Biden embraced Israel after Oct. 7, but that has given him little influence with its leaders as Gaza collapses
After initially unequivocally backing Israel, President Biden has increasingly highlighted the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in recent months. On Oct. 27, three weeks into Israel’s punishing counterattack in Gaza, top Biden officials privately told a small group assembled at the White House what they would not say in public: Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets.
Biden’s strategy from the outset rested on a central trade-off: that if he showed Israel unequivocal, even defiant, support early on, he could ultimately influence its conduct of the war. Some administration officials now concede the strategy is heading toward failure, and in private talks, they voice a striking frustration and uncertainty about how the war will end.
If Netanyahu moves on Rafah without consequences, Van Hollen said, the United States will look “feckless.” He added, “It’s good to see the president’s tougher comments. But the question will be whether the president uses the leverage he has to demand accountability and enforce his requests.”Biden, who has a long-standing and visceral attachment to Israel, responded with unusual emotion in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks. Noting that Oct.
Israel and its allies reject the notion that they do not care about innocents. The killing of civilians at Jabalya was the “unintended, tragic consequence of Hamas’s systematic embedding of terror infrastructure within a civilian population,” the Israeli Embassy said in a statement.
Van Hollen, who had received a classified briefing about the U.S. intelligence on al-Shifa, said there were “important and subtle differences” between what Biden officials were saying publicly and what the intelligence actually showed. “I did find there to be some disconnect between the administration’s public statements and the classified findings,” the senator said.
“Bibi’s approach to disagreements in the past has been something along the lines of, ‘Let’s not and say we might.’ In this case, he stopped even pretending or obfuscating,” said Frank Lowenstein, a former State Department official who helped lead Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2014. “He just went out and announced the exact opposite of what we asked them to do.”
But across the federal government, the president’s continued embrace of Israel more than three months into the war was increasingly causing strain.administrator Samantha Power’s commitment to the humanitarian principles she heralded as a scholar, the protest spread. In January, more than 100 USAID workers sent a letter to Atul Gawande, an acclaimed former New Yorker staff writer and surgeon who holds a senior position in charge of global health.
The Biden administration began taking modest steps at this point to distance itself from Netanyahu, though they often involved Israel’s handling of the West Bank, where Jewish settlers have attacked unarmed Palestinians and the government has approved thousands of new settlements, rather than Gaza.By early February, Biden’s support of Israel’s onslaught was clearly having political consequences.
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