Here’s an article from before the Hamas attacks:

The White House has finally invited Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the US after months of snubbing the Israeli prime minister over his government’s creeping annexation of the West Bank and deepening oppression of the Palestinians.

And another one:

President Biden bluntly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he “cannot continue down this road” … he touched off the kind of response usually expressed by America’s adversaries rather than its allies. … “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Wednesday, accusing the U.S. president of meddling in another country’s politics — which is exactly what Mr. Biden was intending to do. It was a remarkably public outbreak of the kind of disagreement that usually takes place in private. But there were other factors at work that had been brewing for many years.

And here’s another relevant article:

Biden understands that Netanyahu’s position is a precarious one. His governing coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote, and took power only because of a quirk of the Israeli electoral system. The coalition relies on an alliance of unpopular far-right parties to stay afloat, whom Netanyahu must appease to remain in office. Biden has exploited this weakness and repeatedly poked at it. Rather than directly confronting Netanyahu, he has called out his extremist partners and in this way heightened the contradictions within Netanyahu’s coalition, undermining its stability and gradually eroding its support in the polls. In July, Biden told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Netanyahu’s government has “the most extremist members of cabinets that I’ve seen” in Israel … This was Biden’s approach in action: criticizing Israel during wartime in front of a pro-Israel crowd, and doing so in a way that nonetheless denied Netanyahu any opening. As long as it’s Biden versus Ben-Gvir, rather than Biden versus Bibi, the president holds the upper hand. … Biden has brought the same strategy to bear on the issue of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has accelerated under the cover of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Netanyahu’s coalition is unable to clamp down on these extremists and their terrorism because it is beholden to these extremists. But most Israelis have no desire to mortgage the security of Israel and its indispensable relationship to the United States in favor of some far-flung hilltop settlers in West Bank regions that few Israelis could locate on a map. Knowing this, Biden has begun unrolling a series of unilateral measures intended to raise the price of settler violence and pit Netanyahu and his allies against the Israeli public.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/biden-netanyahu-geopolitics-israel-hamas-war/676357/

Proper nasty politics, keep your enemies closer, and backstabbing basically.

People think Biden’s this old incompetent coot, but there’s a reason he’s been around for decades. He’s a piece of work, for better or for worse, and knows how the game is played.