With friends of America like this...

...who needs enemies? Benjamin Netanyahu is making life increasingly hard for the 'leader of the free world'. When in early May, Joe Biden said that Washington would not provide bombs and artillery shells for the Israeli army to invade Rafah in southern Gaza, where some 1.3 mn Palestinians were taking shelter, he didn't reckon that a NYT visual analysis of land fragments of the US-made precision bomb GBU-39 found near the site of an Israeli strike would land at his Pennsylvania Avenue door.

Biden's credibility - and the US' as keeper of global stability - is now at stake thanks to ally Israel's belligerent PM who has conflated the sovereign right to defend itself with brutal excessive force against the Palestinian people.

The White House continues to believe that Israel's 'actions' in Rafah haven't crossed 'red lines'. The evidence on display suggests otherwise, unless Washington believes in different coloured lines for different powers.


The US, in its continued support to Tel Aviv, looks morally compromised. The other Israeli conflation the US is 'not unhappy enough' about is Netanyahu equating Palestinians with Hamas, a conflation, ironically, Hamas created and nurtures.

The US still has time to dehyphenate 'Netanyahu-Israel' and realise that withholding military support to Tel Aviv won't weaken US-Israel ties - and its own standing. On its part, Israel must agree with the US-Saudi Arabia proposal for a credible and irreversible path to a Palestinian state in return for normalising Saudi-Israel relations, which were strained after the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Such a stand can only benefit Israel. DC doesn't have to switch its friendship with Israel off. It has to get Tel Aviv to dial things down considerably - as a friend.