The U.S.-Israel alliance took a hit this week when the United States failed to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution over the Israel-Hamas war.

The contentious decision and the subsequent Israeli response provide insights into the domestic matters President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are facing.

Biden has repeatedly supported Israel’s right to self-defense following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel, but he has faced consistent pressure from more progressive wings of the party to stop Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Despite the Biden administration’s insistence that Israel should do more to protect Palestinian civilians and allow more aid to get into the strip, Palestinian supporters have said the U.S. should cease its military sales to Israel and pursue an immediate and permanent ceasefire agreement.

The president, who will face off against former President Donald Trump in November’s general election, has seen his poll numbers take a dip over the course of the war. He faced write-in campaigns in various primary contests, particularly in battleground states, by progressives protesting the administration’s stance on the war, a clear warning they could decide the outcome of the election.

On Monday, the U.S. opted to abstain from a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” because it did not condemn Hamas for carrying out the attack that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and prompted the Israeli military response.

“Is this Joe Biden’s desperate attempt to pander to the far Left of his party? Certainly, a lot of us think yes,” Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “I think this is more the apotheosis of what has been a gradual turn of the Democratic Party away from Israel.”

Pletka added, “I think that what you’re seeing is the White House is desperately flailing to appease” the progressive wing of the party that has continued to criticize his response to the war.

U.S. officials, in the aftermath of the vote, said it did not represent a shift in their stance on the war, even though they had blocked the passage of two previous U.N. resolutions on the war. Israeli leaders excoriated the U.S., but it also comes at a tenuous time for Netanyahu, who faces his own domestic pressure.

Netanyahu has a history of picking verbal fights with U.S. leaders to bolster his standing within the country and to rally splintering factions around him. In this case, the Israeli leader is looking to rally domestic support because, as Netanyahu’s office argued, the resolution the U.S. allowed to pass “gives Hamas hope that international pressure will force Israel to accept a ceasefire without the release of our hostages, thus harming both the war effort and the effort to release the hostages.” 

He canceled a visit of his top advisers to the U.S. in protest of their abstention.

“He is setting up a situation where he can blame the U.S. for holding him back in Rafah from finishing the job with Hamas and keeping Israel from obtaining its goals,” Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel now at Princeton University, told the New York Times. “And if he does go in, he can argue that he’s the only Israeli leader who can withstand American pressure.”

Netanyahu is facing domestic pressure regarding securing the hostages’ release, and he’s suffering other headaches that predate the war.

Everyone in Israel is required to serve in the military followed by years in reserve duty, as has been the case since the country’s formation in 1948, but exemptions have also been provided to the most religious men of their communities, known as Haredi, so they could focus on their Torah studies full time.

Israel’s war in Gaza has created a more urgent need to bolster its ranks, and the ultra-orthodox communities in Israel have a high birth rate, which means the number of men exempted from military service has increased over time. Israel’s continued exemption for Haredi men has been a source of frustration for secular Israelis long before Oct. 7, though the prolonged war has heightened the matter.

Roughly 66,000 men from the Haredi community in Israel received an exemption from military service over the last year, the Times of Israel reported, citing the Israel Defense Forces’ personnel directorate.

The Israeli Supreme Court set a deadline of the end of March for Netanyahu to present a military draft plan, according to NPR. Israel would not legally be allowed to authorize these exemptions if the government doesn’t come up with a path forward before the end of the month. Whether he backed their continued exemptions or not, Netanyahu will face opposition that threatens his governing coalition.

Conservative Israelis, including the Haredi community, want to continue the long-standing policy of exempting Haredi men from mandatory service. The proponents of extending it include important members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, whereas his opponents, including those within the war cabinet, have called for gradual increases in Haredim doing military service.

Minister Benny Gantz and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — who, with Netanyahu, comprise the war cabinet — have criticized the possibility of extending the blanket exemptions for military service. The former threatened to leave the war cabinet over the matter. The latter, who traveled to Washington, D.C., this week to meet with U.S. officials, said he would only support a proposal that is agreed on by all factions.

Israeli hard-liners in Netanyahu’s party also hold influence over him as they could threaten his hold on power and force sooner-than-anticipated elections. But they and the war cabinet, Netanyahu included, are committed to the defeat of Hamas to ensure Israel’s lasting security.

Israeli leaders have maintained that their forces need to conduct full-scale military operations in the southern city of Rafah, which the U.S., among many others, believes is a bad idea that could result in significant civilian casualties. There are more than a million Palestinian civilians who fled south, as the Israeli forces urged them to do, but now, they are concentrated in the last remaining area in which Israel hasn’t conducted significant military operations to defeat Hamas.

The Israeli Washington-bound delegation that was scrapped at the last minute was to hear alternative ideas of how to defeat Hamas in Rafah without carrying out full-scale operations.

Gallant still traveled to Washington this week, and he met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan despite the cancellation of the separate visit.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

“There are ideas that relate to sequencing, ideas that relate to the prioritization of humanitarian assistance getting in and civilians pulling out. There are ideas that relate to communication between Israel and Egypt and that relate to ensuring the Egypt-Gaza border is secure and not a source of smuggling of terrorists out or weapons into Gaza. Then, there are ideas relating to the precision-targeting of Hamas,” according to a senior U.S. defense official.

More broadly, the two leaders continue to view the “day after” very differently. Biden believes the best way to secure a safe future for Israel is the creation of a Palestinian state, but Netanyahu disagrees and has criticized the Biden administration’s support for the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza after the war.