In March, Vice President Kamala Harris and other senior American officials met with the leader of Israel’s National Unity political alliance and war cabinet member, Benny Gantz. He was in Washington to understand and perhaps take the edge off the differences between the United States and Israel over the war in Gaza. The Biden administration’s frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Gantz’s reputation as the “adult in the room,” and the Bibi Derangement Syndrome—the other BDS—that afflicts much of Washington’s foreign-policy community created great expectations for Gantz’s visit.
In March, Vice President Kamala Harris and other senior American officials met with the leader of Israel’s National Unity political alliance and war cabinet member, Benny Gantz. He was in Washington to understand and perhaps take the edge off the differences between the United States and Israel over the war in Gaza. The Biden administration’s frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Gantz’s reputation as the “adult in the room,” and the Bibi Derangement Syndrome—the other BDS—that afflicts much of Washington’s foreign-policy community created great expectations for Gantz’s visit.
Yet his American interlocutors were reportedly surprised that there was little difference between Gantz and Netanyahu on the need for a Rafah operation and opposition to a Palestinian state. They should not have been.
Perhaps bad staff work caught the vice president and others off guard when they encountered Gantz. “Always count on incompetence” is a common refrain among currently serving and retired officials, but there is likely a better explanation: bad assumptions.
A careful review of his record indicates that journalists, analysts, and officials just assumed a bunch of things about Gantz that do not align with objective reality. For example, during political campaigns between 2020 and 2022, he did not exactly distinguish himself as the centrist or center-left politician that journalists, analysts, and officials imagine him to be. In February 2020, he told Israel’s i24News channel that the response from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to rocket fire from Gaza should be “very harsh” and that Israel “should practice zero tolerance,” placing himself to the right of the incumbent prime minister, Netanyahu. In the same interview, Gantz admitted that the people of Gaza “have the right to live normally,” but then qualified his statement, declaring that “they have to act normally.”
Gantz has never publicly declared support for a two-state solution—perhaps because he has established what one profile described as “cordial relations” with the settler movement. Not only does he believe that Israel should never go back to the June 4, 1967, lines, but Gantz was also supportive of then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for peace. Under that proposal, Palestine would have amounted to an archipelago of West Bank population centers with limited sovereignty.
Yet, despite all this, the foreign-policy community in Washington still sees Gantz as Israel’s greatest hope. In this frame, the National Unity leader is a far more palatable interlocutor than the prime minister (likely true) and someone who can make peace with the Palestinians (highly suspect). It is a narrative that Israelis and Americans who do not like Netanyahu feed, but it does a disservice to policymakers and analysts alike. It is true that the Israeli prime minister is cynical, devious, and untrustworthy, but the excessive focus on Netanyahu allows bad assumptions to flourish in the policy ecosystem. If an Israeli politician is opposed to Netanyahu, that politician must be a good person who wants all the same things that Washington wants.
The problem should be obvious. In place of knowing about and gaining a better understanding of the worldview of important political actors, American policymakers get a skewed view based on their own ideas and the sensibilities of those who advise them. The unfortunate results are suboptimal policies.
Bad assumptions are not just a problem that afflicts Washington’s approach to Israel, but also U.S.-Middle East policy more generally. It is also a bipartisan affair. Looking back over the last few decades of American failure in the Middle East, six (bad) ideas informed the policymakers of Democratic and Republican administrations at different times and with differing degrees of emphasis. The first assumption, which helped guide the Clinton administration, postulated that peace between Israelis and Palestinians would lead to the transformation of authoritarian political systems in the region. Second, President George W. Bush reversed Bill Clinton’s assumption, believing that reform of authoritarian systems would produce peace.
The third flawed assumption is that democracy can flourish without democrats. The fourth is that culture and identity do not matter and its opposite—identity and culture explain everything. Fifth and perhaps the most American assumption of them all, people everywhere want the same things. Finally, the United States has the power, and its officials possess the insight and wisdom, to forge regional political transformation.
What is disheartening about the current moment is that Americans have not learned the lessons of the recent past. Once again, policymakers are wading into the Middle East with big plans, but those goals are based on bad assumptions. When President Joe Biden invokes former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, as he often does, he is visualizing an Israel that no longer exists. No doubt, meeting Meir was a formative experience for the young junior senator from Delaware. Yet 50 years later, the president seems to harbor a set of ideas about Israel that are anachronisms. Principal among them is the ostensible unique vulnerability of Israel. That may sound strange given the horrifying massacres that Hamas carried out in Israel in October 2023 and the subsequent multifront conflict that Israel is fighting. Israel’s problem is not vulnerability, however, but rather a lack of leadership and imagination in Israel’s power centers—the prime minister’s office and the security establishment.
The president’s framing of the issues is not the only problem. He and his administration seem to be of the belief that Israelis and Palestinians want a two-state solution. That is why they encouraged the Saudis to include a “time-limited, concrete path to Palestinian statehood”—which sounds a lot like the Oslo Accords—as a condition of normalization. There are, of course, polls that demonstrate that not insignificant numbers of Israelis and Palestinians support two states, but large numbers do not. Netanyahu’s radical partners—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—control 13 seats in the Knesset, which is nine more than the Labor Party, which has become the remnant of the peace camp of the 1990s.
Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the individuals principally responsible for Oct. 7, are one-staters, declaring that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was intended to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. In March, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reported that support for the Oct. 7 attacks among Palestinians was 71 percent. The same poll demonstrated that 70 percent of Palestinians were satisfied with Hamas and that roughly two-thirds preferred Hamas rule in Gaza after the war.
The underlying assumption to what the Biden administration’s approach to the war is and its aftermath is straightforward but deeply flawed: If Washington gives (how?) Palestinians a “political horizon” for the establishment of their state that simultaneously offers Israelis the security they crave, both sides will jump at the opportunity. This is the same assumption that fueled Oslo. It may have been closer to reality in the 1990s. By now, it is a Washington, D.C., fever dream.
