Gallant heads to DC in shadow of Bibi-Biden crisis

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant will meet in Washington with top American foreign policy and defense officials from Sunday to Tuesday, amid a new crisis that erupted between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden.

In the balance are the future of the war and post-war Gaza policy, the status of weapons sales in a range of areas, Iran policy, and related regional issues.

Due to Netanyahu’s testy relations with Biden and the absence of a fully empowered Israeli foreign minister, Gallant has often been the number-two critical interlocutor between the countries.

Tensions between Netanyahu and Biden 

Earlier this week, Netanyahu attacked the Biden administration for delaying weapons sales, and then, on Wednesday, one of his spokespeople said he had restored American weapons sales.

Netanyahu was referring to Biden’s May public statement that Israel was holding up a shipment of large bombs to prevent Jerusalem from using them in an attack on Rafah.

However, sources close to Gallant, as well as in the IDF and the defense establishment, have blamed Netanyahu for aggravating the weapons crisis rather than navigating it cleverly and quietly, especially since the IDF is so close to taking over Rafah without having significantly upset the US with its conduct of the battle.

Due to the crisis, there are still questions about exactly who Gallant will meet.

During his most recent Washington trip on March 25-26, he met with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and multiple times with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

Some of those meetings were planned in advance, but others were added after a similar crisis between Netanyahu and Biden in March, when each side canceled various meetings. Gallant ended up bridging some of the gaps at the time.

Some speculated that Netanyahu went after Biden earlier in the week in order to declare that he had solved the weapons crisis on Wednesday before Gallant was set to arrive in the US so that the prime minister could take credit.

Instead, a mix of US and Israeli sources seemed unclear about whether Netanyahu’s latest attack on Biden had led the US to pause the approval process for Israel to purchase F-15EX aircraft.

Israel had already delayed that process twice: the first time because of many rounds of elections and the second time more recently, due to disputes between Gallant and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. 

Smotrich sought additional oversight, and the defense establishment viewed his intervention as an attempt to politicize national security.

Israel and the US have wrestled over whether the IDF should invade Rafah and, if so, how to conduct the invasion, considering the number of Palestinian civilians killed, the general humanitarian situation in Gaza, Netanyahu’s refusal to propose a day-after solution for running Gaza, and whether US weapons support should be conditional on Israel following certain American policy recommendations.