Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden’s relationship has followed a predictable downward trajectory since Hamas’s barbaric attack on October 7.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Biden set a new standard of support for the Jewish state and the Jewish people in times of tragedy and war, providing unstinting moral, diplomatic, and material support.
His words of comfort and his visit here in the immediate aftermath of the attack gave Israel the sense it was not alone, and he backed up words with actions, such as sending an aircraft carrier strike force to the region to deter Iran and Hezbollah from taking advantage of the situation by opening a second major front; and giving the green light for an airlift of munitions to Israel to ensure it had the wherewithal to defeat Hamas.
That support did not come without a price – Biden reportedly intervened to keep the IDF from preempting against Hezbollah in the north soon after the Hamas attack. But still, the support was invaluable and will be long remembered.
Complicated relations with Israel
All that, however, took place in the three-week interval after the terrorist atrocity, and before Israel started its ground incursion into Gaza. It was easy to predict that once the ground war started, and as the images piled up of weeping Palestinian mothers, dead children covered in shrouds, destroyed buildings, and thousands of people fleeing their homes, the level of Washington’s public support would diminish.
It was clear to all that as October 7 receded in the rearview mirror, as the world’s recollection of that day waned, supplanted by scenes of Palestinian suffering – scenes saturating the airwaves abroad, even if they are not being aired much here – the tone would change. It didn’t require a former intelligence officer gracing the nightly news shows to realize that the longer the war continued, the more the tensions in the US-Israel relationship would be exacerbated.
And so they have.
It is worth noting, however, that while the tone has changed, the substance has not.
True, Biden has on a couple of occasions reportedly used coarse language to describe Netanyahu, he issued an order calling on nations in active conflict that receive military aid to provide assurance that they are in compliance with humanitarian law, and has begun actively resuscitating the idea of a two-state solution.
Once the US makes these moves, its allies feel free to do the same, even more so.
Most of this has, so far, been only declarative. The only practical step was to sanction four Israelis living in Judea and Samaria for allegedly committing violence against Palestinians, a move that, as if on cue, led other countries to take similar steps. But the change of tone has not yet affected policy.
The Democrat-majority Senate this week passed a $95.3 billion aid bill that included $14.1b. for Israel. That bill now goes to the House, where it is facing Republican hurdles because of the $60b. earmarked for Ukraine and a failure to include any funding for US border control. But that the Biden administration is willing to sign off on $14b. in aid to Israel is a sign that the changing tone has not affected policy. At least not yet.
Likewise, the US has not abandoned Israel at the United Nations.
The US is currently warning Israel against moving into Rafah but is not taking any practical measure to prevent it. In the readout of Biden’s phone call with Netanyahu on Sunday, the White House said Biden told Netanyahu that “a military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of, and support for, the more than one million people sheltering there.”
In other words, such an operation could proceed if such a plan were in place – a plan Israel said it is working on.
Opposition in the US and in the West to certain IDF moves is a pattern that has repeated itself since October 7. After Hamas’s incursion, and during that three-week period when Israel’s response was limited to bombardment by the air, the US urged Israel against a ground invasion, saying it would risk a wider war.
Yet the IDF went into Gaza – it began in northern Gaza – nonetheless. Then there were warnings in Washington and the West against moving into Gaza City, and then against going into Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, and then against moving against Khan Yunis. Each time, however, Israel ignored the warnings and did what it believed needed to be done to defeat Hamas.
The same will likely be true regarding Rafah. The US and the West are urging against it, but if Jerusalem views this as necessary to secure the aim of defeating Hamas, then it will do so – despite protestation from around the world.
White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby clarified on Monday that the US never said Israel can’t go into Rafah to remove Hamas. “What we’ve said is we don’t believe that it’s advisable to go in in a major way in Rafah without a proper, executable, effective, and credible plan for the safety of the more than a million Palestinians.”
Hamas, Kirby said, “remains a viable threat to the Israeli people.”
Biden also understands this, which is why – 133 days into this war, the second longest in Israel’s history – he has not pulled the plug. That does not mean he might not yet do so, but he hasn’t so far.
THAT BIDEN has not yet pulled the plug, however, is costing him politically.
An impact on Biden's election campaign?
The upcoming election in November – likely to feature a rematch between Biden and former president Donald Trump – is expected to be nail-bitingly close. In the 2020 election, Biden won by flipping five states that voted for Trump in 2016: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Conventional wisdom holds that to win this time he will need to retain most if not all of those states. Another two states were decided by less than 3% in the last elections: Nevada, which Biden took, and North Carolina, which went to Trump.
Those are the seven key battleground states this time around. And to win them, the Biden administration appears to be pandering to the progressives and to Arab-Americans threatening not to vote or to vote for a third-party candidate in 2024 as a result of “Genocide Joe’s” strong support for Israel.
The Muslim voters are key in Michigan, and progressives are key in Wisconsin, where Biden won by 0.6% in 2020, and Trump took it by 0.8% in 2016. If, in the college town of Madison, for instance, the progressives stay home, Biden might lose the state.
Those considerations are very much going through his mind, as well as the minds of his political handlers. Which explains why he dispatched senior administration officials to Michigan last week – including former UN ambassador Samantha Power and Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer – to reassure Muslim voters.
According to a New York Times report, Finer apologized for the administration’s handling of the Gaza crisis.
“We are very well aware that we have missteps in the course of responding to this crisis since October 7,” he told Arab-American political leaders in Dearborn. “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration, and the country values the lives of Palestinians. And that began, frankly, pretty early in the conflict.”
The focus on retaining Muslim and progressive voters threatening to withhold support goes far in explaining the changing tone coming out of the Biden administration, as well as why the US is reportedly mulling a plan for a long-term peace deal that would be imposed on Israel and include a Palestinian state.
Michigan, however, is not the only state Biden will need to win in November to get reelected, nor are Arab-American voters the only ones he needs. He will also need to carry Pennsylvania, where there are nearly 300,000 Jewish voters, according to a Jewish Electorate Institute report in 2021, or almost 3.5% of the state’s registered voters.
Or consider Arizona, a state Biden carried in 2020 by a 10,457-vote margin, or 0.3%. There are some 115,000 Jewish adults in Arizona, or about 3% of the electorate. Or take Nevada: Biden won that state in 2020 by fewer than 34,000 votes. There are an estimated 80,000 Jewish voters there, not an insignificant part of the population and one that could very well affect the outcome there as well.
If the Biden campaign team is weighing messaging and even considering imposing a peace deal on Israel, mindful of its reception among progressives, Muslims, and Arab-Americans, then perhaps this is an opportune moment for the American Jewish community – which polls show overwhelmingly supports and feels attached to Israel – to begin throwing around its electoral clout as well.