No one attends the Doha Forum to hear balanced discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The annual conference—the Qatari government funds business-class travel and accommodation for some 5,000 people—allows this pocket-size monarchy to showcase its central diplomatic role. And the prerogative of the host is to shape the narrative.
The topics covered are broad and diverse, but on Israeli-Palestinian matters, in addition to touting their own role in negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages, the Qataris made space for a wide range of strongly critical voices of Israel: former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (whose position is that Israel should simply disappear), the American scholars and think tankers Rob Malley and Trita Parsi, Tucker Carlson, numerous distinguished Palestinians. Only Hillary Clinton offered a different perspective. (Although some Israelis with second-country passports attended the conference, none spoke from a stage.)
That I found myself ideologically isolated in Qatar was unsurprising. But in some respects, I find myself in a similar position at home among some of my fellow Democrats—and that’s a new and more alarming development.
I was in Doha to speak with Qatari officials about the steps they must take to get President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza under way. After Israel’s attempt to kill Hamas leaders in Doha in mid-September, Qatar (together with Turkey) finally exerted enough pressure on Hamas to agree to release all remaining Israeli hostages without a full withdrawal of Israeli troops. At the same time, Trump pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire without the complete dismantlement of Hamas. It was a major breakthrough, and all involved deserve credit.
[Graeme Wood: Why the Gaza peace deal is like an Anglican wedding]
But implementation of the second phase of Trump’s plan has stalled. The plan calls for the full disarmament of Hamas—relinquishing its weapons, the means of producing or smuggling new ones, and tunnels. And that is the sine qua non for every other element of the plan—deployment of an international stabilization force, releasing tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction funds, standing up technocratic transitional Palestinian leadership, achieving a full Israeli withdrawal. None of those other steps—or the better life for Palestinians in Gaza they promise to provide—will happen unless Hamas is fully removed from power and disarmed. And I know of no actors besides Qatar and Turkey that have the leverage and influence to persuade Hamas, which they have supported financially, logistically, and ideologically, to take that step. I told the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani, that he’d proved as much by getting the hostages released.
If others at the conference shared this focus, we were a distinct minority. There were plenty of calls for treating Israel as an international pariah, labeling the country’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion as a genocide, criticizing the United States for its support for Israel, and even treating Hamas as a legitimate “resistance” organization rather than a violent terrorist group.
More surprising is that such views have become prominent among Democrats in the United States. My former Obama-administration colleague Ben Rhodes argued in a lengthy essay in The New York Times that Democrats should take the lead on ending U.S. support for Israel. He grounds his case in both morality—this is the appropriate response to Israeli military operations in Gaza—and politics, arguing that this policy responds to the demands of American voters, especially younger ones. His argument fails on both of those grounds, but it fails in another important dimension as well: the strategic. But given the spread of this perspective, it’s worth following the logic of his argument, exploring what it overlooks, and seeing where the policies he advocates would lead.
First, it’s important to say that Rhodes got some things right. No caring person can be blind to the violence, hunger, and displacement that Palestinian civilians have endured in Gaza over the past two years. The number of civilian deaths is smaller than the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s tally of some 70,000 killed, a number that purposefully does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. But the only appropriate answer to how many civilians have been killed is: too many. Each one represents an entire world and a tragedy.
Without a doubt, aspects of Israel’s conduct of the war have resulted in too much civilian death and deserve criticism. I served in the Department of Defense during much of the war and was in frequent contact with Israeli counterparts. They described targeting protocols that closely resembled those of other Western militaries and argued, correctly, that Hamas embedded its fighters and weapons within and beneath civilians, including in schools and hospitals; hijacked humanitarian assistance; and welcomed civilian casualties as a propaganda tool. We acknowledged that Hamas is ultimately responsible for the health and safety of Gazans, but we argued, in turn, that Hamas’s perfidy did not alleviate Israel’s responsibility to make every effort to minimize civilian casualties. At times, Israel’s tolerance of such casualties in pursuit of an ostensibly legitimate military target was higher than ours, and higher than it should be for any nation governed by the rule of law.
And, of course, Netanyahu’s leadership has been severely lacking. He has prioritized his own self-interest, which led him to include racists and extremists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in his cabinet, on whom he then became dependent. That led to delays in humanitarian assistance reaching civilians in need, disruptions at key moments in negotiations to free Israeli hostages, calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and for Gaza’s annexation to Israel, and unchecked Israeli extremist violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.
[Yair Rosenberg: Netanyahu just admitted he’s unfit to lead Israel]
These facts are not in serious dispute and together presented a major challenge to U.S. interests and values, as Washington sought to provide support for an ally in distress.
But to end the analysis here completely misses the broader frame of what was happening, or at least dismisses multiple things that were happening at the same time.
Hamas’s massive, vicious terrorist attack against Israel on October 7 could not go without a response. Just as the United States could not fail to respond to the September 11 attack by al-Qaeda (or, for that matter, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Israel—facing an assault that resulted in proportionately several times the toll of 9/11, with civilians slaughtered in their homes and at a music festival, and 251 hostages dragged into Gaza—needed to defend its citizens and ensure that such an attack could not be repeated. It had to do so while facing immediate attacks on two other fronts, from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Later, the sponsor of this entire network, Iran, joined the fray with two massive barrages of missiles and drones against Israel.
At the outset, there was bipartisan support for a strategic Israeli response. Former president Barack Obama—my ex-boss, and Rhodes’s ex-boss—had it right when he wrote two weeks after the surprise attack, “Israel has a right to defend its citizens against such wanton violence, and I fully support President Biden’s call for the United States to support our long-time ally in going after Hamas, dismantling its military capabilities, and facilitating the safe return of hundreds of hostages to their families.” (Obama also wrote movingly about the need for Israel to protect civilians in Gaza, even as he acknowledged that Hamas used those civilians as cover.)
The story of the attack and its aftermath—so often ignored in commentaries about the past two years—affirms that what the United States was dealing with was not a genocidal nation out to destroy all Palestinians but a deeply imperfect democratic partner beset by enemies, actual genocidal enemies, and terrorists sworn to its physical destruction.
Israel has a powerful military. But this war has proved that even an uncoordinated set of attacks by members of the Iranian axis can do significant damage to Israel’s society and economy, functionally shrink its usable sovereign territory, and call into question its ability to sustain itself. There is no doubt about the commitment of these adversaries to their ideological crusade. Even after suffering humiliating blows from Israel and the United States against its nuclear facilities in June, Iran’s leaders seem determined to spend their last rial to rebuild their ability to attack Israel, rearm their proxies, and prepare for another round—even as their citizens can no longer rely on running water in Tehran. Facing such adversaries, Israel needed to deliver decisive defeats to discourage future attacks.
But even as it pursued this necessary strategy, it had to remember that it is a democracy. President Joe Biden’s rush to Israel to provide comfort and support days after October 7—Rhodes, in his Times essay, bizarrely suggests that a visit to Israel under attack was inappropriate in and of itself—included his warning to the Israelis, drawn from America’s post-9/11 failings, not to let justified grief and outrage consume reason.
Some of what Netanyahu and his war cabinet subsequently did may have failed that test. But the notion that the United States should wash its hands of its relationship with Israel rests on a glaring error: conflating a government with its people. Those who told the world that the United States’ mistakes after 9/11 should not define us, and that the world should work with us as we tried, unevenly, to find our way to a better path, should recognize as much. So should Democrats, disgusted by Trump’s repulsive and immoral leadership, who hope that our partners abroad will not believe that he represents America in its entirety and write us off. Similarly, Netanyahu, the longtime prime minister of Israel with whom we have to deal, does not equal Israel. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who gathered in the streets for weekly protests are enough to tell us that.
President Obama believed that we don’t get to choose the leaders of our partners and that we can’t make decisions for them. But we must work with them, attempt to resolve disagreements as best we can, and preserve cooperation and core mutual commitments that advance our interests.
At times, that approach can and should mean using U.S. leverage to achieve better results. I don’t claim that Biden always got that balance right after October 7. But even in that instance there were examples of the use of such tools to good effect.
In the spring of 2024, when Israel was preparing an offensive to attack four Hamas battalions in Rafah, where 1.8 million Palestinians had taken shelter, Biden insisted on a pause. He was determined to avoid rates of civilian casualties similar to those inflicted on Gaza City and Khan Younis. Over several weeks, U.S. and Israeli civilian and military officials discussed approaches. When Israel ultimately proceeded, it did so in a far more precise and deliberate manner that enabled it to reach legitimate Hamas targets while giving civilians time to evacuate and producing far less harm.
Weeks later, in May 2024, Biden paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, upset by their use in areas congested with civilians. This caused major tension with Israel. But by June, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was prepared to sign a letter committing to not using such weapons in Gaza, which would still enable him to use them against Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, where major threats lurked but civilian casualties were much easier to avoid. Although that agreement stalled, these examples of dialogue between the U.S. and Israeli militaries and agreements reached at the political level point to the proper use of U.S. leverage, to ensure that an ally under fire from terrible adversaries—its and ours—can defend itself, but in a way that upholds U.S. standards and values.
Those who argue that Biden should have cut off Israel much earlier in the war make clear that they would accept an outcome in which Hamas emerged largely unscathed and almost certainly still holding hostages. (Hamas, like Netanyahu, also found reason to delay hostage negotiations at every turn.) Although the task of removing Hamas from power remains unfinished, anyone who cares about Palestinian suffering should at least spare a thought for the way Hamas’s misrule has ruined the lives of the people of Gaza.
[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: War is coming back to Gaza]
At the political level, some envision a broad coalition forged around opposition to U.S. support for Israel propelling Democrats to victory. Notwithstanding polling that shows a significant decline in Israel’s standing among various sectors of the American public, it’s a thin reed on which to build a political coalition. U.S. elections rarely hinge on foreign-policy issues, and the intense emotions of this war will compete with new outrages—Trump provides them daily—that will absorb attention. Establishing opposition to aid to Israel as a litmus test for Democratic candidates is a means of subtraction, not addition. Democrats need to find a way to assemble a governing majority, not drive out elements of their coalition.
But there is a darker danger to the approach that Rhodes and others endorse. Nearly by definition, calls for ending all U.S.-Israel security cooperation draw those making them into alignment with others on a much more extreme fringe—those for whom it is not enough to end U.S. military assistance to Israel, who fundamentally believe that there is no legitimacy for Israel to exist as a Jewish state. They have found their voice and are making it heard.
If the test of fealty for the Democratic Party becomes supporting international efforts to pressure Israel to define itself out of existence, or expressing indifference to the campaign of Israel’s enemies to destroy it, we will be in a much uglier place. That is not a policy that would meet any moral test, and it would likely be a political loser among the voters who actually determine the outcome of elections. Those calling for an end to U.S. support for Israel need to be mindful that, perhaps inadvertently, they are abetting this camp.
There is also strategic blindness in the proposal to cut off Israel. Its advocates do not honestly wrestle with its likely consequences for U.S. interests and influence in the region.
The end of the U.S.-Israel security partnership would have three immediate effects. First, it would make Israel appear vulnerable, leading Iran and its allies to accelerate their efforts, already under way, to rearm and prepare for another, perhaps decisive, war. Far from advancing the cause of peace, such a move would likely intensify the region’s conflicts.
Second, it would undermine bipartisan efforts to build an integrated coalition of U.S. partners—Israel and moderate Arab states—that assist one another and allow the United States to play a supporting, but not always leading, role in maintaining regional stability. Arab states are deepening their relationship with Israel in large part because they believe that it will bring them closer to the United States. When we are seen as a less reliable partner for our closest regional ally, they will draw obvious conclusions. Cutting off Israel would thus lead to a less stable, more conflict-ridden region. And it would actually set back Palestinian aspirations by undermining the Saudi-Israeli normalization deal that might advance them.
Third, the end of security assistance to Israel would soon mean the same for Jordan and Egypt, whose assistance programs derive from their peace treaties with Israel. Jordan’s stability could be placed at immediate risk, with spillover dangers in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the West Bank. Egypt would not stop arming itself; it would simply buy weapons from Russia and China. Gulf states, boxed out from purchasing U.S. equipment by ongoing U.S. legal requirements to sustain Israel’s qualitative military edge, would do the same. There is no better or faster way to open the door to our competitors’ planting their flag in a strategic and volatile region than by cutting off Israel.
The net result of these trends will be a dramatic decline in U.S. influence in the Middle East. For those embracing the impulse to look inward, that may seem fine. Early in the cycle of isolationism, as in the 1930s or after the Cold War, it always does. But eventually, a shock or crisis—World War II, 9/11, or one that we can’t yet name but that will surely come—will draw us back into the region, but under far worse conditions and at a much higher cost.
Sustaining a functional relationship with Israel, with all of its flaws, is manifestly more beneficial to U.S. interests than the alternative. And we need to keep perspective. Netanyahu will not govern forever. The Israeli public has moved rightward, but there are reasonable leaders from the center right and the center left to cultivate. A Palestinian state will not be on the agenda in the Israeli election campaign of 2026, but as the war recedes, there will be various ways to engage the Israeli public—an imperative that Israel’s critics utterly ignore but that is crucial for obtaining the outcomes we want in a democracy—to incentivize them to vote in a more moderate direction. Bidding them good riddance and telling them that they are on their own would do the opposite. Ignoring the responsibility of other actors—such as Palestinian Authority leaders who must embrace reform and demonstrate the capacity to govern and defeat extremists—would do the same.
If Israel wants to see Democrats pursue engagement, then it must help. Expressing conceptual openness to Palestinian statehood as part of a regionally integrated framework—even if it takes longer than Palestinians might hope and assumes a form that looks different from previous efforts—will be important. Keeping extremists out of the Israeli government, and cracking down on extremist violence, is crucial. And recognizing that legitimate security operations must include maximum efforts to protect civilians is essential. Although Israel Defense Forces commanders were always clear that their intent was to target Hamas, not civilians, their tolerance of civilian casualties in pursuit of legitimate military targets was far too high. An intense military-to-military dialogue could help persuade them to adjust that calculation. As in any war, specific charges that soldiers committed war crimes must be investigated and adjudicated in a credible military-justice system—something the United States military has done, albeit imperfectly.
Democrats, and all Americans, face a choice in upcoming elections. We can make the moral, political, and strategic error of trying to wash our hands of a relationship with a democratic partner under stress that has made many mistakes as it has fought to defend itself. Or we can commit to working with that partner and its current, flawed leadership while we wait for new leaders to emerge. We can choose to sustain crucial aspects of a relationship that serves our moral and strategic interests, while insisting on changes that conform with U.S. values. The latter course is clearly the better choice.
