America Has More Latitude With Israel Than It Thinks

Over the course of Israel’s nearly yearlong war against Hamas in Gaza, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has been reluctant to apply serious pressure on Israel to curtail its most destructive operations and seek an end to the conflict. There are several reasons why Biden has held back. But one is skepticism that anything good can be accomplished by pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to change course. Some analysts and experts have argued that the United States does not have the influence to fundamentally change the Israeli government’s behavior and, indeed, that challenging Israel’s response to Hamas’s devastating attack on October 7, 2023, could backfire.

These perceptions seem to carry weight among top U.S. decision-makers. Earlier this summer, Amos Hochstein, a Biden administration official serving as a mediator between Israel and Hezbollah, warned Lebanese politicians that the United States lacked the power to force Israel’s hand. Ed Gabriel, president of the nonprofit American Task Force on Lebanon, summarized Hochstein’s message: “If you think we can dictate what [Israeli officials] do or not, you’re wrong. . . . You have to understand that America does not have the leverage to stop Israel.” Similarly, as Dennis Ross, a longtime U.S. diplomat and Middle East negotiator, said late last year, “history shows that if Israeli voters think the U.S. is making unreasonable demands, [they] will reject them, regardless of the costs.” This view is driven in part by Israeli officials’ claims. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, for instance, has repeatedly asserted that any U.S. pressure to end the war actually motivates Israelis to keep fighting.

But this assumption is just that—an assumption. To test it, in May, we conducted a unique survey of Israeli public opinion about the war to better understand how Israelis react to statements of unconditional support by the U.S. government compared with U.S. pressure to change strategy in Gaza. The results showed that the belief that the United States lacks leverage is wrong: the United States likely can pressure Israelis to move toward peaceful compromise and an end to the war in Gaza without generating significant backlash. If the Biden administration or, perhaps more likely, its successor were to apply real and sustained pressure on Israel—such as by conditioning the export of offensive weapons to the country in order to reach a deal—it would be likely to significantly undermine Israeli public support for the war and expedite its end.

A WINNABLE PUBLIC

Recent public opinion polls have consistently found that a majority of Israelis support a cease-fire deal to release all hostages in exchange for Israel ending the war and withdrawing fully from Gaza. As of August, 63 percent of Israelis expressed support for such a compromise, up from 56 percent in June. U.S. policy may have already influenced these numbers to some degree; Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns have clearly signaled rhetorical support for a deal and growing impatience at the Israeli government’s refusal to accept it.

To better understand how Israelis respond to the United States’ stances toward the country, from May 7 through May 12, we distributed an online survey of about two dozen questions to a sample of 1,238 Israeli adults that was broadly representative of the general Israeli population. Respondents were polled just days after the news broke that Washington had placed its first hold in years on a weapons shipment to Israel to try to forestall an Israeli invasion of Rafah. This strategy made the direction of U.S. policy toward the war in Gaza appear particularly uncertain at the time in which our survey was in the field.

Our survey included a carefully crafted message test to see how Israelis responded to the United States’ posture. We divided respondents into three groups. The first was a control group; respondents were not primed with any messaging before completing the survey. Before answering questions, the second group read a realistic but fictitious news story suggesting that the American people supported Israel in the conflict and the Biden administration would provide unconditional backing for Israel to achieve a complete victory over Hamas. The third group read a news story in which Americans were described as souring on the war and the Biden administration as having firmly stated that Israel should end it—and that U.S. support wasn’t unconditional if the country failed to do so. Both of the positions presented to the two test groups were fully plausible in early May when the Biden administration had just declared its first weapons hold and there were conflicting reports about whether it was indeed on the verge of a major policy shift or would continue to back the war with mild criticism. After this intervention, all three groups of respondents were asked the same questions regarding their attitudes toward the conflict in Gaza, the possibility of ending it, and other geopolitical issues.

The results were striking. We found that, on average, reading that the United States was prepared to exert real pressure on Israel to end the war did not significantly alter Israelis’ views of the war, the negotiations to end it, or the United States and its geopolitical rivals. Notably, in the group that heard that the United States was pressuring Israel to change course, there was no meaningful drop in the percentage of respondents who subsequently said they held a favorable view of the United States—or rise in the percentage holding a favorable view of Russia or China—compared with the group that was not primed with messaging. These findings undermine worries that U.S. pressure would diminish Israelis’ support for a cease-fire or significantly harm their views of America. In short, Smotrich is wrong: there is no evidence that pressure would backfire.

It is worth noting that in the group of respondents that heard that the United States was providing unconditional support to Israel, the percentage who expressed a favorable view of the United States was eight points higher than it was in the control group. Survey respondents did prefer that the United States offer unconditional support to Israel. But the United States did not appear to lose face with them if they heard it had applied the pressure.

TURNING UP THE HEAT

We looked more deeply at the effect of hearing about U.S. pressure on Israel by disaggregating respondents into supporters and nonsupporters of Netanyahu—a key political cleavage in Israel. We asked respondents if they planned to vote for Netanyahu or one of several other leading Israeli politicians in the next election. We found that Netanyahu voters’ support for reaching a deal with Hamas rose dramatically—from 25 percent to 40 percent—when they read the story about U.S. pressure being applied, showing that key segments of the Israeli public are in fact quite sensitive to hearing that the United States is pressuring Israel to end the war—and that they respond as intended to this pressure, despite some of their leaders’ claims to the contrary.

These findings are particularly notable given the views expressed by Netanyahu voters and non-Netanyahu voters in the control group. Among respondents who did not read anything about U.S. strategy before completing the survey, support for reaching a deal to end the war and return the Israeli hostages held in Gaza—as opposed to continuing it to try and eliminate Hamas—was 25 percent among Netanyahu voters and 73 percent among other Israelis. In other words, Netanyahu voters are the primary source of support for a maximalist Israeli outcome in the war. Eroding their desire to seek a total victory, and pushing them toward compromise, would seriously jeopardize the viability of continuing the conflict in Israeli politics.

For as much as Netanyahu himself is dug in on the war, to which his political future is linked, he has also shown that he is sensitive to U.S. government pressure on the rare occasions when it has been applied. For instance, after a pointed call from Biden in April in which he reportedly told Netanyahu to make serious changes to Israel’s conduct in the war, Israel significantly increased the number of trucks transporting humanitarian aid into Gaza. These events coincided with some of the lowest points in Netanyahu’s polling numbers to date, as well as increased speculation that Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, the more moderate members of his war cabinet, would resign. Proponents of pressure might act when they see a similar confluence of mounting public opposition, growing threats of elite defection, and shifts in policy.

It is perhaps for this reason that Netanyahu himself—along with the Israeli ministers to his right and the Israeli government’s most ardent and reflexive defenders in the United States—have issued such dire warnings about what will happen if the United States pressures Israel to end the war. They recognize the power of U.S. policy to shape the landscape of Israeli politics. If, for example, in addition to large-scale regular mass protests, more reservists were to refuse to report for service in protest of Netanyahu’s unprecedented jeopardizing of Israeli security and American support, as they did during last year’s protests against his government’s judicial reforms, the country could be plunged into further turmoil.

What about the consequences of hearing that the United States would offer unconditional support to Israel? Here we found an intriguing, albeit weaker, parallel to the impact of telling respondents that the United States was applying pressure on Israel to end the war. Reading the news story about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli victory made support for a cease-fire among non-Netanyahu voters decrease by six percentage points compared with the control group, a smaller difference than the one associated with the story about U.S. pressure on Netanyahu voters, and not quite statistically significant. It suggests, however, that when Israelis think that the United States has their back no matter what, they feel that they have free rein to pursue more maximalist goals. Combined with the results from the conditional-support story groups, it demonstrates that Israelis’ views on the war are malleable and, by extension, that the United States’ posture can push Israeli public opinion toward terminating the war.

Ultimately, our survey strongly suggests that the United States does in fact have substantial leverage over how Israelis think about the costs and benefits of continuing the conflict. Hearing about U.S. pressure to end the war can move Israelis to turn against the continuation of military operations and toward compromise without incurring significant costs to Israelis’ overall opinion of the United States. What’s more, our findings likely understate the power of real U.S. pressure, since subjects were reading a single, fictitious news story. Although it is possible that countermessaging by the Israeli government could eat into the effects we uncovered, our results are still quite bullish on the United States’ ability to influence Israeli views about the conflict.

WHO’S THE SUPERPOWER HERE?

Of course, the worry that U.S. pressure might fail—or backfire—has not been the only impediment to Washington seeking to exert more influence over Netanyahu’s government and its behavior. There are at least two other major reasons why Biden has refrained from applying serious pressure on the Israeli government about its conduct of the war. Biden has a long-standing personal sympathy for Israel, which makes him hesitant to criticize the country’s conduct, and his behavior has also no doubt been influenced by domestic political considerations in a presidential election year.

Soon, however, neither of these factors will be nearly as relevant. Biden is nearing the end of his presidency, after which his personal worldview will no longer be a key driver of and constraint on U.S. foreign policy. And the excruciatingly strong political pressures associated with the country’s high-stakes presidential contest will pass, too, in a few short months. The next presidential administration will be much freer to adjust its policy on the war in new directions.

While reaffirming her basic commitment to Israel’s security, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential candidate, has signaled greater empathy for Palestinian suffering and sharper rhetoric toward and treatment of Netanyahu in recent months. Harris’s main foreign policy advisers on the Middle East are progressives who have likely encouraged this posture. Some supporters of a cease-fire are thus hopeful that a Harris administration might be willing to marry her rhetoric with concrete actions to push the Israelis, along with Hamas, more forcefully toward a deal. The Democratic consensus on Israel has moved to Biden’s left, and the next Democratic president, along with a new crop of Democratic leaders, may seek to apply more pressure to Israel. Worries that such pressure will have a negative impact will likely linger. Our survey, however, shows that there is greater room for such a shift in policy than many strategists fear.

Could the results of our survey also inform the policies of a second Trump administration? Given Donald Trump’s embrace of Israel’s right wing in his first term, stated opposition to withholding arms to Israel to end the war, and comments that Israel should “finish the job,” it is more difficult to imagine that a Trump administration would be willing to pressure Israel to end the war. Yet tensions between Trump and Netanyahu dating to the end of Trump’s first term, as well as Trump’s other close relationships in the region, such as his ties to the Saudis, leave open the possibility that regardless of the November election’s result, U.S. pressure on Israel to end the war could rise in the next administration.

Applying pressure to the Israeli government is the primary tool the United States has to encourage the war’s end.

As for steps a new administration could take, historically, U.S. presidents seeking to change Israeli behavior have pulled several levers. One is diplomatic pressure, which often entails allowing resolutions critical of Israel to pass at the United Nations or even voting in favor of them. In June, the United States made a move in this direction by sponsoring a UN resolution calling on both Israel and Hamas to end the war, although the language was somewhat restrained, and for now, the resolution has had little effect.

In the past, the United States has applied more serious forms of pressure in the economic and military spheres. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush held up $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel, forcing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to change Israel’s settlement policy and participate in a major peace conference in Madrid with the Palestinians. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama each paused high-level arms shipments to Israel over the Israeli military’s interventions in Lebanon and Gaza, respectively. When applied with firmness and patience, these forms of pressure have often succeeded in restraining Israeli governments and pushing them toward the bargaining table to end military campaigns.

Philip Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser, has made clear that a full arms embargo would be off the table if Harris were to win the presidency. But his comments still leave open the possibility of substantial pressure, up to and including a halt on all offensive arms shipments to Israel until a cease-fire deal is reached. Pausing the shipment of some or all (nondefensive) weapons to Israel, refusing to guarantee Israeli loans unless the government ends the fighting, and possibly holding out the promise of economic inducements to incentivize a deal illustrate what a potential menu of pressure actions could include. Coupling such moves with renewed diplomatic efforts to push key regional powers to lean on Hamas would also likely be under consideration.

Ultimately, the war in Gaza must end. The conflict has already exacted a devastating human toll in both Israel and Gaza. The longer it goes on, the more it elevates the chances of a wider regional war and generates anti-Semitism and Islamophobia worldwide. And the longer the United States appears to support Israel or just stand on the sidelines, the more tarnished its image becomes across the Arab world and the global South. Ending this war is clearly in the United States’ national interest—and, as a number of Israelis from former security chiefs to peace activists have contended, it is in Israel’s national interest, as well. Applying pressure to the Israeli government is the primary tool the United States has to encourage the war’s end. Our analysis suggests that Washington can push right-of-center Israelis meaningfully toward the bargaining table without suffering significant damage to its reputation. If the next U.S. president wants the war to end, they must find the courage to push for it.