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U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war, especially his seemingly preternatural support for Israel, has been criticized across much of the U.S. political spectrum. An NBC News poll published Nov. 19 found that just 34 percent of registered voters approve of how Biden is handling the war. Many younger voters in particular are angry; and some Arab and Muslim Americans are telling pollsters they won’t vote for Biden in 2024 because of his stance.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war, especially his seemingly preternatural support for Israel, has been criticized across much of the U.S. political spectrum. An NBC News poll published Nov. 19 found that just 34 percent of registered voters approve of how Biden is handling the war. Many younger voters in particular are angry; and some Arab and Muslim Americans are telling pollsters they won’t vote for Biden in 2024 because of his stance.
The Democratic Party itself is deeply divided on the issue, with even some moderate Democrats urging Biden to do more to restrain Israel. And inside the administration, the president is seeing dissent from staff in the White House and State Department of a kind these two authors never witnessed during our government careers. Biden has even been accused of supporting “the genocide of the Palestinian people” by a member of his own party.
Yet given the president’s long and deep attachment to Israel, the brutality of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and the lack of policy alternatives in the first several weeks of the crisis, it’s doubtful that Biden could have followed another course that would have been more successful. Standing by Israel, deterring Hezbollah and Iran from escalating the conflict, and pursuing negotiations to secure the release of hostages as well as buy time and space to ameliorate—though admittedly not end—the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza have proven to be the right, though hardly perfect, choices.
Still, having tethered U.S. policy to Israel’s war aims—the eradication of Hamas—Biden now finds himself in a bind. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the exponential rise in the deaths and suffering of Gaza’s civilian population have undermined U.S. credibility at home, in the Arab and Muslim world, and in the international community. Going forward, the success or failure of U.S. policy may well rest on whether Biden can reshape Israel’s military campaign, alleviate the humanitarian situation, and engage Israel and other partners in coming up with a workable plan for post-war Gaza.
Like most of the world, the Biden administration was stunned by the timing and severity of the Hamas attack. But the potential damage to U.S. interests was clear from the get-go. The administration had previously concluded that a major effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue given the Netanyahu government’s priorities would be futile and had shifted focus instead on negotiating an Israeli-Saudi normalization accord. The Hamas attack, along with Israel’s punishing response and the rising death toll it has caused in Gaza, put that on hold, as did the increasing danger of a new front opening along the Israel-Lebanon border.
Preventing an escalation and widening of the war that could pull in the United States was now a key priority, as was trying to limit the damage to U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim world as Israel’s military action claimed thousands of Palestinians lives. Securing the release of the estimated 240 hostages—including at least 10 Americans—kidnapped by Hamas also moved to the top of the administration’s priorities, both for moral reasons and to create humanitarian pauses in fighting in exchange for their release. In an effort to regain some ground with the Arab states and Palestinians, the administration began to talk about the importance of not going back to the Oct. 6 status quo, the U.S. commitment to a two-state solution, and the need to create a new post-conflict reality in Gaza.
For Biden, though, backing Israel wasn’t a hard choice; it was virtually guaranteed. His Oct. 10 speech—one of the most powerful of his presidency to date—set his frame: The United States would give Israel the time, space, and support to do what it believed it needed to do against Hamas. U.S. policy began to evolve as the deaths of Palestinians and destruction in Gaza began to rise. But despite growing opposition, that frame has remained remarkably consistent.
Biden faced an Israel that had already been moving sharply to the right and was now thoroughly traumatized by Hamas’s sadistic and indiscriminate killing of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. An Israel, in other words, primed to respond with extreme violence and disinclined to worry too much about Palestinian civilians. Indeed, like Hamas, which doesn’t regard Israeli civilians as innocent, some Israelis—especially Netanyahu’s far-right political allies—consider Gaza’s population to be complicit in Hamas’s atrocities. The fact that Hamas uses civilians as shields against attack reinforces this attitude.
The Biden administration also faced an Israel that saw this moment as an opportunity to deal decisively with threats from Lebanon and Gaza that it has been living with, if uneasily, for years. And because Hamas’s rage was unleashed on Gaza’s border communities, which contained a disproportionate number of liberal Israelis who notably detest their current government and favor a two-state solution, it unified Israeli support on the right and left for a crushing response. Moreover, because the attack was made possible by Israel’s own blunders, the government felt that it needed to restore perceptions of power and its willingness to use it. This all pointed to a no-holds-barred counteroffensive.
Biden has dealt with these obstacles as well as anyone could.
To manage the risk of escalation, Biden did two things—one privately and the other publicly. Privately, he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israeli preemption against Hezbollah in Lebanon—a very real possibility early in the crisis—was a nonstarter. Washington would not support it, and for Israel to proceed would damage U.S. interests; not a good idea when Israel was isolated internationally. Biden then deployed two carrier strike groups—a total of 180 fighter bombers—to the Eastern Mediterranean and beefed-up U.S. military power in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.
The message to Hezbollah and Iran was clear: Don’t start anything. Thus far, both adversaries have indicated publicly and privately that they got the message. Yes, Hezbollah-Israel exchanges have been at their heaviest since the 2006 war. But both parties have pushed but not exceeded the rules of the game. The threat of a regional war that could suck in the United States is, for the time being, in abeyance.
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Through Biden’s visit to Israel, as well as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s repeated trips and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit, Biden made it impossible for Israel to launch its ground offensive in Gaza until the United States had at least weighed in and the Israeli fury had cooled somewhat. He bought time for Washington to influence the pace and scope of Israel’s campaign. The reason U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Glynn, who commanded the U.S. forces that participated in the anti-Islamic State campaign in Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq, was dispatched to Israel ahead of the planned ground offensive was to caution the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against a scorched earth strategy and suggest ways they could meet their military objectives in Gaza without the kind of wholesale destruction the United States unleashed on Islamic State-occupied cities in Syria and Iraq.
Granted, there was no way this warning would influence the Israeli air campaign already underway in Gaza, especially in its initial phase—partly because the violence was expressive but also because Hamas had deliberately tunneled under heavily populated civilian areas, and the IDF had no good ideas about how to deal with the situation without bombing.
Biden was also successful in compelling Netanyahu to accept the need for humanitarian corridors and resume the flow of water and now fuel to Gaza. Without Biden’s intervention, it’s a safe bet that none of these Israeli concessions would have been forthcoming. Indeed, it’s unlikely the current humanitarian pause, which has allowed more aid into Gaza and significant hostage releases, would have happened without Biden’s personal effort and U.S. intervention. Israel on its own would not have gotten there until things were much worse, if ever.
Could the Biden administration have forced Israel to embrace a more permanent ceasefire, as many have urged Biden to do? What threats might it have used? A halt to U.S. military assistance would have sparked a firestorm in Washington, destroyed Biden’s demonstrated influence on Israel’s crisis response, and pushed Israel to rely on less precise weapons, leading to more civilian deaths—and all likely without changing Israel’s actions.
Imposing conditions on Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons is another option being raised not just by progressive Democrats but by a few more centrist ones as well, though the latter group is so far just asking questions and requesting information rather than pressing for restrictions. Such an approach would have to involve looking at individual weapons: how they are deployed, what are legitimate military targets, and whether Israel has carefully calibrated the impact on civilians in the area. This seems almost impossible in the middle of an active warzone and in any event likely would not alter Israel’s operations.
Should the United States have withdrawn military support for Israel in other ways, such as by redeploying the carriers in the eastern Mediterranean, the U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea, and the U.S. X-band air defense radar installation in Israel’s Negev desert? Doing so would undermine the U.S. objective of deterring Hezbollah and Iran from escalating the conflict and likely trigger an Israeli preemptive war against Lebanon. Such a step would, in effect, play into Iranian hands and undermine, not strengthen, deterrence.
Recalling the U.S. Marine expeditionary force whose missions include embassy and country evacuations, hostage rescue, and other special operations would undermine U.S. readiness for any number of contingencies. Voting against Israel in the United Nations can be guaranteed not to move Israel’s needle one bit. The administration might have considered using U.S. forces to protect aid convoys entering Gaza against Israeli wishes, but this would pose risks that would truly be incalculable.
As the Israeli ground campaign now renews, so do the greatest challenges for the Biden administration’s policies. The United States cannot prevent Israel from resuming military action in northern Gaza or the more worrisome unfolding of a major military campaign to root out Hamas’s infrastructure and kill its leadership in the south. With nearly half of Gaza’s population displaced into the south and disease and lack of necessities taking their toll, a massive ground campaign in densely populated areas there would be disastrous. Indeed, when comparing pre-Oct. 7 Israel-Hamas conflicts with the appalling Palestinian death toll of the past month and a half, it’s clear that Israel is being far less discriminating this time around and has expanded its rules of engagement in attacking Hamas targets embedded in or near civilian areas.
The question is whether Biden can, through pressure and persuasion, reshape Israel’s thinking and create the requisite time and space not just for safe zones but for reliable channels to deliver humanitarian assistance. Having had Israel’s back over the past 50-plus days, the U.S. president is in a position to wield influence over what may well be the most important juncture in Israel’s war against Hamas. Still, Biden must be realistic: Stopping Israel from dealing Hamas’s military capacity a death blow was never in the cards.
The other issue is how to bring the Israelis around on the elusive question of an endgame in Gaza. Privately, the Biden administration has been hammering the Israelis to think this through, though Netanyahu has been reluctant to engage largely because of the demands of his extreme right-wing coalition partners.
Blinken has already laid out publicly a number of “nos” for post-conflict Gaza, including no reduction in territory, no forced relocation of Gazans, and no use of Gaza as a platform for launching terror attacks. We still have no idea how Israel sees the future, other than the certainty of some Israeli presence and perhaps buffer zones until some new reality that can guarantee Israel’s security could be established. But who does Israel envision governing Gaza? And what will Gaza’s relationship to the West Bank be? Biden has called for renewed negotiations for a two-state solution. Both that issue and the future of Gaza will ultimately depend on whether and how the war reshapes Israeli and Palestinian politics.
Uncertainties abound—hardly an unusual state of affairs in the middle of a major Middle East conflict. Yet despite all of the criticism and the grim death toll among Palestinians and Israelis, and given the constraints and things beyond his control, Biden has fared pretty well so far in preserving U.S. interests and preventing matters from getting worse. For a crisis with so many moving parts, that is no small achievement.
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