Ten days into Operation Guardian of the Walls, US President Joe Biden has shown that he has Israel’s back… at least for now.
And it can’t be easy, as he is coming under pressure from the radical progressive wing of his party – the Bernie Sanders-Ilhan Omar wing – to come down hard on Jerusalem. He is also coming under pressure from mainstream Democrats, some of whom sent a letter to Biden on Sunday asking him to take a more active role and work for an immediate ceasefire.
Biden has articulated consistent support for Israel’s right to defend itself against a barrage of missiles coming from a terrorist organization bent on destroying it, and as such, he is swimming against a rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment among progressives and selected cultural icons, such as John Oliver, who launched a 10-minute vicious diatribe against Israel on his popular Last Week Tonight television show on Sunday night.
Biden is not deaf to the calls from the progressives, or to the Oliver-type rants. Nor is he blind to images of destruction from Gaza running in loops on the news programs, or wrenching photographs of children amid the rubble in Gaza on the front page of leading newspapers.
Yet he hasn’t budged in his defense of Israel’s right to defend itself, and he continues to block one-sided UN Security Council statements calling for a ceasefire without condemning Hamas or its thousands of rockets.
Israel might have to pay a price for this support down the line, and it may come in the guise of toning down opposition to US reengagement with Iran over the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But in the meantime, Biden’s support is there.
But in the president’s conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday evening, Biden’s fierce detractors among Israel supporters will argue, he came out in favor of a ceasefire. Isn’t that pressure on Israel?
Not really. The penultimate sentence of a five-sentence readout of that call put out by the White House read: “The president expressed his support for a ceasefire and discussed US engagement with Egypt and other partners toward that end.”
Considering the heat Biden is feeling from those in his own party to act immediately to bring about a ceasefire, meaning to pressure Israel to agree to a ceasefire, that sentence is tame.
US presidents know how to demand of Israel a ceasefire when they want to.
Take George W. Bush, for instance.
It was April 6, 2002, nine days into Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF campaign that was the turning point of the Second Intifada, when Israel sent the troops into Palestinian cities in the West bank to curb the endless terrorist attacks, which reached a peak on March 27 with the Park Hotel Passover Eve massacre in Netanya. Bush called for Israel not only to cease fire, but to withdraw from the cities it moved into in an attempt to stop the terrorist carnage.
“My words to Israel are the same today as they were a couple of days ago,” said Bush at a news conference alongside visiting British prime minister Tony Blair at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. “Withdraw without delay.”
He added that he expected Israel to “heed my advice.”
If that wasn’t clear enough, two days later, his spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president expected Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian cities it moved into and to “do so now.”
Prime minister Ariel Sharon, who in October 2001 – a month after 9/11 – said Israel would not play the role of Czechoslovakia in a US bid to cultivate Arab partners for its war on terrorism by foisting a peace plan on Israel, heard Bush’s call. But he still carried on with Operation Defensive Shield for another month.
Compared to Bush’s unequivocal language – language that wasn’t heeded anyhow – it is tough to characterize Biden’s statement of support for a ceasefire as a form of significant pressure on Israel to force it to do something it deems contrary to its own interests.
Then there is the matter of tone.
While the statements coming out of the White House and State Department last week that aimed to strike an “even-handed” note were definitely a break from the type of “no ifs nor buts” statements of support that Israel came to expect under the Trump administration, the tone coming out of Washington is not one of hectoring or looking for public squabbles with Israel, as was so often the case during the Obama administration.
Exactly a year ago, on May 18, 2020, amid the US presidential campaign, then top campaign adviser and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Biden as president would not air his disagreements with Israel publicly.
“Joe Biden believes strongly in keeping your differences – to the greatest extent possible – between friends behind doors,” Blinken said at a virtual event with the Democratic Majority for Israel. “When it comes to your friends and partners, you’re much more effective when you disagree on policy matters in dealing with it in private – doing it clearly, forcefully, effectively, but not airing, to the greatest extent possible, any dirty laundry in public.”
That was the message the Biden campaign wanted the Jewish community to hear during the campaign. He has now been president for nearly four months, with this being his first full-blown crisis involving Israel, and Biden has kept to that line.
If he has reservations about how Israel is conducting the current military operation, he has kept them largely to private conversations.
As White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said when grilled on Monday about the lack of a more forceful response from the US toward Israel, “We’re not going to give a day-by-day evaluation.” The US approach is to work “through intensive, quiet diplomacy behind the scenes,” she said several times.
Asked why the US has not called for a ceasefire “right now,” Psaki replied that conversations behind the scenes with Israel, as well as with other countries in the region, “is the most constructive approach we can take.”
With the rockets still blazing, and Israel still interested in some more time to deepen its deterrence and further defang Hamas, that’s an approach that Jerusalem can definitely live with.