A collective sigh of relief was heard across Israel as the results of the U.S. presidential election were declared. But we cannot rest on our laurels. At this critical juncture, Israel must carefully assess the challenges it faces in the immediate term, as the lame-duck Biden administration completes its term. And it must set goals for the next four years to ensure that the opportunity Donald Trump’s return to the White House affords us is not squandered.
To understand the immediate requirements, we need to remember what happened during Barack Obama’s final months in office.
No longer concerned about winning an election, in December 2016, the Obama administration decided the time had come to punish Israel for opposing its nuclear appeasement of Iran and for rejecting its efforts to establish a Palestinian terror state. That month, America’s U.N. ambassador Samantha Power drafted an anti-Israel resolution that declared all Israeli presence beyond the 1949 armistice lines—including the Western Wall in Jerusalem—illegal. Power then pawned it off on other Security Council member states to sponsor and abstained from the vote, ensuring the passage of what became U.N. Security Council Resolution 2234.
Resolution 2234 was the most anti-Israel resolution ever passed in the Security Council. It effectively called for an international boycott of all Israeli activities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. But 2234 wasn’t meant to be a standalone event. The Obama team planned to pass an additional resolution that would set out a timetable for Israel to agree to a Palestinian state in Hamas-controlled Gaza, all of Judea and Samaria and eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. The resolution was supposed to include sanctions on Israel if it failed to capitulate within the set time schedule.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked with Trump’s transition team to scuttle it. Netanyahu and Trump’s advisers appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who signaled that Russia would veto the resolution. Stunned, the Obama team angrily shuffled away.
There is good reason to assume that in the two and a half months before Trump returns to office, the outgoing Biden team intends to get that long-shelved resolution passed.
The Biden team may also initiate a resolution requiring Israel—on pain of Security Council sanctions—to accept a ceasefire in Gaza that will leave Hamas in power, a ceasefire in Lebanon that will leave Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and in charge of Lebanon, or both.
Now as then, Netanyahu must work with Trump’s team and Israel’s many allies in the Senate and House of Representatives to block these anticipated moves.
Beyond punishing Israel for not bowing to the administration’s yearlong demand for capitulation, the purpose of the Biden administration’s anticipated U.N. ceasefire resolution is to prevent Israel from winning the war and to block the Trump administration from supporting an Israeli victory. The Biden team is expected to reinstate Obama’s effort to pass the Palestinian statehood resolution in order to prevent both Israel and the incoming Trump team from abandoning the failed and destabilizing “two-state” chimera.
In other words, the purpose of the U.N. operation is to prevent Trump from adopting his own policies and prevent Israel from securing itself.
Blocking the Biden administration’s anticipated moves is Israel’s most pressing diplomatic challenge. But obviously, they are also a means to enable Israel to win the war it is currently fighting. As to the war, Israel must move deliberately to achieve its strategic goals on all fronts—and particularly in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
It is to this end that Netanyahu fired Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday.
The Biden administration began micromanaging every aspect of Israel’s war effort immediately after Oct. 7, 2023. It sent American generals to Israel Defense Forces headquarters, where they made “suggestions” that made no sense but to which Israel had to listen—if it knew what was good for it.
The administration began slow-walking critical military supplies to Israel last December, forcing IDF officers to justify nearly every bullet and tank round expended. It threatened sanctions to block Israel from taking any action that would fundamentally shift the strategic balance in Gaza, and throughout the region, in its favor. It blocked a congressional effort to pass a law sanctioning International Criminal Court officials for waging lawfare against Israel, and so effectively greenlighted ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s bid to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
The Biden team delayed Israel’s action in Rafah for months by threatening an arms embargo and by forcing Israel to maintain futile hostage talks with Hamas’s state sponsors Qatar and Egypt until they reached their inevitable, failed conclusion.
The administration spent a year pressuring Israel to agree to surrender sovereign territory to Hezbollah in exchange for a respite from the Iranian proxy’s missile war. The U.S. offer, if accepted, would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel, keeping Hezbollah’s forces intact, fully armed and poised along Israel’s border just steps away from communities they were trained to overrun and massacre.
The administration continues to pressure Israel to leave Iran’s regime, nuclear installations and oil platforms intact.
The Biden team’s success to date in preventing Israel from defeating its foes owes in large part to its exploitation of the Israeli security brass’s institutional and ideological opposition to Netanyahu, his coalition partners and voters. Gallant was the central figure in the administration’s divide and conquer effort to block Israel from taking action that would change the strategic balance of power in the region.
During the eight months that Gallant’s fellow retired generals Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot served with him in Netanyahu’s War Cabinet, Gallant colluded with them and the administration to block government plans to order operations like the seizure of Rafah—that would pave the way to the dismantlement of Hamas’s military forces and ending its political and economic grip on power.
It was only with the resignations of Gantz and Eisenkot in June that Netanyahu was able to overrule Gallant and order the invasion of Rafah, cutting Hamas off from the rest of its state sponsors. Since then, working with the IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, Gallant opposed, slowed and watered down—but was unable to block—Israel’s ground operation in Lebanon.
Gallant and Halevi blocked the government’s plan to task the IDF with distributing food, medicine and water to Gazans even though it is the only way to dismantle Hamas’s continued political and economic control over the area.
Gallant and Halevi opposed the operation to blow up the beepers of Hezbollah operatives, which neutralized Hezbollah’s senior and mid-level command structure.
Gallant tried to block Israel’s move to eliminate Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah by insisting that Israel provide advance notification to the administration, knowing full well that the Biden team would try to block the operation.
Gallant openly and repeatedly called for Israel to end its war effort in Gaza in the interest of freeing the hostages, even though there is no actual deal on the table to release them.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Gallant had refused to remove Halevi or any of the other senior IDF commanders responsible for the Oct. 7 fiasco from their positions. Instead, he rubber-stamped every action Halevi advocated, including firing more aggressive generals from the IDF and promoting to senior positions incompetent, dovish generals who had failed to warn of or prepare for Oct. 7.
Finally, Gallant reportedly opposes taking any independent Israeli strategic action against Iran.
By removing Gallant from office, Netanyahu removed the major political obstacle to pursuing victory on all fronts. This is imperative as Israel moves from managing the war under the Biden administration to winning the war in anticipation of Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Looking towards the four years ahead, Israel must determine its strategic goals not only for winning the war, but for securing its borders and its position in the region, and safeguarding its alliance with the United States for years to come.
Oct. 7 and the war that followed exposed three strategic vulnerabilities that Israel can work with the Trump administration to overcome. The first is the specter of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. The second is the U.N. system. The final vulnerability is Israel’s strategic dependence on U.S. munitions.
Since Oct. 7, any residual public support for the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River has disappeared (outside the fever swamps of the radical left). The onslaught from Gaza, which has been an independent Palestinian state since 2005, and the near-unanimous support the atrocities enjoyed among Palestinians in Judea and Samaria made clear that a Palestinian state is not a solution to anything. Rather, it is an existential threat to Israel no less severe than Iran’s nuclear weapons project.
To contend with the Palestinian threat, Israel needs to extricate itself completely from the strategic deathtrap of the so-called “two-state solution.” David Friedman, Trump’s first-term ambassador to Israel, recently published “One Jewish State.” Friedman’s book sets out the case for Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. In it, Friedman urges Israel to determine its goal for securing its national rights and security needs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
Israel should immediately take Friedman’s advice. Netanyahu, his ministers and advisers must determine a clear strategy for extending Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria and taking permanent military control of Gaza. They must then work with the Trump administration to secure U.S. support for those plans in the framework of a regional peace.
The moral corruption of the U.N. system is nothing new. But since Oct. 7, Israel has recognized that this system, replete with its in-house terror group the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), terror auxiliary force the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and international courts trying Israel for genocide and treating Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals, is itself a mortal threat to the Jewish state.
Broadly speaking, the U.N. system today is a full-blown alliance of the Marxist, post-national left, China and Islamic terrorist groups. Israel obviously cannot contend with this behemoth on its own. Working with the Trump administration and other nation states that are similarly—if less existentially—harmed by the U.N. system, Israel must spearhead an effort to dismantle, divide and permanently weaken the U.N. system and restore the power of nation states to work separately and in alliance with others to secure international peace and prosperity.
Finally, in light of Israel’s experience with the Biden administration’s exploitation of Israel’s strategic dependence on the United States for munitions as a means to undermine Israel’s war effort, Jerusalem needs to end its client-state relationship with Washington. Israel and the United States must cooperate in transforming the U.S.-Israel bond into a true alliance between a global superpower and a regional power.
Trump’s determination to decrease America’s foreign aid budgets, and his doctrine of supporting allies to enable them to defend themselves as the surest way to decrease America’s need to fight wars, fully aligns his position with Israel’s strategic requirements. Israel should move quickly to forge a new defense relationship with America that would end U.S. military assistance over a 10-year period. During that period, the relationship would shift from supplier-client to a strategic partnership geared toward weapons systems development. To end its vulnerability, Israel should maintain and expand its efforts to rebuild its domestic arms industries with the goal of being fully capable of producing all the munitions it requires to win its wars and preserve post-war peace by the end of Trump’s term. This transformation of U.S.-Israel ties will enable the alliance to survive and thrive over time, to the great benefit of both countries.
In his congratulatory message to Trump on Wednesday morning, Netanyahu wrote, “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”
This is absolutely true. And by firing Gallant, Netanyahu has facilitated the rebuilding of Israel’s alliance with America on firmer footing than ever before. By working together to achieve common goals, Israel and the United States, under Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, can secure the peace of the Middle East and their nations’ separate and common interests in the international arena, to the benefit of the world as a whole.