By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt
For the first time in two months, President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Wednesday in a phone conversation that was expected to focus on Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack.
But it also carried 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 White House confirmed the conversation had taken place and promised a description of it soon.
Recent history, though, suggests that Biden’s advisers were unlikely to offer details of the conversation, particularly on whether Netanyahu would comply with Biden’s demand to avoid striking Iran’s nuclear sites and energy facilities.
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 Biden that after the missile attack by Iran on Oct. 1, which did relatively little damage in Israel, Iran’s 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 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.”
The concerns about escalation — further inflaming what has already turned into a regional conflict — explains why Biden has been so public in his warnings to Netanyahu. Yet time after time in the past year, the Israeli leader has largely ignored the American president, betting that Biden did not have the political latitude to cut off arms or aid to Israel.
White House officials, worried after they were blindsided by a series of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, demanded the conversation Wednesday and insisted that it take place before Israel conducted a counterattack.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin 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 U.S. 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.
For his part, Netanyahu believes that Biden’s constant efforts to reach a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, 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 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 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.
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