João Fazenda
In Barack Obama’s White House, there were two schools of thought about managing the United States’ bedrock alliance with Israel. Defense Secretary Robert Gates privately called the relationship “all give and no get,” and was among those who thought that Obama should approach Jerusalem with skeptical caution, according to Dennis Ross, a Middle East hand who advised Obama and later wrote an eyewitness history of U.S.-Israeli relations. On the other side, as Ross summarized it, then Vice-President Joe Biden argued for “drawing the Israelis close to us,” in part to gain greater influence, even amid bitter disputes with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Last week, arriving for a one-day visit to Tel Aviv, President Biden descended from Air Force One and bear-hugged Netanyahu before a phalanx of cameras. “You are not alone,” he said later, in a speech to Israelis about the Hamas-led terror attacks of October 7th, when militants broke out of Gaza and murdered more than fourteen hundred Israelis and seized hostages. Since then, Biden has denounced the “bloodthirstiness” of Hamas and spoken evocatively of Israeli victims: “infants in their mother’s arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted.” As the Israeli Air Force unleashed an unbridled counterattack in Gaza, the President also pledged aid to besieged Palestinian civilians; according to Gaza’s health ministry, more than twenty-five hundred women and children died in the enclave during the war’s first two weeks.
Biden’s attempt to get food and medicine into Gaza will test whether his access and credibility with Israeli decision-makers can help protect Palestinian civilians even as the Israel Defense Forces prepare an expected ground invasion. In Tel Aviv, Biden struck a deal with Israel and Egypt to send an initial aid shipment; at Israel’s behest, hundreds of thousands of Gazans have migrated to the south of their fenced-in territory, in search of safety amid bombings and dwindling resources. Providing care to such a displaced population would be hard even if Israel and Egypt, the co-authors of a long-running blockade of Gaza, coöperated fully. As it is, Israel has agreed to let aid flow to Gaza only if it can be kept away from Hamas—no simple matter.
The risk of a wider regional war remains acute. Hezbollah, the heavily armed Shiite militant group in Lebanon, has traded fire with Israeli forces, and Israel has evacuated civilians from several border towns. The Pentagon has dispatched two aircraft-carrier strike groups to the Mediterranean, partly to deter Hezbollah from opening a second front. Iran—a patron, funder, and arms supplier of both Hezbollah and Hamas—presents another variable. Biden Administration officials have told reporters they have no evidence that Iran helped to plan the October 7th assault; according to the Times, the Administration has sent messages urging Tehran to stay out of the conflict.
Meanwhile, on the Gaza front, the kidnapping spree carried out by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad has embedded a wrenching and delicate international hostage crisis in an urban war that may soon involve block-by-block combat. Militants took more than two hundred people—Israelis, Americans, and others. Israel has long made bold efforts to free its hostages and prisoners, and Biden has said that he has “no higher priority” than seeking the release of the American captives. On Friday, Hamas released two of them, a mother and a daughter taken from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, but carrying out negotiations or rescue attempts during a chaotic and high-tempo war remains a tall order.
Within Israel, the kidnappings have deepened the national trauma. Biden, during his visit, noted that the events of October 7th were like “fifteen 9/11s” relative to the size of Israel’s population, and that, as was true of many Americans in 2001, many Israelis would understandably feel an “all-consuming rage.” The President also suggested reflection on the lessons of America’s post-9/11 overreach: “While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” (He did not elaborate, but the invasion of Iraq and the failed twenty-year war in Afghanistan hardly needed to be named.) Israeli government spokesmen have said that their war aim is to end Hamas’s governance of Gaza and to destroy the movement’s military capabilities. Yet even if Israel bears the casualties and accepts the Palestinian civilian suffering that would be inflicted in order to achieve those goals, what will happen the day after? A renewed Israeli occupation would inflame Palestinians and the Arab world, while the imposition of a new Palestinian administration would be a highly uncertain project.
Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. Presidents have tried to steer toward a durable peace accord between Israelis and Palestinians—a negotiated “two-state solution” that would birth an independent Palestine, including Gaza. These days, many Palestinians and Israelis regard that project as futile, if not dangerously delusional. The Administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have concentrated on fostering new diplomatic and economic ties between Israel and Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain. Another proposal—normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—was being discussed openly just before the October 7th attack. (Spoiling an Israeli-Saudi accord may have been part of Hamas’s motivation.) The Gaza war will set the project back, but may not bury it. Saudi and other Sunni Arab leaders promote Palestinian rights and statehood, but they also fear Iran and despise the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political movement of which Hamas is an offshoot. In private, they are unlikely to wring their hands over the fate of either Hamas or Hezbollah.
Last Thursday, after returning home, Biden delivered a prime-time address from the Oval Office. He spoke again of aid for Gaza’s civilians, and of the need for Israel to adhere to the laws of war, but he offered no details. He conjured a future Middle East with better-connected economies, “more predictable markets, more employment, less rage, less grievances, less war.” In the shadow of October 7th, it sounded like a self-soothing daydream, and the main point of his speech was a pitch for some seventy-five billion dollars of “urgent” new aid for Israel and Ukraine. Among other things, the President said, the aid would “sharpen Israel’s qualitative military edge.” Biden’s instinctive embrace of Israel in its unprecedented hour of crisis has been one of the most confident performances of his Presidency. But his foreign-policy legacy will be shaped by what comes next, in a war in which his advice about restraint and calm deliberation may well be ignored by all the leaders involved. ♦
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