In a period of six months, US President Joe Biden has gone from being the greatest military supporter of Israel in history – by providing billions of dollars and visiting Israel while Hamas rockets still flew over the country – to instigating the greatest military crisis between the US and Israel in decades.
There are two unmistakable, critical conclusions that can be drawn from this crisis, in which Biden said that if Israel ignored warnings not to fully invade Rafah, he would halt all offensive weapons shipments to the Jewish state: 1) Israel must change course in its war strategy to be closer to Biden so as to maintain US military and diplomatic support; and 2) Jerusalem must start the long and incredibly expensive process to achieve complete military independence.
Easier said than done to be militarily independent
To those who say that Israel can ignore the US and be completely militarily independent right now: No serious Israeli military expert believes this.
There are weapons systems that Israel can change and adapt quickly, some over several months, but there are also crucial ones that could easily take a decade.
Israel’s entire offensive and defensive strategy for the coming 20-30 years is based on receiving additional squadrons of F-35 and F-15-EX fighter aircraft, as well as KC-46 midair refueling aircraft and a large variety of other weapons products from the US.
These are not weapons systems that Jerusalem can produce on its own in a couple of years.
Building such weapons will require initiating new industries and finding markets for those industries besides Israel so that the businesses involved are not just massive, constant money-losers.
That is on the quality side.
On the quantity side, Israel simply does not have enough bombs.
Cutting off US weapons supplies would severely curtail the Jewish state’s ability to continue the current war and fight future wars for anything other than a very short time.
This is not the political ideology of one side or another, but cold, hard facts.
Significant new industries will need to be created to substantially increase the quantity of munitions that Jerusalem can produce on its own.
All of this will not only take time, but could require restructuring aspects of Israel’s macro-economic strategy to shift funds from other areas into defense.
Figuring out how to best shift those funds without invoking shock therapy that rips apart aspects of the current economy and social welfare net will also take time and planning.
So, solely from a military perspective, if Israel wants to be ready for a next round with Gaza, Hezbollah or Iran, it needs to move toward aspects of what the US wants, whether that is the best current move or not.
This might not mean abandoning a larger Rafah operation, but it might mean taking longer to evacuate Palestinian civilians until the US is satisfied or committing to not using larger US-supplied bombs in the operation.
There were some earlier years, not so long ago, when advocates of immediate Israeli defense independence said the US could be easily replaced by its new allies, Russia and China.
But after watching them cozy up to Iran and China over the last six months, can anyone imagine Israel relying on them?
Besides the military side, the US may be the only thing that can hold off the International Criminal Court from international arrest warrants coming after Israeli officials in over 120 countries worldwide.
Although the Biden administration did not veto one UN resolution that put some pressure on Israel to end the war, it vetoed all of the others and is the single main reason that Jerusalem was able to pursue a six-month fight to eliminate Hamas, while almost the entire world deserted the Jewish state much earlier.
And all of this still misses what top Israeli defense officials say is the most important aspect of US backing: It scares and deters Israel’s adversaries.
Yes, Iran launched a massive assault on Israel on April 14. However, imagine if Tehran and Hezbollah had let loose with everything they had back in October.
A major reason they didn’t was because Biden warned them, “Don’t.”
If Israel loses the perception that America has its back when the cards are down, it loses incalculable aspects of deterrence against enemies, as well as one of the big reasons many Arab Sunni countries want to normalize with it: using Israel to ingratiate themselves with the US.
So, until Israel has the time to make some of these major transitions, it needs to roll with the current situation closer to the American playbook.
This does not mean doing anything and everything that America wants.
The US did not want Israel to take over the Philadelphi Corridor of Rafah, but it has not halted weapons sales over that.
It wanted Israel to halt the war in December, but it did not cease weapons sales over the last few months, giving Jerusalem the chance to rout Hamas out of Khan Yunis.
However, it entails taking US policy recommendations more seriously and sometimes adhering to them.
Still, that is only half of the story.
The truth is, Biden’s decision is not just about Biden.
America isn't as pro-Israel as it used to be
America is changing.
Bernie Sanders came in second for the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, and he was a rabidly anti-Israel candidate.
The isolationist wing of the Republican Party, which hates spending money on anyone who isn’t an American, is ascending over the interventionist, strong-military wing and may overcome the Evangelical wing, which is unambiguously pro-Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly upset the Democratic Party’s general public by clearly affiliating himself with top Republicans, dating back to his 2015 speech to the US Congress against the Obama administration.
All of these trends were likely going to make Israel much less of a bipartisan issue in 20 years.
The Gaza War accelerated this process.
While polls still show that Americans as a whole are heavily in favor of Israel over the Palestinians, Israel has taken a historic negative hit over the last six months in how Americans view it.
Biden is reflecting this evolution and, in some cases, being dragged into recognizing it far more than he is leading it.
So Israel can no longer just talk about the possibility of someday achieving defense independence. It needs to start pushing in that direction – and pushing hard – because some aspects will take years, and between now and then, Jerusalem will sometimes have limits on what it can do.
That window of limits needs to be shortened and closed as quickly as possible.
On October 7, Hamas showed what Russia demonstrated in Ukraine in 2022 and what Iran showed with its massive aerial attack on April 14: that bad guys in this world are as bad or worse than ever and may be more willing than ever to break sacred cows and launch devastating attacks.
In the face of this more dangerous world, there may be times when Israel will need to fight back in ways that the West has not yet come to terms with because it has not yet been in the direct crosshairs of the new age of conflict.
Everything should be done to maintain US support for as long as possible, and if it is possible to restore Israel as a bipartisan issue, then Jerusalem should try everything it can to do so.
But at the same time, Israel must plan for and be prepared for the worst, including a day when it may truly need to stand alone.