Biden doesn’t have a lot to show for embracing Israel
United States Stands with Israel During Biden’s High-Stakes Visit to the Middle East: A Direct Call for Continued Aid to Israel and Ukraine
While Biden’s 31-hour visit was largely symbolic, he also managed concrete accomplishments. The aid to the Palestinians was announced, along with convincing Israel to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza and persuading Egypt to open up a land crossing into southern Gaza.
“I understand,” Biden said Wednesday. Many Americans understand. You can’t look at what has happened here and not scream out for justice, but I caution this — while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States, and while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
The barbaric killings of unsuspecting civilians in Israel on Oct. 7 and the current devastation of Palestinians in Gaza are all President Biden’s fault. Did you not read? He was hesitant in his dealings with Iran. He is soft. He has exposed the United States as something even flimsier than a paper tiger — we’re a Kleenex pussycat. It’s open season if he’s sleeping at the Resolute desk.
President Biden got off Air Force One during his high-stakes trip to the Middle East Wednesday and greeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a big hug.
The message was clear — the United States stands with Israel. Biden is taking his message to the American people Thursday night in an Oval Office address.
Biden will deliver a prime-time televised speech at 8 p.m. Eastern time Thursday from the Oval Office, where he’s expected to outline the gravity of the situation in the Middle East and make a direct appeal to the public for continued aid to both Israel and Ukraine.
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Republicans couldn’t pick a speaker. The U.S. cannot respond to anything in a strong and substantive way.
Ahead of his reelection bid next year, Biden has to balance his own world view – one that is in line with that deeply ingrained American, pro-Israeli position – and that of younger voters and voters of color, who don’t share the same depth of support for Israel.
Invoking the Holocaust, Biden said, “The world watched then — it knew — and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again – not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
For the first time this year, Gallup found that Democrats’ sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis. And that is driven by young voters.
Two-thirds of respondents in the NPR poll said the US should publicly support Israel, after the attacks by Hamas and after Biden’s initial remarks.
Cracks started showing in the aftermath of the Gaza hospital bombing. Before the United States weighed in, Democrats Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — the first two Muslim women elected to Congress — joined a pro-Palestinian chorus blaming Israel.
“Bombing a hospital is among the gravest of war crimes,” Omar tweeted. “The IDF reportedly blowing up one of the few places the injured and wounded can seek medical treatment and shelter during a war is horrific.”
After the U.S. intelligence assessment, Omar wanted an independent investigation to find who is responsible for the war crime.
The National Security Council said, in part, “Our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion.”
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A lot of damage had already been done. In countries such as Jordan, where Biden had originally planned to meet with Jordanian, Egyptian, and Palestinian leaders, protesters took to the streets because people were not waiting for confirmations.
“As an American, not just as a member of the United States Congress, I am ashamed,” she said, per ABC News. “I am ashamed that they’re saying, ‘not yet. Maybe next week. Is that true? Is there more that need to die?
She added, “To my president, to our president … I want him to know I’m a Palestinian American and Muslim so I won’t forget this. And I think a lot of people are not going to forget this.”
It’s troubling that Members of Congress rushed to blame the hospital tragedy in Gaza on Israel, according to Senator John Fetterman. “Who would take the word of a group that just massacred innocent Israeli civilians over our key ally?”
“Now is not an ideal time to talk about a ceasefire,” he said. The militant group Hamas does not want peace and wants to destroy Israel. It is possible for us to discuss a ceasefire after Hamas is disarmed.
The leader of the nation is expected to show leadership when something big happens in the world.
A president has to often balance his own world view with domestic politics. Initially, both appeared to be in line with one another.
Foreign policy isn’t one of the top priorities for voters even though the president has much control over it.
But the reality is, Biden isn’t likely consumed with the domestic politics of this. Before serving as president, he spent a good portion of his life — as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman and vice president — intimately involved in the U.S.’s role in the world.
Many in this country have taken a turn inward after two decades of war and become weary of U.S. involvement in international conflicts. Biden acknowledged that Americans relate to the pain Israel is facing. Still, he had some potential lessons from the U.S. response to 9/11 Wednesday.
No, wait, that lesson is all wrong, as you discover the minute you travel from the right to the left. There you find groups taking the silhouette of a Hamas assassin paragliding into Israel as an inspiring symbol of resistance to imperialist oppression. The narrative is similar: the powerful are exploiting the powerless and they fought back. They never thought that they slaughtered babies. They did not abduct grandmothers. A group of marginalized peoples of the world unite. Paraglide to justice!
I would rather live in a universe that is politically and morally vacuous than in a universe that is morally vacuous. How clarifying that must be. And I wince at the way in which the deadly tribalism of the Middle East has been met with the dreary tribalism of American politics — with lazy and self-serving responses to harrowing circumstances that are ill served and grossly demeaned by them.
The massacre of hundreds upon hundreds of people in Israel over the weekend was called by President Biden as a very evil thing to do by the Hamas assailants. Oct. 7 was the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, and was so profoundly outrageous, so distinctly awful, that it should have been off limits for appropriation by politicians and activists intent on pressing their own agendas, amplifying their own grievances.
In the wake of a visit by President Biden, Israelis on Thursday praised his courage in coming at a time of war and for his full-throated support, as he pledged “we will not let you ever be alone” after attacks from Hamas killed at least 1,400 Israelis.
This degree of consultation is rare, if not unprecedented, even in a relationship this close, Israeli analysts said. It could have benefits for Mr. Netanyahu, but also carries risks. It may give him cover for an extended war, but at the same time it may be bad for how he conducts it.
Satellite images showed that Israel had already deployed hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles north of Gaza as it prepared to send tens of thousands of soldiers into the enclave.
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An Israeli analyst wrote in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that the late Sharon used to say, “We will defend ourselves by ourselves.” “These are not the values that Netanyahu has been projecting in the last few days. He wants to be the 51st state of the United States. This comes with a price, symbolic as well as practical.”
This criticism was even more sharply expressed by more right-wing analysts who have supported the government in the past. Nechama Duek says that Mr. Biden has bound Netanyahu and his government with his words.
President Biden could very well go down as the last American president shaped by the view of American power in the Cold War, as he was born during World War II. No other leader on the world stage today can boast that they sat in the Israeli prime minister’s office 50 years ago with Golda Meir, or discussed dismantling Soviet nuclear weapons with Mikhail Gorbachev.
“When presidents get into their sweet spot you usually see and hear it, and in the past few weeks you have seen and heard it,” said Michael Beschloss, the historian and author of “Presidents of War,” which traces the rocky history of Mr. Biden’s predecessors as they plunged into global conflicts, avoided a few, and sometimes came to regret their choices.
The backdrop of his rare Oval Office address, and the fact that Mr. Biden has never addressed the American people before, make the question about whether he can bring the American population along more uncertain than ever. During the past 18 months he has talked about America’s role in restoring democracy over autocracy and protecting free people from invasion and terrorism in order to reestablish a global order that is fast unraveling.
It is a far harder case to make now than in February 2022, when President Vladimir V. Putin tried a lightning-strike attack to overthrow an imperfect democracy in Ukraine and restore the Russian empire of Peter the Great. The initial overwhelming support for Ukraine — one of the few issues that seemed to unify Democrats and Republicans — is clearly shattering, with a growing part of the Republican Party arguing that this is not America’s fight. The war in the Donbas complicates the picture for Mr. Putin as he waits to see if Donald J. Trump will be elected president of the US.
The high-stakes visit served simultaneously to illustrate the limits and the capability of U.S. influence in the region, and the importance of America’s longstanding relationship with Israel.
It also inevitably ties the administration to whatever comes next, analysts say — including more deadly Israeli airstrikes in the densely populated Gaza Strip, targeting Hamas, and the possibility of a bloody ground campaign, where civilian casualties could quickly mount, further inflaming anger among Israel’s Arab neighbors. So far, more than 3,400 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The visit almost didn’t happen. “My team weighed whether it should even happen,” Biden said. The Secretary of State flew to the Middle East last week, where he met with Netanyahu and his war cabinet for seven hours.
The trip served to reassure Israel that Biden “prioritizes the need for the U.S. to actually engage in this question, rather than step back from it,” says Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute.
The message of engagement was also directed towards Iran and Hezbollah, who are both involved in politics in the Middle East.
Hard-power signals were sent by the US to the eastern Mediterranean after Biden’s visit reinforced his warnings.
“The main threat right now is the prospect of Iran and their proxy in Lebanon joining in,” says Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.
He says Biden and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “were very clear in warning Iran and Hezbollah, and this was a major contribution by the Biden administration to consolidating the status quo.”
A meeting between the vice president and regional leaders fell apart just hours before the president’s landing in Israel after an explosion at a hospital killed hundreds of Palestinians.
“I don’t think the door is shut between the Biden administration and the key Arab countries just because of the cancellation of the meeting in Amman,” Katulis says.
There is concern among U.S. officials that civilian casualties can negatively affect the mission itself and the goal that Israel has stated.
John Kirby said the US is trying to locate the hostages and is doing everything in its power to get them released. Hamas has indicated that it might be willing to release non-Israelis.
“I think the fact that President Biden spoke to some of the families of the hostages is a sign that he prioritized this,” she says. There is a big open question as to the fate of those American captives.
