Israel’s Netanyahu to Address Joint Session of U.S. Congress Amid Ongoing War

Source; CFR

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lay out his vision in Israel’s war against Hamas and response to regional threats while reaffirming the country’s partnership with the United States, an unnamed official from his office told The Times of Israel. Nentanyahu’s visit to Washington this week comes as the war triggered by Hamas’s October 2023 attack continues in its tenth month, with mounting Israeli domestic pressure to secure a hostage release deal and global concern about the conflict’s humanitarian toll in Gaza and potential escalation to other parts of the Middle East. Netanyahu is also scheduled to later meet with senior U.S. political officials including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump.?

Divided U.S. opinion on Israel’s war tactics extends to Congress, where some Democratic lawmakers said they will boycott the speech. Both Harris and Republican vice presidential candidate and Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) said they will not attend due to scheduling conflicts. Netanyahu’s visit also comes amid upheaval in the U.S. presidential campaign, with Biden due to address the country this evening on his decision to not run for reelection. Netanyahu said ahead of his trip that he “will seek to anchor the bipartisan support that is so important for Israel.” (Times of Israel, NYT, Politico, WSJ)

Analysis

“Netanyahu will endeavor to shift the conversation away from the conflict in Gaza toward the threat that Iran and its proxies pose not just to Israel, but also to the United States ,” CFR Senior Fellow Steven A. Cook writes in this Expert Brief. “Netanyahu clearly wants to elicit both military and diplomatic U.S. support should the Israelis decide to escalate their ongoing border conflict with the militant group.”?

“Negotiated settlements borne of third-party pressure are much more liable to collapse than those sought by the belligerents themselves,” the University of California, Los Angeles’s Eric Min writes for Foreign Affairs. “Washington has several alternatives to its current strategy of pushing for talks that could more meaningfully affect the course of the conflict.”

Read the full suite of Foreign Affairs and CFR.org resources on Israel and the current conflict.