If Biden is not careful, Israel could end up as his Vietnam

Echoes of the past leave US president in a quagmire of his own making

Pundits and protesters are drawing parallels between Joe Biden and Lyndon B Johnson − another liberal presidency doomed by an ugly war. In so many ways, Gaza is not Vietnam. America has no boots on the ground; no draft if it did. Yet the analogy builds in three troubling steps.

One: Biden owns the Middle East conflict even as he denounces the casualties. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times notes that in January, the Israelis dropped a US-made bomb from a US-made plane on a US-relief group in a war supported by the US. “How can that not come back to Biden?”

Kristof concludes that the president, for all his anti-war instincts, remains a die-hard Zionist, reluctant even to cut ties with an alleged crook like Netanyahu (there is reportedly a photo of the president on the prime minister’s desk inscribed: “Bibi, I love you but I don’t agree with a damn thing you have to say.”)

Did the US like the South Vietnamese government? Not much. But it regarded its survival as essential to US security, even as the cost of defending it mounted. That cost wasn’t just material or reputational; it also alienated America’s youth and divided liberals.

Step Two: Gaza, like Vietnam, is splitting the Democratic coalition along historic fault-lines of generation, race and class. “Again,” writes Ross Douthat, “you have an ageing Democratic president struggling to modulate a conflict with no endgame”. Again, the left finds its voice on campus, where students and academics compare Israel to Apartheid South Africa and evoke the wider cause of “decolonisation” (the line from “Black Lives Matter” to “From the River to the Sea” is depressingly straight). And, once more, older liberals struggle to contain forces with which they are usually sympathetic.

Take Columbia, where students opened an occupying encampment demanding the university disinvest from Israel. The demand is naive − it’ll be hard to unbundle the institution’s vast and complex portfolio − and hijacked by the usual racists and nutcases who have made Jewish students feel besieged. One professor reported that shouts of hate ruined his music class’s appreciation of John Cage’s piano composition “4.33”: unsurprising as the modernist piece comprises four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (Columbia, sigh conservatives, has been occupied by weirdos for decades).

Protesters, some of them Jewish, have denounced media coverage as hysterical and false, arguing that the real story is the administration’s reactionary response. When former Harvard president Claudine Gay infamously said anti-Semitic remarks should be considered in context, she lost her job.

Minouche Shafik of Columbia has cannily gone the other way, reassuring Congress that anti-Zionist professors will be punished and calling police to clear the protests (students claim they were hand-tied and held for eight hours in cells with a shared toilet). One casualty was the daughter of Ilhan Omar, the radical congresswoman − left “homeless” and “starving” by the university.

Columbia was an epicentre of anti-Vietnam war protest in 1968. So was Chicago – here we come to Step Three – when it hosted the Democratic Convention that fateful year. In the city of machine mayor Richard Daley, working-class cops ran truncheon-first into young radical activists, casting a bloody image for TV viewers that led to Democrat defeat in November.

It’s a wound that took a long time to heal. And where, pray, are the Democrats meeting to renominate Biden in 2024? Chicago.

It won’t be the same, some have soothed, because conventions today are so tightly controlled − and protesters will find the city broadly sympathetic.

Mayor Brandon Johnson is black, left-wing, a scion of the teaching unsupporting ions and he helped pass a ceasefire resolution on the city council.

Even if there are no street battles, the convention will be forced to confront the party’s growing moral controversy, as the new left challenges the Zionist old guard for authority. Pro-Israel groups are expected to pour millions into this electoral cycle, targeting pro-ceasefire Democrats. Anti-war Dems stand accused, as they were in 1968, of not only wanting to end the conflict but actively the other side, Hamas and the Vietcong both being murderous, racist organisations.

Biden has felt compelled to denounce the anti-Semitism at Columbia, remarks he balanced with a swipe at those who fail to feel pity for the Palestinians − yet his administration has shepherded an Israeli aid package through Congress worth billions of dollars. Thus we return to the fundamental problem that the president cannot decide whether or not to go all the way with Benjamin Netanyahu.

LBJ wanted to fight a war in Vietnam with minimal engagement and casualties, a policy that arguably prolonged the conflict and drove up the bodycount. Biden is also faced with a choice between letting Israel finish the job or stepping in to save what remains of Palestinian society from ruin. This is his quagmire, and he’s sinking fast.

‘We return to the problem that the president cannot decide whether or not to go all the way with Netanyahu’