The significance for Israel of Thursday night’s US presidential debate between President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump is not in anything said during the debate but rather in what was said afterwards: Biden is no longer fit to be president.
Within minutes of the two presumptive nominees from their respective parties ending the debate – without even looking at each other, let alone shaking hands – commentators from various media networks began talking about what they described as Biden’s dismal performance.
And when the leading commentators on CNN – not Fox News but CNN – are saying that Biden fumbled the ball badly and someone needs to tell him that his time is up, then this is a moment to take note of.
Media personalities were not the only ones talking about the president’s need to step aside and allow for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August to anoint a new candidate leading Democratic officials – albeit mostly anonymously – and voters in focus groups also echoed similar sentiments.
The questions that need to be asked
The possibility that Biden might not be on the November ballot, once only whispered about privately but now openly discussed, has far-reaching implications. This potential development not only disrupts US politics but also sends shock waves through global affairs and impacts the Middle East and Israel in particular.
The first question, obviously, is who would replace him. Would it be US Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or perhaps Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro?
The second question is: How would the policies of any of these candidates regarding Israel and the Middle East be different than Biden’s, if at all?
Another question that will need to be addressed is how another candidate entering the race this late in the game would impact Trump’s chances of winning in November.
If it seems that such an eventuality would increase Trump’s chances, then how does this affect Israel’s policies? Further, how does this impact Iran and Hamas?
There is also the question of Biden as a lame-duck president. What kind of influence will this have on the policies of various actors worldwide, including Israel?
Presuming perhaps that Biden will not be in the White House in January, will that convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take actions relative to Hamas in Gaza – and regarding a possible war in Lebanon – that may run counter to Biden’s opinion because of the realization that there might not be that great a price to pay in defying a president who won’t be in office that much longer anyway?
Shifting from what was said after the debate to the content of the debate itself, several points concerning Israel, antisemitism, and current anti-Israel protests in the US merit attention.
First, contrary to the perception that vocal demonstrators and their cheerleaders – certain individuals on some media outlets – are trying to create, support for Israel is not something of which to be ashamed or embarrassed.
Biden did not try to hide his support for Israel. Rather, he highlighted it – a sign that he understands that this is something that the public favours.
“We saved Israel,” he said. “We are the biggest producer of support for Israel.”
Significantly, the president unequivocally placed the blame on the continuation of the current war on Hamas, saying that it “cannot be allowed to be continued,” that it has been greatly weakened, and that it “should be eliminated.”
These are not comments that a candidate makes during a debate if he thinks that supporting Israel is going to cost him the election because progressives or Arab Americans will stay home instead of voting for him as a result.
Biden admitted that he denied Israel 2,000-pound bombs because “they don’t work very well in populated areas,” reiterating his concern since the beginning of the war about having civilian casualties.
In his response, Trump, as they say in poker, saw Biden’s ante and upped it, claiming that Israel wanted the war to continue so it could finish off Hamas and that Biden should “let them finish the job.”
Then, Trump made a comment that was rather difficult to comprehend: “He [Biden] has become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. He is a weak one.”
Asked point blank whether he would support the creation of a Palestinian state, Trump replied briefly, “I’d have to see,” before quickly changing the subject.
In the next context in which Israel came up, this was in regards to antisemitism and implicitly to antisemitic, anti-Israel protests around the country, whereby Biden made reference to the 2017 riot in Charlottesville.
He repeated what he has said in the past – that the reason he decided to challenge Trump in 2020 was because of that riot and since Trump said back then that there were “fine people” on both sides of the divide, referring to both white supremacists at the Unite the Right rally and counter-demonstrators who showed up to protest that rally.
“I said that I wasn’t going to run again until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Biden said. “People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches and singing the same antisemitic bile that they sang back in Germany... What American president would ever say that Nazis coming out of fields carrying torches, singing the same antisemitic bile, [and] carrying swastikas were fine people?”
Trump, in his response, dismissed the Charlottesville story as having been debunked, leaving the listener confused over what part of the story was debunked or how.
But in his final statement, Trump made a comment comparing the Charlottesville march – a single march of a few hundred white supremacists chanting antisemitic slogans – to the scores of anti-Israel protests on campuses and in American cities in which the common staple is left-wing radicals shouting antisemitic slogans.
“We have the Palestinians and we have everybody else rioting all over the place,” Trump pointed out. “You talk about Charlottesville. This is 100 times Charlottesville, 1,000 times.”