Biden's anger and Netanyahu's defiance reshape Middle East dynamics

Did you know that Joe Biden, the outwardly mild-mannered, avuncular 81-year-old president of the United States could outmatch Richard Nixon, the notoriously foul-mouthed 37th president of the republic, in his use of profanity-laced language, and that while he publicly played nice with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, he cussed him out privately?

If you didn’t, get hold of a copy of Bob Woodward’s most recent book, War, set to be released next week.

Since he teamed with colleague Carl Bernstein in 1973 to expose the watergate scandal in the Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward (who three years later was portrayed by Robert Redford in the Academy Award-winning film All the President’s Men) has been a Washington institution and a legend in American journalism.

His best-selling books, which mostly chronicled the achievements and failures of American presidents over the past 50 years, are often considered a “happening” in political circles after their release, given the author’s known access to important sources in Washington’s corridors of power.

Several excerpts from War were released to some American news outlets on Monday, in advance of the book’s publication on Oct. 15, that focus, among other things, on the rocky, frustrating and infuriating relationship between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, a relationship that drove the American president, well, let’s say, up the wall — so up the wall in fact that he found himself able to express his feelings only by resorting to four-letter words.

In a phone call to Netanyahu in April, for example, Biden, we read in the excerpts, pleads and pleads with the Israeli prime minister to please not invade the city of Rafah in southern Gaza.

“What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asks in his earthy Delaware patois.

“We have to go into Rafah”, Netanyahu says.

“But, Bibi, you’ve got no strategy!”

It’ll be recalled that that same month Israel launched a strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, that killed several top Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, which prompted Tehran to fire a 100 or so essentially ballistic missiles into Israel. Israel promised to retaliate and, in a phone call, Biden, Woodward writes, told Netanyahu to “take the win, you don’t need to make another move, do nothing”.

Still, Israel went ahead and launched a calibrated, albeit limited strike against Iran.

“Netanyahu...He’s a bad guy. He’s a bad [expletive] guy”, fumed Biden. “18 out 19 people who work for him are liars”. And he then resignedly left it at that.

Biden’s fury with Netanyahu “boiled over” after Israel went into Rafah, Woodward continues.

“He’s a [expletive] liar”, Biden told aides in the Oval Office.

And in July, after Israeli air strikes killed a top Hamas military commander, along with three civilians in the heart of downtown Beirut, Biden again spoke on the phone with Netanyahu.

“Bibi, what the [expletive]? You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor”.

Netanyahu’s response to the American president’s entreaty was dismissive. “We saw an opportunity and took it”, he said. “The harder you hit, the more successful you’re going to be in negotiations”.

Biden's helplessness

We can only guess at how helpless Biden must have felt during these phone calls with this obstreperous Israeli politician who has been defining Israel’s sharp drift to the fascist right for decades now, and how angry he must’ve been at seeing his stature, as chief executive of a big power that saw itself as “leader of the free world, reduced to such an undignified fragment.

“When angry, count to ten”, American humorist and essayist Mark Twain once remarked. “When very angry, however, swear”. Then he added: “There ought to be room in every house to swear in, because it’s dangerous to have to express an emotion like that”.

And if you’re an American president who lives in the White House, that room might as well be the Oval Office.

Never before in the whole history of the world, to the best knowledge of this columnist’s knowledge, has there ever been an alliance similar to the “special relationship” (a phrase coined by President John F. Kennedy in 1962) between the US and Israel, an entente cordiale between a big power and a small state on the periphery, where the latter has the former by the jugular, dictating its policy while receiving from it, as Israel has received from America,

$300 billion (adjusted to inflation) since 1948 — and $17.6 billion since Oct. 7 last year.

Profanities by Biden and duplicity by Netanyahu aside, at the end of the day, it was the American president’s own moral failure to embrace a principled policy in the Middle East, coupled with his failure to live up to the promise he had made in his inauguration speech that America will be an exemplar to the world, that has contributed to all the chaos and human suffering that have ravaged our region over the last twelve months.

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile