‘Old-style Zionist’
What happened to the Joe Biden i knew, asks this veteran political analyst.
DURING the Darfur genocide and humanitarian crisis two decades ago, then Senator Joe Biden passionately denounced then US President George W. Bush for failing to act decisively to ease suffering. Biden expressed outrage at China for selling weapons used to kill and maim civilians, and he urged me to write columns demanding the White House end needless wretchedness.
Darfur and the Gaza Strip are very different, of course, but I recall the senator’s compassion and urgency – and I wonder, where has that Joe Biden gone?
Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign – and it could get worse if Gaza cascades into a full-blown famine or violent anarchy, or if a wider war breaks out involving Iran or Lebanon. An Israeli strike on a military base in central Iran early last Friday underscored the danger of a bigger and more damaging conflict that could draw in the United States.
Consider just one example of the US fingerprints on this war under Biden’s leadership. In January, the Israeli military dropped a bomb on a compound in Gaza used by the International Rescue Committee, a muchrespected American aid organisation that is supported in part by US tax dollars. The International Rescue Committee said that the near-fatal strike was caused by a 450kg American-made bomb, dropped from an American-made F-16 fighter jet. And when an American-made aircraft drops an American-made bomb on an American aid group in an American-supported war, how can that not come back to Biden?
“Biden owns that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden and Barack Obama administration official who now runs Refugees International, another aid group. “They’ve provided the materiel that sustains the war. They provided political support that sustains the war. They provided the diplomatic cover at the United Nations that sustains the war.”
This is not Biden’s war in the way that Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson’s war or that Iraq was Bush’s war. Biden has not sent US troops, and he has not directed this war. He is clearly uncomfortable with the civilian toll of this war and wishes Israel was conducting it with more restraint – yet he continues to underwrite it. His rhetoric has become more critical, but his actions so far have not changed significantly.
“Is this the war Biden would want?” Konyndyk asked. “No. But is this the war Biden is materially supporting? Yes. And so in that sense, it’s his war.”
It was Ukraine that Biden wanted as his war. Not that he wanted any war at all, but Ukraine was his opportunity to stand up and uphold the “rules-based international order” against an enemy that violated international law, bombed infrastructure and sought to make all Ukrainians pay. But it is the war in Gaza that Biden has saddled himself with, with its “indiscriminate” bombing – as he himself described it in December – leaving him and the United States looking to much of the world like hypocrites.
Yet Biden will not easily extricate himself from this mess.
“Six months in, the Biden administration is in a strategic cul-de-sac with no easy way out – weakened both morally and politically, dependent on two combatants who see no urgency in ending the war and facing the real possibility of a serious escalation between Israel and Iran,” Aaron David Miller, a veteran US diplomat and Middle East peace negotiator, said.
One of Biden’s reasons for standing close by Netanyahu and keeping up the flow of weapons has been to ensure that Israel is prepared should war break out with Iran or with Hezbollah in Lebanon. That’s a legitimate concern. But unconditionally arming Israel also enables Netanyahu to take provocative steps that increase the risk of expanded war – and everyone knows that peace may not be in Netanyahu’s personal interest, for it would bring new elections that he is expected to lose. That’s worth remembering as one considers Israel’s deadly bombing of an Iranian consulate in Syria early this month, the move that prompted Iran’s retaliatory strike on Israel.
Tries to do the right thing
For decades I’ve known and admired Biden. He’s wise and decent, a committed public servant who tries to do the right thing. He’s the most experienced foreign policy hand in the Oval Office in decades, surrounded by excellent advisers and known for his warmth and empathy. He would be a hard man to dislike.
Yet I believe Biden’s ongoing support for the Israeli military campaign reflects miscalculations that grew out of his outrage at the savagery of the Hamas attack on Oct 7, coupled with his conviction that Israel not only had a right to strike back at Hamas but also had a duty to do so, to reestablish deterrence. Biden’s initial unwavering support for the military campaign also reflects his generation, growing up in the shadow of WWII’S Holocaust, and his deeply felt admiration for Israel. Daniel Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel, put it this way: “President Biden is preternaturally supportive of Israel. It’s in his DNA.”
Martin Indyk, who was twice ambassador to Israel, agrees. “You know the line about him being an old-style Zionist?” Indyk asked. “That’s the heart of it.”
American public opinion has moved rapidly on the war, with a majority of people now opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza. If the bloodshed and starvation continue, one can imagine a further shift – carrying increased political risks for Biden.
The anger among young progressives is particularly strong. Some of this anger, both in the United States and abroad, stems from what critics of the war perceive as a lack of urgency and even empathy on Biden’s part for Palestinian suffering. When he speaks of the victims of the Oct 7 attack, I can feel his horror and disgust at the inhumanity of Hamas, but I don’t hear the same emotion about the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza.
“There has just been a profound and visible empathy gap in how Biden talks about the two sets of victims in this conflict,” Konyndyk said.
Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland who has known Biden for many years, made the same point and argued that what seemed to finally move Biden (and much of the world) was the killing of World Central Kitchen’s foreign aid workers – even after about 190 Palestinian aid workers had already died.
We all have empathy gaps based on our backgrounds, and in Biden’s case, this isn’t the first time the issue has been discussed. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and caused so many civilian casualties that everyone from then Republican US president Ronald Reagan to Democratic senators expressed outrage. One exception: the young senator from Delaware.
Then Senator Biden clashed with Israel’s hard-line prime minister, Menachem Begin, over West Bank settlements, and he deserves credit for being prescient in his opposition to land grabs for settlements. But Biden reportedly also told Begin that he favoured an even harsher attack on Lebanon, even if this meant killing women and children, according to Israeli press reports.
In fairness, Biden has offered a strong moral voice in other humanitarian crises, including when he spoke up strongly for Muslims in Bosnia in 1995 and in Darfur in the 2000s. In both cases, he was impatient with talk and demanded action to ease suffering. “We are still making threats instead of taking action,” Biden complained about Darfur in 2007, when Bush was president.
Those of Biden’s generation sometimes complain that younger critics of Israel lack historical perspective and don’t appreciate the threats that Jews have faced. But parallel arguments of naivete were lodged against young critics of the Iraq and Vietnam wars.
In retrospect, the backers of the Vietnam War didn’t understand the power of nationalism and vastly exaggerated the ability of even a powerful army to eradicate a homegrown enemy with nationalist credentials, while they were myopic about the human cost of their strategy and didn’t ask essential questions about its morality. Today it is the critics of the Vietnam and Iraq wars who have been largely validated. They may have known less history, but they possessed keener empathy.
Another parallel with the Vietnam War that worries some Democrats: The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was the site of chaotic anti-war protests that were mishandled and damaged the entire party at a time it needed to signal unity. That fall the presidential election went, by less than 1 percentage point, to the Republican Richard Nixon.
Oh, and where will the Democratic convention be held this year? Chicago, again.
The Biden administration called for moral clarity after the atrocities of Oct 7, and that was appropriate. But moral clarity cannot be like a pair of glasses we put on and take off. Our shared humanity means recognising that all children’s lives have equal value. If your heart breaks for victims on only one side of the Israel-gaza border, then your failure is not of geopolitics but of humanity. If you care about the human rights of only Israelis or only Palestinians, then you don’t actually care about human rights.
In the past, Biden repeatedly resisted meaningful limits on arms transfers. Under pressure from Democratic senators, he issued National Security Memorandum 20, which restated US law that puts humanitarian conditions on military transfers – but then the administration announced that Israel was meeting the requirements, which many outsiders doubted.
The administration must issue another report by May 8 about whether Israel is meeting its humanitarian obligations, but many critics of the war expect a whitewash.
Many Biden supporters are exasperated.
“The current approach is not working,” Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said in a statement calling on Biden to withhold bombs from Israel. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was among 40 House members who sent a similar letter to Biden.
Biden’s hope for months has been a temporary halt in fighting that the administration could then use to frantically negotiate a landmark Saudi-israeli-american deal that would normalise relations and lay the groundwork for a two-state solution. This would be the diplomatic equivalent of pulling an elephant out of a hat.
But it hasn’t happened and it’s not clear what Biden’s backup plan is.
“The message I and others have carried is you can’t count on such a deal being worked out,” Merkley said. “And meanwhile the humanitarian disaster is getting worse every single day.”
The most dire scenario ahead may be a multifront war involving Gaza and Hezbollah or Iran. A poll found that 53% of Israeli Jews favour such an all-out attack on Hezbollah. That would, I believe, be a catastrophe for the region.
There’s also the possibility of an Israeli invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza without any serious effort to move civilians out of the way. We may see a full-blown famine in Gaza, or, with no authority in place, Gaza might linger (even if Hamas is a spent force) as a shattered, anarchic territory dominated by militant extremists and criminal gangs. Netanyahu seems to have no long-term plan for Gaza (or the West Bank) that would be acceptable to the outside world.
So far the war in Gaza has, according to authorities there, killed roughly 34,000 people, including about 13,800 children. The toll includes some 484 health workers, 100 journalists and 200 aid workers. The war has also damaged or destroyed more than half of the territory’s buildings. There is no end in sight, and I don’t see a path for Biden out of the mire in which he has placed himself that does not entail pursuing a fundamentally tougher and more independent path.
That means insisting that Netanyahu show far more restraint in warfare and both allow more aid into Gaza and ensure it is actually delivered to starving people. And if there are no immediate results, Biden must stop the flows of offensive weapons, for that is the step that will finally get the attention of the Israeli military and of all the country’s leaders.
This is a sad column to have to write. Biden has generally been an impressive foreign policy president, I believe, particularly astute in building connections in Asia to meet the challenge of China. I think he’s personally a good man with a compassionate heart.
That makes his complicity in the cataclysm of Gaza all the more tragic. As a young man, Biden watched US president Johnson’s dream of being remembered for his “Great Society” collapse in the face of youthful opposition to an unpopular and cruel foreign war, with Johnson’s failures leading to the election of a corrupt president from the other party. I hope Biden takes action to avoid a repeat.
Biden might listen in particular to one close adviser who is apparently in anguish over Gaza – for she is right.
“Stop it,” Jill Biden reportedly told her husband. “Stop it now, Joe.” – © 2024 The New York Times Company