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In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israeli civilians, President Joe Biden showed sympathy and support for Israel. Even as news of that day's horrors, including the death of 30 Americans, continued to come out, Biden's sympathy and support was not shared across his administration. As the war reaches its six-month mark, those anti-Israel voices within the administration and the Democratic Party are pushing Biden further and further away from his initial position.
In those early days, Biden showed a willingness to stand up to his internal staff a number of times. In Biden's initial statement, in which he said Israel must combat the "sheer evil" of Hamas, his staff had first suggested comments that took more of a neutral stance. According to news reports, Biden rebuffed them multiple times, rejecting a "both sides" approach and insisting on a more pro-Israel draft.
Later, when false reports emerged that Israel had blown up a hospital, killing 500 Gazans, Biden did not take the Palestinian claims at face value, saying, "I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed." Then there was Biden's visit to Israel, the first trip by an American president to Israel in wartime. The president did so against the advice of his top staff, telling reporters that he insisted on going during a "lengthy, one-hour" debate with his team.
In this initial phase, Biden seemed to be following in the footsteps of previous administrations when presidents stood up for Israel despite internal staff pushback. Examples of this include Harry Truman deciding to recognize Israel in 1948 over the objections of Secretary of State George Marshall, Lyndon Johnson disagreeing with his national security team and refusing to blame Israel over its attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 Six-Day War, and Richard Nixon demanding that his Department of Defense end any holdups and get badly needed arms to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Yet as we know, personnel is policy, and we are now seeing changes that reflect the anti-Israel sentiments of many members of the Biden team. In recent months, we have seen Democratic staffers voice their opposition to Israel at the State Department, on Capitol Hill, and from inside the White House itself. In November, 500 political appointees and staff members from 40 government agencies anonymously signed a letter calling for a ceasefire. Five hundred alumni of Biden's 2020 presidential campaign signed another letter calling for one as well. In one particularly outrageous breach of protocol, White House interns sent a letter to the president objecting to the administration's stance on the conflict. And in January, 17 current but anonymous Biden campaign staffers signed a letter directly calling on Biden to push for a permanent ceasefire. A similar dynamic has been taking place on Capitol Hill, where staffers have been sending letters to their bosses complaining about the administration's stance in support of the war against Hamas.
If the previous model from the Truman, Johnson, and Nixon administrations were to hold, we would continue to read snippets in the press about Biden standing up to these internal critics. Perhaps some would be fired or reassigned. At least one State Department official has resigned, but that appeared to be on the official's initiative, not because the White House sought to oust him. Even the interns appear to have been able to criticize the administration without pushback.
The lack of pushback foreshadowed a softening of Biden's support toward Israel. While his early comment showing skepticism toward the numbers coming from the Gaza Health Ministry was encouraging for supporters of Israel, he backed away from that stance after a meeting with Arab American leaders. When pressed on the question of Palestinian civilian casualty numbers in November 2023, Biden vowed to "do better" in the future. This seemed like an explicit retreat from his earlier, and proper, questioning of the numbers coming from the Gaza Health Ministry.
As the administration's support for Israel has softened, its criticism of Israel has hardened. In recent months, the critiques of Israel have been continual, and from multiple voices in the administration. In a February press conference, Biden accused Israel's conduct in the war of being "over the top," a comment widely circulated by Israel's critics. In March, Vice President Kamala Harris accused Israel of not doing enough to stop a "humanitarian catastrophe." And in April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has long-standing close ties to Biden, warned that Israel risked making itself "indistinguishable" from Hamas. These are not the comments of a divided administration so much as an increasingly united one.
In its increasingly unified Israel stance, the Biden administration is now starting to resemble other administrations that took an approach that was critical of Israel. One such administration was George H.W. Bush's, which clashed with Israel over the admittedly lower stakes issue of loan guarantees and expanding West Bank settlements. The Bush administration put on a full-court press against Israel, with Secretary of State James Baker giving a hard-hitting speech to AIPAC calling for the end of settlement activity.
Bush himself participated in the effort, asking Congress to delay the loan guarantees and complaining in a press conference about pro-Israel lobbying, saying he was "one lonely guy" "up against some powerful political forces," including "a thousand lobbyists" on Capitol Hill. During this fight, a young Israeli diplomat named Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Bush administration's policies of being "dishonest." He got himself banned from the State Department and the White House for his troubles.
There was one small exception to the unanimity of the Bush administration on Israel. In 1992, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp set up a meeting with Israeli Housing Minister Ariel Sharon. Baker was unhappy about the meeting and called Kemp to the White House, where he asked Kemp to cancel the meeting. Kemp responded that he had good ties with the Jewish community, which would be helpful to Bush's 1992 reelection effort. At this, Baker made his infamous comment, "F*** the Jews. They don't vote for us anyway," which Kemp leaked to former New York City mayor and columnist Ed Koch. What's telling about the whole incident is that the biggest pushback Bush got to his criticism of Israel was from the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, not typically someone with purview over Israeli policy.
A worse dynamic was at play in the Obama administration. Emblematic of that administration's critical approach toward Israel was deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, who was so hostile that by his own admission his nickname inside the administration was "Hamas." Rhodes's position, however, was not contrary to that of Obama. In fact, the two men were so closely aligned that there was talk of a "mind meld" between them.
The criticism of Israel was consistent across the administration. At one point, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton upbraided Netanyahu, who had become prime minister, about building activity over the so-called green line separating Israel from the West Bank. Clinton had reportedly read from a script to ensure that no criticism was left behind in her tirade. Then, to ensure that the message went through, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg engaged in a similar excoriation of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren on the same subject. Oren later found out about the internal unanimity on the subject when he learned that State Department aides gathered to hear Steinberg upbraid Oren and cheered him on as they listened.
In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, Biden had a chance to make clear that he stood in a different place from his anti-Israel aides. He could have continued to distance himself from their letters and criticisms, and he could have cleaned house by getting rid of people who objected to his policies. Instead, Biden chose to go in a different direction. Stories of his initial resistance to the internal critics stopped making it to the press, and for all we know, the resistance stopped altogether. Internal critics were never shut down or moved out and just became emboldened by the lack of pushback. Biden and his top aides became increasingly critical of Israel, and less demanding of Hamas, as time went on.
All of this activity has an impact. Strategically, the best way to accomplish the administration's stated goals of defeating Hamas, freeing the hostages, including six Americans, ending the war, and protecting the Palestinian people is to minimize the daylight between the United States and Israel. More daylight means more criticism of Israel from America, and this means that Hamas holds out longer and makes more and more outrageous demands. Hamas's leaders read the news, and the criticism from the Biden administration makes them think, not irrationally, that America will stop Israel diplomatically when Hamas cannot do it militarily. The relentless criticism of Israel gets in the way of a ceasefire, gets in the way of rescuing the hostages, and gets in the way of providing more humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.
The situation also reminds us of an important historical lesson. The initial period, in which there was internal administration dissent on Israel, showed fault lines inside the Democratic Party and warned of trouble ahead for Israel. This subsequent period, of greater internal unanimity, however, is even more dangerous for Israel as it shows a Biden increasingly going along with anti-Israel voices within his administration. As the historical examples of the Bush 41 and Obama years demonstrate, the only thing more worrisome for Israel than internal fighting over an administration's Middle East policy is the absence of fighting over it.