President Joe Biden‘s shock announcement that he would condition U.S. military support of Israel on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s decision to invade the Gazan city of Rafah to end Hamas has been criticized by pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans.
But many pro-Palestinian Democrats are also skeptical of Biden’s words and actions.
The longer the war between Israel and Hamas lasts, the more the support of Israel that Biden demonstrated immediately after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks gets tested as he seeks to keep pro-Palestinian stakeholders on his side.
“The moment Biden decided he would oppose Israel destroying Hamas and winning the war, he started a countdown to this moment,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior adviser Richard Goldberg, a onetime national security aide to former President Donald Trump, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s isolated himself and undermined his influence and leverage by going down this road.”
Even House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) described Biden’s announcement as “off script” and hopefully a “senior moment” in a conversation with Politico.
Biden had said during an interview with CNN on Wednesday that the United States would no longer provide heavy bombs and artillery shells to Israel if it launches a large-scale incursion of Rafah, and the announcement came after the president paused one shipment of 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound and 1,700 500-pound bombs to Israel. The shipment was not part of last month’s passed national security funding package.
“I don’t know if Biden was just meandering in his senile fashion or if this was a policy change,” American Enterprise Institute foreign and defense senior fellow Danielle Pletka told the Washington Examiner. “Clearly, he’s getting major pressure from his base and his own staff in the White House on this.”
White House senior spokesman Andrew Bates dismissed Johnson’s speculation about Israel and U.S. military support, contending the Biden administration, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, had made similar statements days earlier. But Bates told the Washington Examiner, “To be fair, we understand the speaker has a lot to keep up with.”
For White House national security spokesman John Kirby, Biden’s decision to make the announcement was based on “seeing things, threats for a major operation in Rafah, and certainly rhetoric around that,” which gave him “pause.”
“You all don’t hear everything that the president says to Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Kirby told reporters Thursday during a briefing. “I can assure you the direct and forthright nature with which he expressed himself and his concerns in that interview with [CNN] is consistent with how he has expressed himself to Prime Minister Netanyahu and to Israeli officials.”
Alexander Hamilton Society Executive Director Gabriel Scheinmann countered that Biden was undercutting an ally at war with a “genocidal terrorist group” because the administration would “rather see the end of the Netanyahu government than the end of the Hamas regime.”
“The Netanyahu government, and frankly any government that would be present in the last six months, cannot continue to survive if the goals of the war are not achieved, i.e. the elimination of Hamas,” Scheinmann told the Washington Examiner. “So in that stark choice, what it truly means is that Biden is trying to unseat Bibi by forcing an end of the war far short of the objectives.”
Biden’s counterpart to Netanyahu’s Israel-Hamas war cabinet includes Austin, in addition to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Sullivan’s deputy Jon Finer, CIA Director Bill Burns, and National Security Council Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk. Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan sat down with Finer earlier this year to discuss the conflict after they declined to meet with Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez about the same topic.
“I think there is still a deep sense of skepticism toward President Biden’s comments,” Michigan State University political science professor Nura Sediqe told the Washington Examiner of the community after Biden’s announcement on Israel and U.S. military support. “He is often referred to by a nickname that implicates him as a war criminal, rather than by his name, so it will take a lot of clear visible signs to turn the tide in opinion among American Muslims and Arab Americans.”
That skepticism persists amid Israeli claims that more civilians may be killed or injured in Gaza because the paused shipment of U.S. military support, postponed for two weeks, includes Boeing-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which transform so-called dumb bombs into precision-guided ones, as well as Small Diameter Bombs.
“Israel needs resupply from the United States,” AEI’s Pletka said. “Can it fight without them? Yes. But more people will die; they will need to use dumber bombs and broader and less pinpointed weaponry.”
Goldberg, of FDD, also emphasized Israel’s military preparedness more broadly: “The question is what will happen if Iran escalates any one of its six other fronts against Israel, especially via Hezbollah, which is a threat 10 times larger than Hamas ever was.”
Biden’s announcement, too, coincides with polling that indicates younger people, among the most vocal regarding Gaza, have competing priorities before November’s general election. An Axios–Generation Lab poll published this week, for example, found that only 13% of college students considered the “conflict in the Middle East” as the issue “most important to them.”
“This is the irony,” Pletka said. “Young people ‘say’ they aren’t voting on Gaza. They are also notoriously unreliable voters.”
“Biden is so spooked by his poll numbers and the third party candidates that he has persuaded himself he needs every last pro-Hamas voter he can get to win,” she added.
Scheinmann, from the Alexander Hamilton Society, disagreed: “If he were truly concerned about winning Michigan, he wouldn’t be seeking to kill the combustion engine via his electric vehicle policies. Way more people are going to be put out of work or life made more expensive as a consequence of those policies than on Israel-Gaza stuff. I think that simply at the end of the day, this is where the administration is.”
Democratic strategist Tom Cochran, an alumnus of former President Barack Obama’s State Department and now managing director of public affairs firm 720 Strategies, was of a different opinion.
“First, it is always about politics and balancing an impossibly tenuous situation,” Cochran told the Washington Examiner. “Second, it sends a clear message to Netanyahu that Biden’s patience has limits, given that a ground offensive would likely result in continued widespread civilian casualties.”
Meanwhile, Sedique sought more information about the Axios-Generation Lab poll because she could not find the demographic breakdown of its respondents online.
“If this is an aggregate of all college students across the U.S., as it appears, then that average may make sense,” Sediqe said. “But if we were to do a regional poll on the Northeast, California, Michigan, I anticipate the answers looking different and this poll doesn’t appear to capture their perspectives.”
Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz responded to polling such as the Axios-Generation Lab survey last week during an interview with Hearst: “While the war is one issue, the Biden campaign sees the cost of living, reproductive rights, and fighting for democracy as top issues that could win over voters in November.”
In his gaggle with reporters, Kirby argued that Biden remained committed to the “enduring defeat of Hamas” and that the president’s position on Rafah has been constant. He cited how Israel is receiving “the vast, vast majority of everything that they need to defend themselves.”
“The arguments that somehow we’re walking away from Israel fly in the face of the facts,” Kirby said.
The previous day, Biden acknowledged civilians have been killed in Gaza “as a consequence” of U.S military support and “other ways” that Israel has engaged “population centers” during the war.
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“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, that deal with that problem,” Biden told CNN on Wednesday.
“We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently,” he said. “But it’s — it’s just wrong. We’re not going to — we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”
