Can America’s relationship with Israel survive the ‘phone call heard around the world’?

The very special relationship that has bound the United States to Israel for the best part of 50 years has been unravelling in a dramatic way since the Hamas attacks six months ago – or, more accurately, since Israel’s launched its military response three weeks later. How bad relations have become between the current occupant of the White House and the prime minister of Israel positively rang out from the official US account of a half-hour phone call between the leaders on Thursday.

To describe the tone as unfriendly would be an understatement. But it was more than that. The report reads like an aggrieved reprimand from a parent, US president Joe Biden, to a petulant child – Benjamin Netanyahu. As described, this was not an encounter between the leaders of equal sovereign states; it was a comprehensive dressing down, with warnings. If you grant that such reports tend to observe the niceties of diplomatic language, you can only imagine how acrimonious the actual conversation may have been.

It was the first time the two had spoken since seven international aid workers were killed in Gaza, in a series of Israeli missile strikes on their convoy, and Biden pulled no punches. He “emphasised” that the strikes on humanitarian workers and “the overall humanitarian situation” were “unacceptable”. He essentially ordered Israel “to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers”. And there was a scarcely veiled threat of consequences for failure to comply: “US policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action...” In other words, it will be Washington, not Israel, that decides