LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Israel holds its national elections next week. It will be the country's first since the October 7 attacks by Hamas that triggered Israel's war in Gaza. Leading the country through it all has been Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's fighting to stay in power for a seventh term, as many voters and political rivals accuse him of prolonging the war in Gaza and failing to prevent the attacks in the first place.
I sat down with the Biden administration's deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer, to ask him how he sees the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship and started by asking what it would mean if Netanyahu won again.
JON FINER: It would be a very good thing, I think, for Israel, for the United States and for the wider world if Prime Minister Netanyahu is defeated. His tenure has coincided with the October 7 attacks and the security breach that led to that, with the horrific conflict in Gaza that followed it and Israel's international standing growing only more and more isolated.
On the other hand, it is not clear that the cast of opposition leaders who are most likely to replace Netanyahu if he loses are going to make fundamental changes to Israeli policy that would improve the standing in the eyes of many Americans, who are turning rapidly against Israel. There are recent polls that show more than 60% of Americans now hold an unfavorable opinion of Israel. That number was 40% in 2022. And so it is not clear to me, even though it would be fundamentally a good thing for him to lose, that a new government would do enough to alter those trajectories.
FADEL: What would need to happen for there to be a fundamental shift that would change U.S. and global perception of Israel in this moment? I mean, like you said, more than 60% of U.S. voters, even in a recent survey, said they just want to stop military aid to Israel over what it's doing in Gaza and in its wars. When you say there need to be fundamental shifts, what are those?
FINER: So I can give you a few examples, all of which seem a bit like science fiction in the current moment. But, for example, there is not a single Jewish leader in Israel right now who endorses the idea of a Palestinian state. There is not a single leader who is likely to take on in a full-throated way the settlement enterprise in the West Bank. I think you would probably see a bit less settlement activity under an opposition-led government than you have seen under Netanyahu. But they are not likely to roll back what has been a just massive increase in the number of settlements in the West Bank, even just in the years since the October 7 attacks.
Similarly, when it comes to West Bank settler violence, I will give the opposition credit. They have said that it should stop. They have said that they will hold people accountable. But I was in the U.S. government working in the Biden administration the last time Netanyahu was out of office. And what we saw during that period, when we had a government called the change government led by some of the same leaders involved in the current opposition, was actually an increase in settlement activity from the Netanyahu government that had come before them and an increase in settler violence without a meaningful increase in accountability for that settler violence.
FADEL: I want to ask about one of your former colleagues - Brett McGurk, the former White House Middle East coordinator. He's - has a book out right now. And in that book, he blames Hamas pretty exclusively for the prolonged war and the inability to get a deal to free Israeli hostages. This is being used in this election cycle by Netanyahu's supporters to say, see. He did all he could after October 7 to get the hostages out, which was the main concern among Israelis. Do you agree with McGurk's assessment?
FINER: So look. I'm not going to get into a personal back-and-forth with Brett, who's somebody I worked with for a long time. But in my mind, both Hamas and the Netanyahu government were extremely reluctant to do a deal that would end the war and release the hostages. And there were definitely times, as apparently Brett described, according to your account of his book, where Hamas was the more reluctant party, said no to offers that were on the table that Israel may have accepted.
By the way, there were also clear times in which we believe that Hamas had basically agreed to the terms of a deal, and it was Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu who added additional hurdles and additional aspects of the deal that made it impossible for that deal to occur. And the war went on for months longer than it needed to, and the hostages stayed in captivity. And some of them died during this extended period while the two sides continued to haggle.
FADEL: And thousands of Palestinians also died during that time.
FINER: Many thousands.
FADEL: There will be people listening to you right now, as we discuss the future of U.S.-Israeli relationship, who will say the Biden administration continued supplying Israel bombs and, for that reason, is responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians - men, women and children - as well as Israel's bombings of hospitals, of schools in Gaza, of entire buildings. How much blame does the administration that you served in bear for Israel's actions of the last few years?
FINER: I think everybody who served bears accountability for the - what happened during our time in office.
FADEL: Yeah.
FINER: And I'm, you know, not going to pretend otherwise. I do think, though, to say the least, U.S. policy towards Israel has not gotten better since our administration left office. Right now we have zero pressure placed by the Trump administration on Netanyahu to scale back what is essentially terrorism taking place by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. And obviously, we've had this collaboration on a deeply unpopular and unwise war with Iran. So this administration bears the responsibility for their choices that have led to these outcomes, as does every previous administration, including the one I served in.
FADEL: But did it create a permission structure that, basically, there won't be accountability?
FINER: I think the message that was sent is that the things that we were asking for - whether that is a different way to conduct the war in Gaza, whether that is increased humanitarian access to Gaza - were more akin to preferences than to interests. And future administrations should draw the lesson that absent concrete actions by the United States that make clear that lines have been crossed, left to its own devices, there are likely to be actions taken by Israel that violate American interests.
FADEL: Are there things you regret personally?
FINER: I mean, I regret some of the actions taken by the administration I served in. Administrations, at the end of the day, are decisions made by the very top. And I've made clear, I think, the ones that I think were misguided.
FADEL: There is a campaign right now basically calling for top administration officials from the Biden era to not be employed at think tanks and government positions, and I just wonder what you think about that.
FINER: Look, that is really a decision for other people to make. My view at this point is, when I'm asked to speak on this topic, I'm going to offer my opinion, my analysis based on the experiences that I've had, which have been quite a lot. You mentioned my time in the Biden administration. I also was John Kerry's chief of staff.
FADEL: Yeah.
FINER: The last time we had real negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians - spoiler alert - ultimately unsuccessful, as every other negotiation before that had been. And so I'm less focused on what this means in terms of this or that future political role and more focused on trying to make the case for what I believe would be the right policy approach. And people have the right to listen to that or not.
FADEL: Jon Finer, thank you for your time.
FINER: Thank you.
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FADEL: Jon Finer was the deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration.
(SOUNDBITE OF ACETONE'S "MIDNIGHT COWBOY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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