This article appears in the April 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a knack for making world leaders do the jobs of their subordinates. President Joe Biden had to call Netanyahu himself in October—in the first weeks of Israel’s brutal assault on the occupied territory of Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attacks of October 7—to urge that Israel allow more than 100 trucks of relief aid a day into Gaza. Normally, that’s a task a low-level economic officer at the embassy might handle.
Five months later, the situation has only gotten more humiliating, with Palestinians suffering from an Israeli-sponsored famine. In mid-February, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was expressing desperation that flour paid for by U.S. taxpayers reach Palestinians in Gaza. USAID Administrator Samantha Power was visiting stockpiles of humanitarian assistance in Jordan that were also held up. Then the Biden administration floated the idea of air-dropping aid into Gaza, a tactic of colossal expense and little value when Israel could just speed inspections and open up more entry points.
The next day, Israeli troops launched what became known as the “flour massacre,” opening fire on Palestinians in Gaza waiting in a bread line, killing over 100 people and injuring hundreds more. The U.S. went ahead with the airdrop. Now the administration is planning to build a makeshift port near Gaza City to prevent Israeli forces from stopping U.S. aid with U.S.-made weapons.
The U.S. looks powerless. Biden initially warned Israel not to perpetuate the mistakes the U.S. made after the September 11 attacks. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” he said to Israelis in October, though now Israel very much has done that and has not faced consequences. If nothing changes, the destruction of Palestine will be a major piece of Biden’s legacy.
Since October 7, the Biden administration has not applied pressure on Netanyahu to stop a widespread humanitarian crisis, but rather has transferred more weapons (often sidestepping Congress to do so), used its veto power at the United Nations to shield Israel from resolutions in support of a cease-fire, and played the role of technocratic fixer, trying to distribute aid that Israel is obligated under international law to provide to Palestinian civilians.
Experts are almost unanimous about what policy changes are needed to save lives today: securing an immediate cease-fire, conditioning weapons transfers on following the laws of war, and withholding diplomatic cover in forums like the U.N. Security Council. Biden’s team has tinkered with its rhetoric incrementally to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians and call for what they now call a cease-fire (previously, it was a “humanitarian pause”; both would only last six weeks). It has introduced some policy mechanisms that could in the future hold Israel accountable for what have been credibly described as war crimes.
But for all of the outcry from voters, officials who have resigned in protest, and Democratic politicians, as well as anonymous, leaked criticisms from Biden’s own team, there has been no re-evaluation of the policy course. Beyond being unable or unwilling to stop Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians or the leveling of Gaza, Biden has not even been able to enforce the United States’ own laws on Israel.
The reason for Joe Biden’s particular brand of Israel policy is Joe Biden. People who worked with him throughout his 45-year career as senator and then vice president say that on this issue, he is Zionist and pro-Israel, and he means it. He’s been close with every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir, as he reminds audiences, and his go-to one-liner is “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.”
A willingness to buck the foreign-policy establishment has given Biden confidence in the face of outside criticism, and an allergy to changing course.
For Biden, Israel is not just a foreign-policy issue. As Haim Saban, the Israeli American businessman who’s raising millions for the re-election campaign, put it, Biden is pro-Israel in his gut. “It’s in his kishkes.”
Biden has at times been forward-thinking on domestic policy and flexible in updating his old-school thinking when it comes to anti-monopoly policy or reproductive rights. As a retail politician, he’s eager to listen to workers on the issues they care about.
On foreign policy, he has often strayed from the Washington establishment, withdrawing from Afghanistan and avoiding knee-jerk hawkishness on China. Not so on Israel and Palestine. And that willingness to buck the establishment has given him confidence in the face of outside criticism, and an allergy to changing course.
Biden is stuck in a box of his own creation. He has watched while Netanyahu runs a war campaign so ruthless, lethal, and indiscriminate that the International Court of Justice is investigating it for charges of genocide. And still, Biden appears oblivious to how much the U.S. electorate has moved in its support of Palestinians. Several recent surveys show that a majority of Americans, especially Democrats, disagree with his approach to Israel. American voters’ support for Palestinians has been steadily increasing for a decade.
Can Biden climb out of the box? The self-made trap preceded the war, says Yousef Munayyer, a researcher with the Arab Center Washington DC. “U.S. policy toward this issue was fundamentally flawed on October 6,” he told me. “And that really put the U.S. in a horrible position in terms of responding to this crisis once it started.”
The driving force behind Biden’s Middle East policy, before the war, was that “Palestine is just not that important anymore,” Munayyer explained. “That turned out to be catastrophically flawed.”
Remembrance of Things Past
As a child, Biden lived in a world without the State of Israel. As a politician, his approach to Israel was shaped in the era of the country’s founding, by events that happened before many of his advisers were even born. He speaks about the Jewish state with the flourish of a vintage AIPAC speech. “You know, the miracle of Israel is Israel. It’s Israel itself—the hope it inspires, the light it represents to the world,” Biden said on October 11.
“I truly believe, were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee,” Biden added, another phrase from his usual repertoire. On that day, many American Jews wondered why America isn’t that place.
He so regularly recounts his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, and her admonition to him that “We Jews have a secret weapon in the battle with the Arabs … we have no place else to go,” that it clearly still informs his thinking. Biden has been even to the right of the ultra-hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, founder of the Likud party, which Netanyahu today leads. In 1982, Biden told Begin that he fervently backed Israel’s war on Lebanon, even if it involved Israel killing women and children. “I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin told reporters upon returning to Israel. “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war.”
He’s long been a favorite on the pro-Israel circuit. “I don’t think there’s any senator who’s ever done more fundraisers for AIPAC or gone around the country more for AIPAC,” Biden told their policy conference in 1992. He even lashed out at the George H.W. Bush administration for pushing Israel too hard in its diplomatic efforts that laid the groundwork for a peace process.
When the Israeli government embarrassed Biden—and the U.S.—by announcing the construction of new settlements in the West Bank during the vice president’s Middle East trip in 2010, Biden nonetheless defended Netanyahu.
He has ideological blinders, says Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute. Israel for him is a kind of moral touchstone that transcends history and geopolitics, he told me. “Most presidents have had this Israel-centric view of the region, but even they were able to see when Israel went too far. Biden is not able to see that, and that’s the part that’s really astonishing.”
And he’s missed opportunities to engage with Israel through his term so far.
MAJDI FATHI/AP PHOTO
At least half of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to researchers.
Biden is hugely popular in Israel, especially after his public bear hug after October 7. Inside the country, there are portraits and murals and graffiti of Biden on street corners, all coming from a place of true goodwill toward the president. But he is unwilling to use what should be a tremendous amount of earned leverage to draw firm red lines in Israel’s military operations and the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians—or else cut off weapons to Israel.
No one has been able to convince him otherwise. “This is Biden’s personal project, this is his decision,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Nobody can touch it except Biden. He is the one that is holding reins of this policy of arming Israel.”
Israel is no longer a small, defenseless state. It is a nuclear-armed regional power whose politics has been shaped by the endless occupation of Palestinian lands, policies that Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups have documented as apartheid, and now the incredible lethality that characterizes the ongoing systemic violence in Gaza.
The Israeli center has been pulled to the right by Netanyahu’s Likud party, with extremist settlers in Bibi’s cabinet like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Emboldened by this fundamentalist flank, West Bank settlers have accelerated attacks against Palestinians—notably in a rampage in the village of Huwara that burned 30 Palestinian homes, with the Israeli military standing by.
Now, Netanyahu’s extremist allies are using the pretext of Hamas’s attacks to fundamentally reshape Gaza and Palestine. “Israel this time has a different set of objectives,” Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace told me. “They want to take this moment to fundamentally change the paradigm and erase Gaza.”
Throughout, Biden has held steady, refusing to look outside of this side of the box.
Adviser “Groupthink”
“The Middle East is quieter than it has been for decades,” Jake Sullivan, the White House’s foreign-policy gatekeeper, proclaimed a week before Hamas’s attacks in October. He was confident enough to commit that to writing in a cover story for Foreign Affairs magazine.
Biden was the first Democratic president in a generation to not show a serious effort toward a Palestinian state. The idea was to keep the Middle East, a perennial career-killer, off the president’s desk. That led to a diplomatic void and the further disenfranchisement of Palestinians, which likely contributed to the current war. There were a handful of minor economic summits between Israel, the U.S., and Arab states, while settler violence surged in the West Bank. Even before the October attacks, Israeli human rights watchdog Yesh Din called 2023 “the most violent year in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in both the number of incidents and their severity,” which highlights just how late the Biden administration has been in its sanctioning of Israeli settlers.
“I don’t want to finger one person, but it’s groupthink,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founding president of J Street, which has sought to be a liberal, but still pro-Israel, counterweight to AIPAC.
Running point from the White House is Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, who worked on Iraq in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. McGurk said early on that Biden was pursuing a “back to basics” approach to the Middle East, but it’s unclear where the U.S. would be going back to. (McGurk worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq during the U.S. occupation in 2003, so hopefully not back there!)
In contrast, experts say that deputy national security adviser Jon Finer gets it. Finer, who started his career as a Middle East journalist for The Washington Post and worked in the Obama White House, is one of the administration’s progressive voices on foreign policy. In advance of the Michigan primary in February, he was dispatched to meet with frustrated Arab American voters in Dearborn. Other advisers include Amos Hochstein, a U.S.-Israeli dual citizen who has served in the Israeli military; despite holding an energy investment portfolio, Hochstein has been a key voice on national security. There are also two respected Middle East specialists, Philip Gordon and Ilan Goldenberg, who work in Vice President Kamala Harris’s office.
Biden doesn’t seem to get the Arab world, where the cause of Palestine remains popular and galvanizing.
The White House aide who most clearly articulates the president’s perspective is, not surprisingly, spokesperson John Kirby. His defenses of seemingly indefensible Israeli actions from the podium have now become viral memes. A typical line: When Israel had already killed 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza on October 27, Kirby said, “We’re not drawing red lines for Israel.”
Washington insiders say the White House is directing Israel-Palestine policy, not the State Department.
Still, the top officials at State, including those who have met with Israel’s war cabinet, largely share Biden’s pro-Israel ideology, chief among them Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As Biden’s longtime aide, he pushed Biden’s pro-Israel viewpoints and continues to, to this day. The special envoy for humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, has longtime links to the Israel lobby and managed to avoid any Department of Justice prosecution for handing off confidential information to AIPAC in 2005. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew served as an informal emissary to the American Jewish community when he was Obama’s chief of staff, and Democratic Majority for Israel applauded his new appointment. Counselor Derek Chollet also worked as a senior national-security official in the Obama administration, where he shepherded advanced weapons transfers to Israel that were unprecedented. Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, hails from the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy. When she co-authored a 2020 essay about U.S. policy toward Israel, she didn’t mention Palestinians.
“There is no debate, and criticism of Israel is so hard to express within the administration,” Josh Paul, who resigned in protest from a State Department security assistance job in October, told me.
Very few Arab or Muslim Americans serve at high levels of Biden foreign policy. Hady Amr, the special representative for Palestinian affairs, has been noticeably absent from press briefings, high-level meetings, and public appearances.
The U.S. military, for its part, may be the most skeptical if not downright critical of this whole approach, as epitomized by airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington.
But many of Biden’s appointees to the Pentagon, naturally, share the president’s view. Of note is Daniel Shapiro, the top civilian for Middle East policy at the Department of Defense, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Israel and then stayed on in the country, working as an adviser to Israeli companies like the notorious spyware-maker NSO Group.
Still, Biden’s most important adviser is Biden. He believes in his own foreign-policy judgment and won’t be easily swayed by others. Meanwhile, Biden’s advisers say that they are working tirelessly to tinker with policies, but there is no major reassessment in the works.
“Every time their policy has shown to not be working, instead of changing course or adjusting, they double down on it,” Elgindy told me. “At this point they are so heavily invested in what is a catastrophically failed approach, and to change course in anything but rhetoric would mean conceding that they were wrong from the beginning.”
A Shifting Electorate
Biden’s formative years in Washington were a time when being reflexively pro-Israel was good politics. From his perspective, you never pay a price for being too supportive of Israel.
“The group of people around him in his close political circle went by the rulebook of the 1990s,” Ben-Ami told me. “And God forbid you do something that gets you on the wrong side of the Jewish community.”
That may have been true when Biden was a junior senator, but today he speaks for a much narrower constituency. While many older voters share his views, he has grown out of touch with younger voters, minority voters, and Arab voters. Those groups happen to increasingly occupy positions in Democratic campaigns and as political appointees.
Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American appointee, was the first member of the Biden administration to resign over Gaza. Habash told me Biden has been willing to “embrace innovative policies on domestic issues,” like in forgiving student loans, which Habash was leading in the Department of Education. Habash says Biden has been on the “forefront of listening to working Americans.” But on Palestine, Biden won’t move from his “unrelenting support and unrestricted military funding.”
“They have not been listening for the past four and a half months” to Arab Americans, Habash told me. “If you’re not willing to take tiny steps to exert any kind of pressure, why would you expect Arabs to come out and vote for you?”
This also contributes to the experience of many Arab Americans who feel that Biden lacks humanity and empathy for them.
CARLOS OSORIO/AP PHOTO
Arab American protesters in Dearborn, Michigan. The Uncommitted campaign received 13 percent of the primary vote in the state.
Hundreds of members of Biden’s own campaign staff have spoken out, and members of the White House have begun organizing protests. “Islamophobia is not being taken seriously,” a current White House official with the group Staffers for Ceasefire told me.
In response to the electoral realities of the Democratic Party in 2024, Biden’s team has slightly changed its message and amped up its humanitarian efforts. But those tonal shifts haven’t come with significant policy changes. And that was not enough to win over the 100,000 voters in Michigan who rebuked Biden with an uncommitted vote in the primary. While that accounted for a little over 13 percent of the primary vote, in Minnesota the next week, nearly 19 percent of the vote cast an uncommitted ballot.
This side of the box may be the one that Biden may be forced to confront head on. He might lose the election over this issue. But for now, Biden’s team is helping him avoid pro-Palestine protests on the campaign trail rather than address the root of the dissent.
Misunderstanding the Middle East
Arab cartoonists are already skewering President Biden’s callousness for licking an ice-cream cone while prognosticating about a temporary cease-fire (a prediction that didn’t come true). Does the Biden administration grasp how detested its policies are in the Arab Middle East?
Biden doesn’t seem to get the Arab world, where the cause of Palestine remains popular and galvanizing. And he has lost a lot of Arabs who were on his side. As Emile Hokayem of the British think tank IISS said, “the disaster in Gaza has completely disabused a large segment of liberals and professionals in the Arab world about Western claims of upholding and caring about values in the conduct of foreign policy.” That will detract from the United States’ ability to assert its interests, in the Middle East and beyond.
United Nations votes show America isolated from the world, with just a few countries on its side.
At the same time, Biden’s concept of the U.S. as an indispensable superpower requires huge costs and major risks—especially to U.S. personnel, as evidenced by the killing of three U.S. troops in Jordan in January. Thousands of service members continue to participate in endless wars in Iraq, Syria, and a network of bases in the Middle East and Africa, and run the risk of getting drawn into this war. For all of Biden’s enthusiasm to end the war in Afghanistan, no such commitment has been shown for these forever wars. So the U.S. is caught fighting old, irrelevant conflicts under the guise of countering ISIS or Iran or continuing the war on terrorism, and coming under fire at a time when militant groups see the U.S. as complicit in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.
In that climate, Biden’s advisers thought they could clinch a long-shot deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and just set aside Palestinians. The concept is an extension of the “Abraham Accords,” an initiative of President Trump. Even now, Biden’s team has kept in place Jared Kushner’s formula of casting away Palestinian aspirations in service of pushing to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries. In doing so, Biden kept in place most of Trump’s Mideast policies. (Only in February, four and a half months into the war, did the Biden administration overturn the Pompeo Doctrine of not viewing Israeli settlements as against international law.)
The administration is clinging to the triple bank shot of a policy that: (a) Saudi Arabia would at long last normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, in exchange for (b) an Israeli pledge toward the establishment of a Palestinian state and (c) U.S. inducements for Saudi Arabia that might include nuclear technology and even an American security guarantee for the kingdom, which polling shows Americans don’t support. This would require so many contingencies—the buy-in of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, congressional approval, and fast-moving politics in an election year—that it’s difficult to take it seriously.
The idea is reminiscent of another Biden fantasy solution, the three-way partition of Iraq along ethnic lines that he dreamed up with the late foreign-policy strategist Leslie Gelb. It was a ridiculous and incendiary idea that didn’t take into account how U.S. foreign policy affects actual people. By the way, as an undergraduate, Sullivan worked as Gelb’s intern at the Council on Foreign Relations, and now at the White House, he continues to channel that Great Game mentality of U.S. exceptionalism in the world.
In a Box With Biden
Unless President Biden is willing to kick down the sides of the box—checking his own assumptions about Israel, facing down the realities of the electorate, turning to new advisers with a broader perspective, and seeing the Middle East as it is—he will remain constrained.
Many policies to ensure human rights and accountability are already enshrined in law. They are lying in wait, unused. “If we’re going to keep arming Israel then there’s not that much to talk about,” Yager told me.
On most topics in any presidential administration, credit or blame can be broadly distributed. But in this case, the pro-Israel directives are coming from the president himself, with his instincts from another era. “Biden has a multi-decade career where he has proudly stood with Israel at every turn,” Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. “The idea that now, in his later years, he is going to want to distract from that legacy is unlikely.”
The most powerful foreign-policy officials in the Biden administration are negotiating with Israel about getting more flour into Gaza, tweaking rhetoric in press conferences, urging their boss to adjust small policies on the margin, like holding Israeli settlers to account, while failing to make the bigger adjustments needed to deal with the gravity of the crisis at hand. The story is not really one of foreign policy, but of the ideology and psychology of President Biden.
