Biden struggles with Gaza conundrum

When Joe Biden broached the conflict in Gaza at a fundraiser in Washington earlier this month, his audience would not have immediately sensed anything out of the ordinary.

The US president made a point of telling the Democratic donors gathered at the luxurious Salamander hotel on December 12 that America’s commitment to Israel was “unshakeable”.

In the wake of the October 7th attacks, he reassured them, the US would keep providing Israel with the military aid to defend itself and “finish the job” against Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that carried out the assault.

But then Biden’s tone changed. He went on to call for the Israeli government led by Binyamin Netanyahu to shift course, remarks he had previously been loath to deliver publicly.

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“He’s a good friend, but I think he has to change,” Biden said of Netanyahu, with thinly disguised frustration. The Israeli government was the “most conservative in Israel’s history” and did not want “a two-state solution” or to have “anything to do with the Palestinians”.

Finally, Biden warned Israel that it was starting to lose the support of the world because of its “indiscriminate” bombing of civilians in Gaza. According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its military operation in response to Hamas’s surprise attack, which killed 1,200.

Biden’s reproach – notably delivered outside of an official White House event – did not by any means signal a fundamental rupture with Israel was looming. But it did point to the mounting frustration in Washington with Israel’s conduct as its offensive rages on and the death toll of Palestinian civilians keeps mounting. The growing disquiet suggests trouble for Biden, too, on both domestic and international fronts.

Unlike Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine last year, when the US had clear indications of Moscow’s intentions for weeks in advance, Biden had no time to prepare for the war in Gaza: it was a jolt out of the blue at a time when the White House believed the Middle East to be relatively stable.

Suddenly, the 81-year-old president was faced with a series of tricky diplomatic dilemmas: how to manage a prickly ally like Netanyahu and prevent a regional conflagration while navigating the deep internal divisions within his own political base, and also silencing any doubts about America’s ability to positively influence the world. This is not the stability Biden had hoped to restore after four years of Donald Trump.

Biden’s strategy has been what many in Washington have labelled the “bearhug” of Netanyahu – embracing him and Israeli officials in public, while cautioning them not to go too far in private.

Senior administration officials point to a number of results, including the first extended pause in fighting last month that led to the release of 105 hostages and the delivery of aid to Gaza, and Israel refraining from opening a second front of the war to the north against Hizbullah, the Lebanese militant group. The US says Israel’s offensive in the southern part of Gaza, after the temporary truce, has been more restrained compared with its widespread bombing in the northern part of the strip.

In some instances Israeli officials have presented their American counterparts with examples of operations they claimed they had called off because of the high risk to civilians, which US officials say is evidence that US diplomacy is having a meaningful impact. “We think that we have been able to move the needle in significant ways,” a senior administration official told the Financial Times. “The president’s view is that that has helped us get to a better place.”

The view on the ground in Gaza is different. As well as the huge loss of life, mostly women and children, the territory is in ruins. More than half of the buildings in northern Gaza have been destroyed and entire neighbourhoods wiped out. Gaza is also in the grip of a grave humanitarian crisis. Only nine of 36 health facilities in the strip are functioning, according to the World Health Organisation, with a limited number of aid trucks carrying medical supplies, food and fuel being allowed in.

As a result, some of Biden’s top allies in Congress have grown impatient with his approach, saying the US has failed to put enough pressure on Netanyahu to make him reconsider Israel’s tactics.

“While the Biden administration has made some incremental progress in getting the Netanyahu coalition to take certain actions, I believe we could be making much more effective use of US leverage,” says Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland and a member of the foreign relations committee.

“There’s a big gap between what the United States says is essential, and what the Netanyahu government is prepared to do,” he adds. “And when you see these big gaps, the United States looks feckless.”

Old alliance

Biden’s response to the crisis has been dictated by his loyalty to America’s decades-old alliance with Israel, as well as a close personal connection to the state that he speaks of frequently.

The president met Israel’s first woman prime minister Golda Meir when he was a young senator in the 1970s and, after learning about the Holocaust from his father, has spoken of wanting to educate his own family about the genocide of the Jewish people during the second World War by Nazi Germany.

But most importantly, Biden does not want to be seen as the president that allowed the worst massacre on the Jewish people since the Holocaust to pass without consequence, analysts say. Not only did Biden denounce the Hamas attack as “sheer evil”, but within days he was in Tel Aviv visiting Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet.

From a policy perspective, Biden and his top aides have faced a variety of difficult choices from the start – and still do as Israel’s campaign continues.

They agree with Israel that it must destroy Hamas in such a way that it will be unable to launch attacks on Israel or maintain control over the Gaza Strip. They accept fighting at some level could go on for many months as Israel works to achieve its goal.

But American officials would like to see Israel wind down its most intensive combat operations and shift to a new phase that would hopefully catch fewer civilians in the crossfire – a time frame that Israel may not necessarily respect.

“Bluntly, there is a lot of concern and frustration that we have not yet seen a shift in tactics on the ground,” says Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware, and a member of the foreign relations committee.

“It is time to move towards a more targeted counter-terrorism strategy,” he adds. According to Coons, Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, and Lloyd Austin, the defence secretary, have delivered that message “pretty clearly” during visits to Israel over the past week.

Over the longer term, the US is absolutely adamant that it does not want Israel to occupy Gaza and would much rather reignite long-dormant talks for a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority.

But such a prospect was openly mocked recently by Netanyahu. Inside Israel there is little appetite for a two-state solution, with deep resistance across Israel’s government and most of its political parties, and it would require a huge shift in the political conversation.

US officials say it is not surprising that Netanyahu remains opposed at this juncture, but they are hopeful that the landscape will shift eventually.

Critics say Netanyahu’s failure to more openly respond to US pressure has nonetheless put Biden in a bind. “The administration is in a very difficult situation ... it is being perceived as aiding and abetting the humanitarian disaster in Gaza,” says Edward Djerejian, a former US ambassador to Israel under Bill Clinton.

But despite those concerns, the US has shied away from using any serious diplomatic pressure such as putting conditions on American aid or withholding support for Israel at the UN, officials and analysts say. The US has asked Congress to approve an additional $14.3 billion after the October 7th attacks on top of the $3.8 billion in military aid the US gives Israel every year. The US has often voted with Israel at both the UN General Assembly and Security Council on matters concerning its conflict with the Palestinians, using its veto to shield Israel from resolutions it deems too punishing.

US officials do not believe that a cooler or even a more combative approach to Israel – such as the one that Barack Obama adopted during his years in the White House – would necessarily help trigger a change of heart by Israel and may, in fact, backfire. Biden administration officials say that while they have some sway with Israel, the notion that they dictate the terms of Israel’s campaign or can tell it when to stop are overblown.

Some analysts agree. “The US has been advocating with Israel to take a more strict, more precise, surgical sort of an approach. I don’t know how realistic that really was ... [considering] the Israeli political atmosphere,” says Dan Rosenthal, managing partner at Albright Stonebridge, a consultancy in Washington, calling the idea that the US has “a great deal of leverage over the Israelis” an “overestimation”.

Considering the “unprecedented” nature of the October 7th attacks and the fact that Netanyahu’s right-wing government is not as concerned with “reputational” damage, “I don’t see any other option that would have been preferable,” adds Rosenthal.

But many Democrats disagree. A group of moderate House Democrats with national security backgrounds, including Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, wrote to Biden this week urging a shift in tactics.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the leftwing senator from Vermont, is calling for conditional aid to Israel. “If asking nicely worked, we wouldn’t be in the position we are today,” he says. “The blank cheque approach must end.”

Biden’s Michael Corleone moment

The conflict in the Middle East broke out at a pivotal moment for Biden’s foreign policy, and now threatens to overwhelm it.

The White House had been focused on marshalling support for another round of funding for Ukraine and trying to stabilise relations with China after the high tensions of Biden’s first two years in office.

In the Middle East, Biden was engaging on an economic and diplomatic level after the surge in oil prices forced him to reconnect with Saudi Arabia: the White House tried to broker a normalisation deal between the kingdom and Israel, and at the G20 in September launched a big infrastructure project stretching from India to Europe through the Gulf and Israel.

But the October 7th attacks pulled Biden back into a military and strategic concentration on the region that the president thought he had left behind with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The threat by Houthi rebels in Yemen to disrupt shipping supply chains in the Red Sea, forcing many western companies to stop sailing there, has added a commercial dimension to the conflict that is also preoccupying the White House.

“This war is in a sense his Michael Corleone moment on the Middle East, every US president has one,” says Brian Katulis, senior fellow and vice-president of policy at the Middle East Institute, referencing the iconic scene in the Godfather III when the Mafia boss complains of getting pulled back in to a life of crime.

Coons gives credit to Biden for his regional diplomacy since the outset of the war, such as “deterring Iran from getting further engaged”, and with “some success” in preventing a wider war with Hizbullah as well as militias in Iraq and Syria, though there is an “ongoing challenge” with the Houthis. The administration has touted the launch of a multinational taskforce to try to protect shipping lanes in the Red Sea as a victory.

“Even with countries that don’t see exactly eye to eye with us on Gaza, we are able to get things done that are significant,” says a senior Biden administration official.

But the risk of Biden losing precious diplomatic capital because of his stance on the conflict is plain. In recent days, some of the US’s closest allies – the UK, Germany and France – joined together to call for a “sustainable” ceasefire, breaking from Washington, which is resolute that this would benefit Hamas.

The US also was the sole country to veto a UAE-backed resolution calling for a ceasefire at the UN earlier this month, finding itself at odds with the emerging and developing economies it has been trying to woo as part of its competition with both China and Russia.

“I do worry about the impact on US relations with our allies, but also with others around the world who are watching closely what we do – countries in the global south who know the US could be doing more to exercise its leverage,” Van Hollen says.

Personal test

The war in Gaza is a personal test for Biden, not least as he prepares for a re-election campaign in 2024.

His response has fractured the Democratic Party, triggering fury from critics who believe the White House has been too tolerant of Israel’s conduct. But arguably the most serious cases of dissent have come from within his government.

Groups of staffers at the White House, the state department, and other agencies have expressed their opposition to Biden’s Israel policies. Josh Paul, a former civil servant in the political-military affairs bureau at state, resigned in protest in October and says there remains strong disagreement inside the government over Biden’s handling of the conflict.

“There are people who think that what we’re doing is a moral disaster: that we shouldn’t be facilitating the deaths of so many innocent civilians – and this runs directly counter to the values that the Biden administration claimed as it came into office,” says Paul, who adds that others worry the approach is doing “vast damage” to the country’s relationships and reputation in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Biden appears to be getting little credit on the right, even though many Republicans claim to be staunch supporters of Israel. Some strategists caution that even if Biden did take a harder line with Israel, that could alienate him from those Democrats who want him to strongly support the Jewish state.

A recent poll by Blueprint, a Democratic firm, found that just 32 per cent of voters consider Biden to be close to their views on foreign policy, with 30 per cent considering him close to their views on Israel-Palestine. Trump, who delighted Netanyahu by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem during his term and is likely to face Biden at the polls again in 2024, scores higher. A New York Times/Siena College poll released on Tuesday found that 57 per cent of voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and 46 per cent trust Trump to do a better job.

“Biden is at a real disadvantage right now to Donald Trump in terms of the share of voters who think he’s right on the money with Israel-Palestine,” says Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s top pollster, adding that Biden is struggling to define and defend his approach to national security.

“Voters just see a world in chaos, with conflict after conflict, and America drawn into each of them,” Smith adds.

The president’s overall approval ratings have kept edging downward since the war began more than two months ago. While Democratic lawmakers have already expressed concerns about how Biden’s policies could affect him at the ballot box, just how damaging this crisis will be is not yet clear.

“Most Americans don’t vote on foreign policy issues. So how elastic people’s votes are as a result of this campaign, I think, remains to be seen,” says Jonathan Lord, a senior fellow at CNAS.

Coons says one key step in the near term would be to secure a second pause in the conflict to restore “humanitarian aid, some recovery, some re-establishment of medical services, and the release of more hostages.”

Van Hollen, the Democratic senator from Maryland, is still hopeful Biden can find a path through the thicket of political and diplomatic complications he finds himself in.

“Getting the policy right can also address some of the political concerns,” he says. “Not all of them – people obviously have strong feelings.”

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023

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