It’s hard to remember a year in which the US and Israeli governments engaged in more public squabbles
For the Biden administration, the interim Israeli government it was dealing with a year ago was a dream come true.
Yair Lapid was acting prime minister. He presided over a liberal-left coalition that included an Israeli-Arab party. This docile government had just agreed to a US-mediated proposal asking Israel to cede international waters with potentially vast oil and gas reserves to the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese regime. Lapid, and his predecessor Naftali Bennett, offered only passive resistance to America’s dogged efforts to renew a nuclear deal with Iran that previous Israeli governments viewed as an existential threat.
The American dream fell out of bed with a thud in November, after Israel’s fifth election in four years returned Binyamin Netanyahu to power, and he formed a center-right coalition with 32 Orthodox Jews of various stripes. Even before the new coalition was sworn in, American ambassador Tom Nides was interfering in Israel’s internal affairs, warning Netanyahu that the Biden administration would not cooperate with coalition partners it deemed to be “extreme right.”
The ink was barely dry on the coalition agreements when Biden offered his anemic congratulations, warning Netanyahu that his administration would “oppose policies that endanger” the two-state solution or “contradict our mutual interests and values.”
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