It took seven months almost to the day, but Joe Biden appears to have, finally, reached a public moment of reckoning over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. On Wednesday morning, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that the Biden Administration had paused delivery of thirty-five hundred heavy bombs to Israel. That evening, the President himself explained why, admitting that “civilians have been killed in Gaza” as a result of American-supplied weapons and saying flatly that he could not accept them being used in a military offensive against Hamas in the densely populated city of Rafah, which Israel has threatened to carry out. Biden insisted that the U.S. would continue to help Israel secure itself from external threats, but he laid down what appeared to be an uncrossable line for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “If they go into Rafah,” the President told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “I’m not supplying the weapons.” His decision amounts to the most high-profile example in decades of a U.S. President publicly imposing such limits on American military assistance to Israel, and it came accompanied by a stark rebuke of how Israel has treated Palestinian civilians. “It’s just wrong,” Biden said.
Translation: the long Biden-Bibi bear hug is over. The President of the United States is now all but publicly daring the Prime Minister of Israel to defy him.
The reaction from the American right was swift, loud, and hyperbolic. Republican congressional leaders put out a statement on Wednesday night warning that Biden “risks emboldening Israel’s enemies.” By Thursday, the ranking G.O.P. member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator James Risch, of Idaho, said that the President “has handed a great victory to Hamas,” and the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post carried the headline “BETRAYED,” claiming that Biden “Vows to Cut Off Weapons if Israel Tries to Finish Off Hamas.” Donald Trump, unsubtle as ever, elevated Biden’s actions to something close to treasonous, attacking him in a social-media post for “taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the Radical Mobs taking over our college campuses.” Netanyahu, for his part, put out a defiant statement saying that Israel would “stand alone” if it had to. “If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails,” he added. “But we have much more than fingernails.”
Of course they did not bother with what Biden actually said. But even some Democrats who are vocal supporters of Israel expressed concern about Biden’s “mistake,” as Dennis Ross, the former longtime U.S. envoy in the region, put it, fearing it would embolden Hamas to fight on at a delicate moment. As for Biden’s critics on the left, there seemed little hope that the President’s move would suddenly make the encampments of students protesting the war on college campuses disappear. That is just not a realistic hope in toxic 2024.
Throughout his long career, Biden has generally profited from an unerring instinct to find his way to the political center. But his dilemma on the war, as with so many other issues, is that there is no center, just a yawning chasm that separates the sides. If anything, both Biden and Netanyahu have a political incentive to take their differences public right now—a high-profile pissing match that Biden’s restive left flank and Bibi’s hard-right coalition will only cheer.
Cheering is exactly what many Democrats in Washington did after Biden spoke. For many of the President’s supporters on Capitol Hill, the frustration with Israel’s conduct of the war has become increasingly personalized, and they viewed Wednesday’s remarks as a long-overdue rebuke of Netanyahu. “The Prime Minister has mostly ignored the President of the United States,” Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland who has emerged as a loud advocate of pressing the White House to condition military aid on more humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians, told me. “I’m glad to see the President follow words with action because the U.S. loses credibility when the President lays out red lines and they are ignored.”
Biden’s announcement came only a day after the President gave his most full-throated speech yet condemning the wave of antisemitism in the United States that has accompanied the political debate over the war since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th. The speech, to commemorate the Holocaust, warned that “people are already forgetting” the atrocities committed by Hamas, “downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring” what had happened. Notably, I was told by a source familiar with the speech that advisers had considered including language that alluded to the suffering the war has also caused for the civilian population of Gaza. But they chose not to do so, deciding that a Holocaust speech “was not the occasion for any kind of moral equivalence,” as the source put it. In the end, Biden’s comments came across as a strong reprimand to those on college campuses who have taken over buildings, harassed Jewish students, and accused Israel—and its U.S. supporters, including Biden—of supporting what critics call a genocide of Palestinians. “That was a courageous message, both politically and morally,” Stuart Eizenstat, the chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council who introduced Biden, told me. In his own remarks, Eizenstat praised Biden as a “mensch” and a supporter of Israel when it mattered.
The speech’s most cited line, however, was immediately undercut by the following day’s news: Biden said that America’s commitment to Israel was “ironclad, even when we disagree.” A day later, in Biden’s CNN interview, he suggested what his words the day before had not—the existence of a disagreement so pronounced that it was now verging on a rift. Even if you agreed with what Biden said on both days, the change in tone was head-spinning.
There was some debate about how significant to consider the shift in Biden’s statements. On Wednesday evening, when I spoke with Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware and an important congressional ally for the White House on foreign policy, he interpreted the pausing of this particular arms shipment not as a change in policy so much as a message designed to convey that “Israel has not given the Administration a credible plan for how to move a million civilian refugees out of the way.” On Thursday, the National Security Council spokesman, retired Rear Admiral John Kirby, made a similar point—that this was Biden saying publicly what he’s been telling Netanyahu privately for weeks. But Van Hollen argued that the backlash from Republicans was so vociferous precisely because what Biden was doing amounted to a genuine break. “It’s loud because for the first time there is no blank check for the Netanyahu government,” Van Hollen said.
Either way, the fact that the President had to go public with his qualms reflects an inarguably grim status quo, in which he and his top officials have spent months on shuttle diplomacy seeking an end to the fighting and something approximating a durable peace with nothing to show for it. On Thursday, in fact, negotiators for Israel and Hamas left the latest round of American-brokered talks for a hostage release and ceasefire, in Cairo, without reaching any agreement.
But Biden, who learned from his decades spent in the Senate to never stop chasing a deal, has continued to pursue a brokered peace. A senior U.S. official told me late Thursday that an accord between Israel and Hamas remains a real possibility, if the threatened invasion of Rafah does not materialize: “It’s not dead, the process is as close as it’s ever been.” What’s on the table now, the official said, is a five-page, detailed agreement, including the release in phase one of the thirty-three hostages that Israel has asked for and, more broadly, “essentially a road map for the end of the war.” The White House is convinced that releasing hostages is not only key to ending the current hot war in Gaza but might even lead to the bigger breakthrough of a regional security deal. In the coming weeks, Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and other officials are expected to travel to the Middle East once again in search of the elusive long-term security agreement with Saudi Arabia and Israel that the Biden team was working toward until the October 7th Hamas attack derailed it.
With much of Gaza in rubble, tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, and Hamas still believed to be holding more than a hundred hostages—after killing more than a thousand Israelis in the surprise attack that triggered this whole mess—it is hard to imagine that a sweeping deal like that is possible. I’ve heard it called a dream, a fantasy, and a joke. I hold out no more hope for those talks than I do for the idea that Biden’s actions this week will produce either a political truce or a physical one. But, in this age of cynics and political charlatans, as the bombs keep flying, it’s hard not to be glad that someone is still trying. ♦
