Why Doesn’t President Biden See What We See in Gaza?
“I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation,” wrote Irfan Galaria in a Los Angeles Times opinion article describing his 10 days volunteering with MedGlobal in the Gaza Strip. Why doesn’t President Biden see what Dr. Galaria along with UN agencies, humanitarian organizations, human rights NGOs, and the International Court of Justice see: plausible evidence of genocide. Or, if he sees it, why does he actively abet it by defunding UNRWA, the largest humanitarian relief operation in the Gaza Strip, while continuing to arm and run international diplomatic interference for Israel?
President Biden would like the world to think he is concerned about the fate of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. On Feb. 15 he told White House reporters, "I've had extensive conversations with the prime minister of Israel over the last several days… and I've made the case, and I feel very strongly about it, that there has to be a temporary ceasefire…to get the hostages out." This is the latest of a dozen reports since November informing us that the president was becoming increasingly frustrated over Israel’s disregard for civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza (cataloged by Jack Mirkinson in The Nation).
Stories about President Biden’s consternation do not mention any concrete measures that his administration has taken to restrain Israel. That is because there are none. Consequently, as the International Crisis Group declared bluntly, the United States, “is complicit in the destruction of Gazan society.”
President Biden also seems not to see the potential domestic political cost of his Gaza policy. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has endorsed an initiative led by her sister, Layla Elabed, and supported by former liberal Democratic congressional representative, Andy Levin, urging Michigan Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in their February 27 primary rather than for President Biden. Muslim American leaders from swing states including Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania met in December to plan an “#AbandonBiden 2024” strategy.
Of course, the Israel lobby has much more policy clout than Arab and Muslim Americans because it has long been a major funder of local and national Democratic campaigns. The military-industrial complex, another big campaign contributor, will not demur from Biden’s Gaza policy. But the US electoral system still requires candidates to obtain a majority of the votes not a majority of the dollars to win.
On Feb. 16 Peter Beinart interviewed James Zogby, President and Co-Founder of the Arab American Institute, and Abdelnasser Rashid, a Palestinian-American State Representative from Illinois, about the political mood among Arab-Americans. (The recording is here, but you may need to subscribe.) Part of their explanation for President Biden’s failure to see Palestinians is that, however much he distrusts Benjamin Netanyahu, the president sees Israelis as real people, “like us.” Palestinians – both in the Middle East and domestically – are “a problem” to be managed.
President Biden seems to believe that after Benjamin Netanyahu passes from Israel’s political arena, Israel will remain a democratic state with liberal values, “like America.” Bracketing the serious threats to liberal values in the United States today, President Biden isn’t paying attention to the extent of the dehumanization of Palestinians and the decline of even basic humane values among Israeli Jews well before Hamas’s October 7 attack, but exponentially more so since.
According to a Tel Aviv University poll, in mid-January, 43.4% of Israeli Jews believed the IDF was using too little force and only 3.2% too much force in the Gaza Strip. At that point Oxfam had calculated that Israel had killed an average of 250 Palestinians in Gaza a day since October 7 – a higher rate than any major armed conflict of the 21st century (Syria, 96.5 deaths per day; Sudan, 51.6; Iraq, 50.8; Ukraine, 43.9; Afghanistan; 23.8; Yemen, 15.8).
President Biden’s inability to see Palestinians or genuinely empathize with their predicament is not a reaction to Hamas’s October 7 attack. During the 2020 election campaign Peter Beinart wrote, “No one in the Obama administration did more [than Vice-President Biden] to shield Netanyahu from consequences” for his repeated provocative expansion of West Bank settlements in the face of President Obama’s stated policy of opposing settlement expansion. While campaigning in Iowa (where he finished 4th behind Buttigieg, Sanders, and Warren) Biden characterized Bernie Sanders’ support for conditioning military aid to Israel as “bizarre,” “like saying to France, ‘Because you don’t agree with us, we’re going to kick you out of NATO.’” As Beinart pointed out, requiring that Israel not use nearly $4 billion per year in US taxpayers’ money to detain Palestinian children is not the same as undermining NATO.
So, President Biden has been part of the problem, not the solution, long before October 7. But the reasons extend beyond his self-proclaimed Zionism.
On the geopolitical-strategic level, Biden fully supports Netanyahu’s declared goal of destroying Hamas. Sending aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean to backstop Israel’s assault on Gaza and proclaiming that Iran was complicit in Hamas’s October 7 attack despite the lack of evidence signaled Biden’s concurrence with Netanyahu’s long held view that the US, Israel, and authoritarian Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt should aggressively confront Iran and its regional allies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas.
Biden has been committed to confronting rather than seeking coexistence with Iran since the first days of his administration. Early in his term of office he could have restored US participation in the US-Iran nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) which his predecessor unilaterally and without provocation cancelled. He chose not to. Consequently, US-Iran relations have steadily deteriorated. Had that not occurred it is possible to imagine Iran exercising some restraint over its allies, Hezbollah and Hamas. The corollary of seeing Israel as the most reliable US ally in confronting Iran is accepting more dead Palestinian children than President Biden might have preferred to see in the Gaza Strip.
Another factor limiting President Biden’s room for maneuver with Israel is that it is uncertain if even very sharp punitive measures would alter Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. The Israeli Jewish public wants revenge. His political survival and perhaps his ability to remain out of jail if he is convicted in any of the three corruption cases currently underway, depend on the support of the quasi-fascist Messianist elements of his coalition.
In response to reports that the Biden administration and several Middle Eastern “partners" are working to formulate a comprehensive peace plan, Netanyahu preemptively announced that "Israel rejects international diktats" to establish a Palestinian state. Great powers must consider that their power may appear to be or actually be diminished if allies and client states reject their preferred policies.
President Biden faces the possibility that his unrestrained support for what the Washington punditocracy routinely and without examination dubs “the only democracy in the Middle East” may, by risking his defeat in November because of weakened support among key constituencies, contribute to the decline of democratic norms in the United States while failing to secure a democratic, peaceful, or even stable future for Israel/Palestine.