Trump factor” is one of several considerations that is allowing Netanyahu — who faces corruption charges when he leaves office — to string out the war.

“I believe that his primary motivation is the need to stay in power for as long as it takes to orchestrate his way out of prison, via legislation or otherwise,” Novik said. “To accomplish that, he needs those extremist coalition partners, who threaten to dissolve his government should he allow the war to end.”

What remains unclear, however, is whether a second-term President Trump would make a difference. Netanyahu and Trump were not personally close during the latter’s presidency. The Israeli prime minister also angered Trump when he congratulated Biden for winning in 2020 at a time when Trump was trying to overturn the election.

Even so, Trump as president ended up giving Netanyahu almost everything he demanded on both the Palestinian and Iranian issues. In contrast to previous presidents, among them Biden and Barack Obama, who sought to restrain West Bank settlements so as to negotiate a two-state solution, Trump barely mentioned the issue as Netanyahu pursued a strategy of sidelining the Palestinians. In a major blow to Palestinian statehood in 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. did not consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law. In another first for an American president, Trump also recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

Bit by bit, Trump also unilaterally withdrew rights and recognitions from the Palestinians that both sides used to consider “final status” issues to be negotiated under the Oslo Accords, which Netanyahu had long sought to undermine. Among other things, Trump announced he was moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and pulled funding to support Palestinian refugees — all without offering any real solution regarding the future of the Palestinian people.

At the urging of his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, Trump embraced Netanyahu’s grand strategy of cementing Israel’s strategic ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain under the Abraham Accords. And in 2018 Trump handed Netanyahu the biggest prize of all, pulling out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Netanyahu had campaigned tirelessly against. In his last speech to Congress in 2015, Netanyahu infuriated Obama by urging that the nuclear deal be scuttled. Israel’s longest-serving premier has virtually made his career in Israeli politics by advertising himself as the only one who can stiff-arm the Americans.

But the deepest current divide between Netanyahu and Biden, one that Trump may be happy to bridge, is on the issue of who will govern Gaza. Biden insists that opening up negotiations toward a two-state solution is once again necessary; Netanyahu refuses to consider even sketching out a rudimentary framework for Palestinian autonomy. As president, Trump sometimes advocated two states but never pressed Netanyahu on the issue. He’s unlikely to do so now, after the Knesset — which has grown far more hawkish since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 — voted overwhelmingly on July 18 to oppose a Palestinian state.

Still, Netanyahu should be careful what he wishes for. Since the war against Hamas began, Trump has been occasionally critical of the Israeli government’s ill-preparedness. And in April Trump said Israel was “losing the PR war” and needed to end the conflict soon. “I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory … and it’s taking a long time,” Trump said in an interview on The Hugh Hewitt Show .

Trump has not been explicit on what he will do. The 2024 GOP platform is only 16 pages long, but Israel is the only country explicitly mentioned as one the U.S. will support unilaterally. “We will stand with Israel, and seek peace in the Middle East,” the platform says, without elaborating.

Some Israeli pundits noted that language appeared to tone down the 2016 platform’s pledge of “unequivocal” support for Israel, and a second President Trump may be more eager to put out the flames in the Middle East than Netanyahu realizes. The new Republican platform, for example, doesn’t even address how to confront Iran, and the current Biden framework would also address ways to find a cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, which Trump would likely support.

“Trump in 2024 is not the same as Trump of 2016-2020,” said Koplow. “He’s been emphasizing a lot more of an isolationist bent. We could expect that Trump is going to be rhetorically hawkish on Iran, but if the platform is any indication or the fact that he picked JD Vance as vice president, then his bark on Iran may be a lot worse than his bite.” Vance is openly anti-interventionist when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.

“The Israel stuff is still in a bit of a black box and is even more unclear than other parts of his policy,” according to a national security expert who is familiar with the thinking inside the Trump campaign. “But I would note that Trump has been critical of Netanyahu, he’s clearly not happy with him as an individual, and again Trump has inclinations toward making a deal. I would not be surprised if he’s cooler toward Netanyahu and is less willing to do things like the annexation of the West Bank or Gaza.”