For the first time in two months, President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Wednesday in a phone conversation that was expected to focus on Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack.
But it also carried the weight of the worst relationship between the United States and Israel in years.
The conversation on a secure line, which also included Vice President Kamala Harris, began shortly after 10:30 a.m., the Israeli news media reported. The White House confirmed the conversation had taken place and promised a description of it soon.
Recent history, though, suggests that Mr. Biden’s advisers were unlikely to offer details of the conversation, particularly on whether Mr. Netanyahu would comply with Mr. Biden’s demand to avoid striking Iran’s nuclear sites and energy facilities.
The call came at a moment when U.S. national security officials believe the Middle East is on a knife’s edge. They have told Mr. Biden that after the missile attack by Iran on Oct. 1, which did relatively little damage in Israel, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not looking to enter a broader war.
But U.S. officials believe that if Israel reacts to the strikes by going after Iran’s most sensitive sites, the result could be an uncontrolled escalation.
That is why Mr. Biden has been so public in his warnings to Mr. Netanyahu. Yet time after time in the past year, the Israeli leader has largely ignored the American president, betting that Mr. Biden did not have the political latitude to cut off arms or aid to Jerusalem.
White House officials, worried after they were blindsided by a series of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, demanded the conversation on Wednesday and insisted that it take place before Israel conducted a counterattack.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III was reported to be “angry beyond words,” one administration official said, because the absence of clear advance notice about the attacks in Lebanon put the lives of Americans in the Middle East at risk.
Top American officials said they were mostly concerned about making sure that Iran and Israel did not get into an uncontrolled escalation of their long-running shadow war. In the past six months, that conflict has expanded to include three rounds of direct missile attacks from one country against the other. This was the first year direct attacks took place since the Iranian revolution in 1979.
The lack of communication between the United States and Israel, two countries that have described themselves as the closest of allies since Israel’s creation in 1948, reflected the deeper breach in the relationship.
Mr. Biden has been widely reported over the past year to have emerged from conversations with Mr. Netanyahu uttering a string of epithets about the Israeli leader.
For his part, Mr. Netanyahu believes that Mr. Biden’s constant efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza, and more recently in Lebanon, would have squandered Israel’s best chance in decades to deal major blows to Hamas and Hezbollah, according to U.S. officials familiar with their conversations. In the prime minister’s view, Israel has scored major tactical victories over both Hamas and Hezbollah by destroying much of their leadership ranks. In Hezbollah’s case, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials believe that half or more of its arsenal of missiles, all designed to strike Israeli targets, has been destroyed.
U.S. officials have argued that it is time for Israel to cement its tactical gains over Hamas and Hezbollah into a broader strategic victory, including some political agreements on cease-fires and, ultimately, toward a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a homeland. But they fear that Mr. Netanyahu is not interested and is trying to revive his reputation after being taken by surprise by the terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.
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