Midterm U-Turn for US-Israel Policy?

Now that the Israeli people have spoken and elected a center-right-religious government, what changes can we expect in US-Israel relations if the Republicans, who generally have a greater affinity for the Israeli right, recapture control of Congress? And how will Binyamin Netanyahu manage relations with President Biden over the next two years?

WHAT IF the Republicans take both the House and the Senate?

Binyamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners will have reason to be cheerful, though they must contend with the Biden administration’s foreign policy, which is a replay of the Obama era, but in slow motion. The administration initially ignored Bibi’s victory. Once the results were final, Secretary of State Blinken called Yair Lapid, perhaps to commiserate over his defeat, and then reached out to Mahmoud Abbas, to assure him that the US still backs the two-state solution — not that Abbas does, but that never seems to matter to the international community.

Blinken and Biden must have misplaced Netanyahu’s phone number for a few days. True, Bibi took his sweet time to congratulate Biden after his 2020 victory, but that’s more understandable, considering Bibi needed to stay on the good side of Donald Trump, who vehemently disputed the results, not to mention Trump was still going to be president for two more months. Leaving the political pettiness aside, a Republican House and Senate will provide strong moral support for a Netanyahu government composed of right-wing and religious elements, and more political backing for any measures Israel must take to fight terror and deter Iran.

EVEN IF Republicans take over the House and the Senate…

Don’t expect much progress on the Abraham Accords until after the 2024 presidential election. The Biden administration has paid only lip service to the groundbreaking accords. The one “peace” deal they engineered between Israel and Lebanon was essentially a one-way street, under which the Lapid and Gantz provisional government gifted hundreds of kilometers of territorial waters as protection money to Hezbollah to allow Israel to pump gas from wells it explored and developed in the Mediterranean Sea without fear of a Hezbollah attack.