Refugee camp in Gaza at the time of the Nakba, 1949, via American Friends Service Committee.
Robert Kuttner, at TheAmerican Prospect, mostly agrees with my assessment of what just happened in Gaza after the telephone call between Biden and Netanyahu:
U.S. officials, unhelpfully, reinforced Netanyahu’s [dishonest account]. On Sunday morning, John Kirby, White House national-security spokesman, said on ABC’s This Week that the troops have "been on the ground for four months … The word we’re getting is they’re tired. They need to be refit."
That is also malarkey. In reality, the Israeli pullout is a devastating defeat for Netanyahu’s Gaza war. With demonstrations in Israel escalating, the reversal should hasten new elections, because any regional deal will require formal Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state, something Netanyahu cannot accept without blowing up his far-right cabinet.
Biden finally, reluctantly, took the hard line with Netanyahu that he should have taken six weeks ago, before so many more Gazan civilians were killed and so much of Gaza reduced to rubble and famine. Now Biden needs to take an even harder line (and make sure that his own spokesman doesn’t undercut it).
The only thing I’m quarreling over here is the implication that Biden was in some sense compelled against his will to move to the “come to Jesus meeting” with Netanyahu that he announced to Sen. Michael Bennett a month ago, in the “hot mic” moment after the State of the Union Address, with Tony Blinken and Pete Buttigieg in attendance (Blinken is more important in this instance than Buttigieg)—
"I told Bibi, and don't repeat this, I said, 'you and I are going to have a come to Jesus meeting'" — a colloquialism for a difficult intervention intended to produce a breakthrough. He then realized he was being recorded and said, "I'm on a hot mic here. Good. That's good."
One of the things people really need to start understanding about Biden is that his famous “gaffes” are not always products of sheer innocent exuberance. He certainly intended to be quoted as saying that the Affordable Care Act was a “big fucking deal”, for instance, or when he told Meet the Press in May 2012, in the middle of his second vice presidential campaign, that he was in favor of same-sex marriage. This is part of the technique by which Biden makes things happen.
I’ve compared Biden before to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose “meandering, garbled answers to questions at press conferences” made the press wonder if he was competent at all, while
Historians now appreciate that Eisenhower recognized the political advantages of working behind the scenes to deal with controversial issues, using his "hidden hand" to guide policy while allowing subordinates to take any credit—as well as the political heat.
Biden sometimes takes that up a notch and uses a “gaffe” to push out an idea before the public before he’s ready to take direct responsibility for it, allowing the public to see him working behind the scenes, and this is looking like one of those.
There’s no question in my mind but that Biden would have preferred for Netanyahu and the Israeli authorities to obey him from that earliest moment, a few days after the October 7 attack, when he warned the Israelis not to commit the catastrophic errors the US had committed in Afghanistan in 2001:
“Justice must be done. But I caution this – while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
But the Israelis chose to ignore the warning, and all its repetitions, and went instead, as the Americans did in 2001, for revenge and collective punishment, on a colossal, really terroristic scale, the Israeli campaign to rain down death by bombing on the Gazans even as they put them under a total siege depriving them of food, water, shelter, and medicine.
There are a few different factors in why the Israelis refused to listen to Biden. One is that they really were “traumatized”, as we say, by the events of October 7; as I said from the start (and Biden did too!), some of that was inevitable. It was a horrific attack, and the trauma was real. Less forgivable was Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing the punishment, to the extent of neglecting the possibility of freeing the kidnapped Israeli victims of the October 7 raids, which seemed intended to shield him from his own deep unpopularity, going back to the Netanyahu government’s efforts in 2023 to cripple the Israeli judiciary, which had been attempting to try him for bribery and fraud. It could seem to an outside observer as if as if Netanyahu was trying to prolong the assault on Gaza as long as he could—once the war ended he could be deposed as prime minister and sent to face the consequences of his crimes, and he really didn’t want to. If Netanyahu was rejecting Biden’s suggestions, perhaps it was mainly to avoid prison. Should Biden have promised him that he could stay in office, or offered him asylum in the US? I really don’t think that would have been a good idea.
In the United States, there was the already ancient tradition of regarding Israel as the great hope of the Middle East, the region’s only democracy, as it’s called. I’m talking about junior high dances in my own youth in which the theme from the movie Exodus (with its sublime Jewish heroes Paul Newman and Sal Mineo) ended every dance (”This land” tadariathump! “is mine!” tadariathump! “God gave this land to me!” by duo-pianists Ferrante and Teicher). For so long, the only Americans ready to hear bad things about Israel were actual Nazis, except in the closed community of the ultra-Orthodox but anti-Zionist Satmars, and a minority among the actual anti-imperialist left, among whom secular Jews like Noam Chomsky played a vital role.
Both of these givens have been weakened over the long period of Likud dominance in Israel since 1996, but more recently shattered altogether. The link in Israel between rightwing politicians and security-minded voters has been broken by the war, where the security politicians failed so grievously to protect the population. The link in the US between Democratic voters and Israel supporters has been exposed in a similar way: public approval of Israeli action had dropped from 50% in November to 36% in March, and Democratic politicians who would never have opposed Israel in any way a year ago seem stunned by the World Central Kitchen killings, such as Tim Kaine, Nancy Pelosi (putting her signature on a petition also signed not just by Jamie Raskin and Rosa De Lauro but also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib), even Josh Gottheimer (though he has denounced that petition).
The permission structure of talking about Israel and the Gaza war has undergone an enormous change, partly because of Netanyahu’s and the IDF’s ruinous mistakes, but Biden has played an important positive role. In particular, discussion in Israel of an end to the war on other than Netanyahu’s original terms (the annihilation of Hamas, at least as a military or political force) began with the hostage families talking about negotiating a return of the hostages. Netanyahu refused even to meet with them; Biden not only met with them, but drove the process that freed 105 hostages (81 Israelis, 23 Thais, and one Filipino) in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons in the brief November ceasefire (Vice President Kamala Harris still keeps regular communication going with the families of the Israeli-American hostages). The negotiations stopped being fruitful after that—the parties most interested in keeping the war going, Netanyahu and the Hamas leadership, have rejected every new initiative—but Biden has never stopped pushing them.
In this way Biden has built himself a real constituency inside Israel, as someone who can be trusted in a way they long ago stopped trusting their own prime minister. That doesn’t mean the Israeli public supports an end to the war or the establishment of a Palestinian state, Biden’s primary goals—they don’t, yet—but a slim majority really does prioritize the return of the hostages over the punishment or eradication of Hamas, as of February, that is they accept an end to the war if the hostages are returned, and these will be ready to see Biden’s presence in a proposal as an indication of good faith. This is what he has been working diligently for.
Yes, Biden has managed to shift positions just ahead of median US public opinion. See also, Equal Marriage
This is excellent. Thanks!