What does supporting Israel mean for the US?

US President Joe Biden confirmed US support for Israel on Wednesday, when he wrote on social media platform X, "I reaffirmed the United States' ironclad commitment to Israel's security" in a meeting with the leaders of the G7 states.

Biden's voicing of support comes at a time when the Middle East is in a state of upheaval that began when militant Islamist group Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the US, the EU, and others, attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas killed roughly 1,200 people and took almost 250 hostages, some of whom are still held in Gaza.

In retaliation, Israel launched a large-scale military operation in the Palestinian territory whose stated purpose was to wipe out Hamas and free the hostages taken by the terrorist organization. Since the beginning of that operation, more than 40,000 people in Gaza, many of them civilians, have been killed.

There has also been increased fighting between Israeli troops and Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based Hamas ally that has been firing missiles at Israel from just across the country's northern border with Lebanon. On Monday, Israel launched a ground offensive against Lebanon, after having killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah over the weekend.

US officials have been stressing they want to avoid a full-on war in the region and reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza in exchange for Hamas releasing Israeli hostages. But on Tuesday, Iran launched a barrage of missiles on Israel, with Israel saying it would retaliate.

Biden and Netanyahu — a difficult relationship

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has faced some blowback from within his own country about his handling of the war with Hamas. His critics are concerned that Netanyahu's hardline actions are making it more unlikely that Hamas will release the remaining hostages.

The US has used its status as Israel's biggest ally to try to influence it to allow more aid into Gaza. But as Biden reaffirmed on Wednesday, Washington's support for Israel remains unwavering. But that doesn't mean that the countries' leaders always get along.

"It's important to distinguish President Biden's relationship with the state of Israel from that with Prime Minister Netanyahu," Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank, told DW. "He has had for years a very up-and-down relationship with Netanyahu. [But Biden's] commitment to Israel and Israel's security has been unwavering."

That commitment, Panikoff says, was seen in full force when the US helped protect Israel against the missiles fired by Iran on Tuesday. At the same time, the Biden administration is "frustrated by Prime Minister Netanyahu's decision-making," says Panikoff, a former US intelligence officer.

US trust in Israel 'significantly reduced'

One example of this decision-making was Israel's killing of Nasrallah. "There is not a tremendous amount of personal trust between [Biden and Netanyahu]," said William Wechsler, Panikoff's colleague at the Atlantic Council and senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Washington-based think tank.

"One week ago, [the US] were focusing all their efforts on negotiating a 21-day cease-fire in the north" on the Israeli-Lebanese border, Wechsler said. "They were in daily conversation with the Israelis about this idea — but while they were having these conversations, the Israelis were planning the operation to kill Nasrallah. And they were not telling the Biden administration that they were doing this. Any degree of trust that was there was significantly reduced by that recent experience."

US involvement in a potential Middle East war

After Iran's missile attack on Israel on Tuesday, Netanyahu said that "Iran made a big mistake tonight — and it will pay for it."

Observers are concerned that Israel could retaliate by firing missiles at targets on Iranian soil. That and further escalation in the fighting with Lebanon could turn into a large-scale war with potentially catastrophic consequences for the region and beyond.

Wechsler said that such a war would involve Hezbollah sending hundreds of thousands of missiles into Israel, enough to overwhelm the country's famous Iron Dome defense system. It would also, he continued, involve Iran firing enough missiles toward Israel to overwhelm US air defenses, which are also stationed in Israel.

War could also mean "Israel trying to preempt both of these attacks, trying to take out huge numbers of weapons and putting huge numbers of innocents at risk, who Hezbollah intentionally embeds their weapons among," Wechsler said.

If it came to that, there is a very high likelihood that the United States would get involved, Wechsler added — "if for no other reason that a lot of Americans would be put at risk: Americans living in Israel, American [troops] in our bases across the region, American partners in other parts of the Gulf."

US support for Israel could hurt Harris in the election

While domestic issues play a bigger role for most voters, US support of Israel could factor into the upcoming US presidential election as well. Some Americans feel passionately about the US role in the Middle East conflict, as could be seen with pro-Palestinian protests that spread across college campuses all over the US last spring.

And in Michigan, a state with a significant Arab-American population, more than 100,000 Democrats chose the "uncommitted" option instead of voting for Joe Biden [then the candidate] in the Democratic Party's primaries. The push to get people to vote "uncommitted" came from opponents to the Biden-Harris administration's support of Israel's war in Gaza. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden only won Michigan by 154,000 votes.

Panikoff sees the possibility that enough voters could turn to third-party candidates over Kamala Harris's support for Israel that it could make a difference in certain swing states — and thus in the election overall.

"Is it possible that voters in Michigan who are so upset over the conflict in Gaza… support Jill Stein or Cornel West to enough of an extent that it swings the election to Donald Trump in Michigan? Yes," Panikoff said. "I think it's possible that you could see the same outcome in Pennsylvania. And if you have it in both of them, then it makes it very, very difficult to see a pathway in which Vice President Harris actually wins."

Edited by Ben Knight