Israel entered Rafah, a city that marks Gaza’s southern border crossing with Egypt, on May 7, 2024, launching a military offensive that the U.S. and others have cautioned Israel not to pursue.

President Joe Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 6 against expanding the Gaza war into Rafah, indicating that this could lead to a shift in U.S. policy on Israel. A divergence over how to handle the war in Gaza prompted the U.S. to place a hold on shipping U.S.-made bombs to Israel, according to Israeli officials and a U.S. official quoted in Politico, Axios and The Wall Street Journal.

Rafah is one of the only places in Gaza that has not been destroyed in the Gaza war. It is also a refuge for more than 1 million Palestinians, about half of whom are children, who have been displaced from their homes elsewhere in Gaza because of the conflict.

The Conversation U.S. politics and society editor Amy Lieberman spoke with Gregory Treverton, a chair of the National Intelligence Council under the Obama administration and a national security scholar at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, to understand the limits of U.S. political leverage in influencing Israel’s seven-month war with Hamas.

Is the US’s warning to Israel typical for their diplomatic relationship?

This is certainly not without precedent. There have been many U.S. presidents and secretaries of state who have been frustrated with Israel over something, going back to at least the 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab countries. The U.S. pressed Israel to adhere to a U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution then – one sponsored by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union – but Israel, for a time, refused.

Other presidents have been in the position of saying, “Do this,” and the Israeli comeback is always, “Not quite yet.” So this episode, while very blatant, is hardly unique.

Countries are allies because their interests overlap but are not identical. U.S. history is littered with allies that managed to do what they wanted and not what we wanted them to do.

Years ago, when I was at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and would talk about the difficulties of dealing with allies, let alone enemies, a wonderful researcher focused on Israel would comment: “So who ever said it was easy to be a superpower!” Biden would sympathize with that remark.

As Israeli politics and leadership have drifted so far to the right, a lot of the people in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition don’t really care about the U.S. and what it wants. Netanyahu is now very dependent on the far right for his own political survival, so he is likely to listen to his right-wingers, not to the U.S.

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