Biden and Netanyahu Speak for the First Time in Months as Mideast Crisis Deepens

by · NY Times

Biden and Netanyahu Speak for the First Time in Months as Mideast Crisis Deepens

The conversation carried the weight of the worst relationship between the United States and Israel in years.

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President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House in July. Their call on Wednesday came at a moment when U.S. national security officials believe the Middle East is on a knife’s edge.
Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Washington

For the first time in two months, President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Wednesday in a phone conversation that focused on Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack.

When the meeting ended, American officials said nothing about Israel’s plans, or whether Mr. Netanyahu indicated he would heed Mr. Biden’s warnings not to hit nuclear or energy sites, which the White House fears could lead to an escalating cycle of Iranian missile strikes and Israeli responses.

Instead, a terse account of the conversation issued by the White House hours later said Mr. Biden “condemned unequivocally Iran’s ballistic missile attack against Israel on Oct. 1,” but made no reference to discussions on how to respond — which was the purpose of the call.

Looming over the conversation was the reality that, for all the declarations of unified purpose, the past few months have been burdened by the weight of the worst relationship between the United States and Israel in years.

The conversation on a secure line, which also included Vice President Kamala Harris, began shortly after 10:30 a.m., the Israeli news media reported.

The call came at a moment when U.S. national security officials believe the Middle East is on a knife’s edge. They have told Mr. Biden that after the missile attack by Iran on Oct. 1, which did relatively little damage in Israel, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not looking to enter a broader war.

But U.S. officials believe that if Israel reacts to the strikes by going after Iran’s most sensitive sites, the result could be an uncontrolled escalation. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, posted a video on Wednesday around the time of the call. “Our attack will be deadly, precise and above all surprising,” he said, which seemed to suggest that some kind of covert action in Iran might be the central element. “They will not understand what happened and how it happened,” he added. “They will see the results.”

American and Israeli officials have hinted that Israel might take its time in responding, adding to Iran’s anxieties about what could come next. There have been, in the past, local attacks on nuclear facilities and assassinations of Iranian scientists, but they have not stopped Iran’s slow but steady progress to the threshold of building a bomb.

American officials do not dispute that Israel needs to react to maintain deterrence. But at this point, administration officials would settle for acts of sabotage, as long as the situation does not escalate what has already turned into a regional conflict. Yet time after time in the past year, Mr. Netanyahu has largely ignored Mr. Biden, betting that the president did not have the political latitude to cut off arms or aid to Jerusalem.

White House officials, worried after they were blindsided by a series of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, demanded the conversation and insisted that it take place before Israel conducted a counterattack.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III was reported to be “angry beyond words,” one administration official said, because the absence of clear advance notice about the attacks in Lebanon put the lives of Americans in the Middle East at risk.

Top American officials said they were mostly concerned about making sure that Iran and Israel did not get into an uncontrolled escalation of their long-running shadow war. In the past six months, that conflict has expanded to include three rounds of direct missile attacks from one country against the other. This was the first year direct attacks took place since the Iranian revolution in 1979.

The lack of communication between the United States and Israel, two countries that have described themselves as the closest of allies since Israel’s creation in 1948, reflected the deeper breach in the relationship.

Mr. Biden has been widely reported over the past year to have emerged from conversations with Mr. Netanyahu uttering a string of epithets about the Israeli leader.

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu believes that Mr. Biden’s constant efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza, and more recently in Lebanon, would have squandered Israel’s best chance in decades to deal major blows to Hamas and Hezbollah, according to U.S. officials familiar with their conversations.

In the American account of the conversation, the White House said that “the leaders discussed the urgent need to renew diplomacy to release the hostages held by Hamas.” It made no reference to the view of American negotiators that Mr. Netanyahu often proved an obstacle to reaching that accord, as did the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar.

In the prime minister’s view, Israel has scored major tactical victories over both Hamas and Hezbollah by destroying much of their leadership ranks. In Hezbollah’s case, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials believe that half or more of its arsenal of missiles, all designed to strike Israeli targets, has been destroyed.

U.S. officials have argued that it is time for Israel to cement its tactical gains over Hamas and Hezbollah into a broader strategic victory, including some political agreements on cease-fires and, ultimately, toward a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a homeland. But they fear that Mr. Netanyahu is not interested and is trying to revive his reputation after being taken by surprise by the terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.

The conversation between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu came after Mr. Gallant, the defense minister, scheduled and then canceled a trip to Washington to see Mr. Austin, his American counterpart. And the reasons seemed to say more about the splits in Mr. Netanyahu’s badly divided national security team than it did about the debate over what to strike in Iran.

Pentagon officials sought to play down the abrupt postponement of Mr. Gallant’s visit on Wednesday, though they acknowledged that it was a missed, or at least delayed, opportunity to discuss in detail Israel’s military response to Iran’s recent missile barrage.

It had also been seen as a moment to help reset personal relations between Mr. Gallant and Mr. Austin. While the two defense leaders generally have good relations — aides said they had spoken more than 80 times since the Oct. 7 attacks — even military ties have been a bit frayed lately.

Senior Defense Department officials complained that the Israelis had not been completely candid or timely in alerting the United States to recent important Israeli operations, including the assassination last month of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

Mr. Gallant had informed Mr. Austin during a phone call as the Israeli operation was underway. Pentagon officials said Mr. Austin was seething that the Israelis had not given more notice to allow U.S. troops in the region to increase defensive measures against potential Iranian retaliation.

In a phone call on Sunday, Mr. Austin made clear to Mr. Gallant that the United States wanted Israel to avoid steps in retaliation for Iran’s missile barrage that could result in a new escalation by the Iranians, a senior Pentagon official said on Monday. The two men had been expected to discuss options in more detail in the face-to-face meeting on Wednesday. Now that will have to wait.

“Certainly, in-person visits allow for just, you know, deepening of the relationship, being in person,” Sabrina Singh, the deputy Pentagon press secretary, told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.

Later, she added, “We’re confident that we’re going to continue to engage the Israelis, whether it be here in person at the Pentagon or over the phone.”

The Pentagon has other channels of communication with senior Israeli military leaders.

Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said on Monday that he had spent Saturday and Sunday in Israel talking to Mr. Gallant and senior Israeli commanders.

“We discussed ongoing Iranian-backed threats to the region and efforts to stabilize the region, ensure Israel’s security and deter Iran’s malign and reckless activities,” General Kurilla said in a statement.

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