Joe Biden flew to Israel on Wednesday to prove how deeply he and the US political establishment support Israel, even as it intensifies its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, demands the forced displacement of more than 1 million Palestinians, and prepares for a ground invasion of the territory. Biden could have paired his expressions of grief over the brutal attacks by Hamas on 7 October, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis, with pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and an effort to prevent the fighting from spreading to other parts of the Middle East.
Instead, Biden ended up doubling down on his administration’s unwavering support for Israel and its leaders. As Biden met with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and survivors of the Hamas attacks, the US ambassador to the United Nations vetoed a security council resolution calling on Israel to pause the fighting and allow humanitarian corridors into the besieged Gaza Strip. The resolution criticized the “heinous terrorist crimes by Hamas” but that wasn’t enough for US officials who insisted that the text was unacceptable because it failed to mention Israel’s right to self-defense.
Biden also went out of his way to support Israel’s claim that it was not responsible for a devastating explosion at al-Ahli Arab hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday night, which killed 471 Palestinians and wounded hundreds. Palestinian officials blamed the strike on Israel, while Israel insists that the blast was caused by a malfunctioning rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas.
“Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden told Netanyahu as they met with a group of journalists in a Tel Aviv hotel. While Biden tried to hedge his language, he didn’t explain that his own intelligence officials were still working to collect and analyze evidence.
Israel also has a long history of obfuscating and denying responsibility for its attacks on civilians and human rights abuses. In 1996, for example, Israeli forces fired artillery at a UN compound in the southern Lebanese village of Qana, where hundreds of civilians had taken refuge during battles between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters. More than 100 Lebanese civilians were killed in the attack, and Israeli officials insisted they didn’t know that civilians had sheltered in the compound. A UN investigation later determined that Israeli forces had deliberately targeted the base and knew it was full of civilians.
Biden’s attempt to brush aside the Gaza hospital explosion – and the widespread anger it has galvanized in the Arab and Muslim worlds – is the latest example of how his administration is blinded to other regional dynamics by its support for Israel. The attack on the hospital triggered protests across the Middle East on Tuesday and Wednesday, and condemnations from Arab governments that had stayed largely silent in recent weeks. The leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority cancelled a summit meeting with Biden, who had planned to visit Jordan after his trip to Israel.
That Biden and his administration did not see this tragedy as an opening to pressure Israel for a ceasefire – or even to accept a watered-down UN resolution calling for a “humanitarian pause” – shows a deeply flawed and hypocritical US foreign policy. To prove that he is a great friend to Israel ahead of his re-election campaign in 2024, Biden is risking a wider war in the region – one that could draw in Hezbollah, whose fighters are already skirmishing with Israeli troops along Lebanon’s southern border; Palestinians in the West Bank; and possibly even Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah.
Beyond its single-minded support for Israel since the 7 October attacks, the Biden administration also bears a wider responsibility for the deterioration in Gaza and the extinguishing of Palestinian political aspirations. Since he took office in January 2021, Biden and his aides focused most of their efforts in the region on brokering a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia – and lofty ambitions of “transforming the Middle East”.
Biden wanted to expand on the perceived success of his predecessor Donald Trump in brokering diplomatic deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. But these so-called Abraham Accords, which were conceived and largely negotiated by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, were built on a mirage: that the US could solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simply by ignoring the Palestinians and their reality.
Trump and Kushner, both fond of flashy real estate deals, essentially treated the Palestinians as holdouts who were refusing to cave in to pressure to give up the little rights they still had. So the Trump administration arranged deals around the Palestinians that excluded their concerns. The US found willing partners in autocratic Arab regimes which have always been afraid of their citizens mobilizing around the Palestinian cause. For its part, Israel saw the normalization deals as a way to entrench its occupation and further isolate the Palestinians, cutting off funding from Arab states like the UAE, which became more interested in buying Israeli surveillance technology than helping the Palestinian cause.
While successive US administrations sidelined and ignored the Palestinians for decades, American officials still paid lip service to the importance of negotiating a two-state solution which would then lead to widespread Arab recognition of Israel. But after Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, much of the US foreign policy establishment decided that the question of Palestine no longer mattered in the Middle East.
When the Biden administration took office – with its supposed “adults in the room”, compared with Trump’s erratic foreign policy – it quietly adopted the Trump policy of ignoring the Palestinians. Instead, Biden and his team turned their attention to brokering new normalization deals, especially after the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, which damaged Biden’s reputation as a foreign policy expert.
The Biden team hoped a vanity peace agreement that exceeded the Abraham Accords would restore Biden’s reputation. The administration became obsessed with convincing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, to reach a normalization deal with Israel. But the prince demanded a steep price: US help in launching a civilian nuclear program, which some American officials fear could be used as a cover by the Saudis to eventually develop nuclear weapons. Prince Mohammed also wants access to more US weapons and a mutual defense treaty guaranteeing that the US would defend the kingdom if it is attacked by a regional rival like Iran.
In months of negotiations with US officials, the prince paid lip service to the importance of the Palestinian question, but he too seemed to assume that Saudi Arabia could make a deal with Israel without extracting concessions to improve the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Biden administration has been so committed to its normalization strategy – and the deliberate ignorance of Palestinian conditions – that it continued to push for a Saudi-Israel deal even after the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israeli assault on Gaza. “It would really change the prospects of the entire region far into the future,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on CBS News on 8 October, extolling the benefits of a Saudi-Israel deal. “Now, who’s opposed to that? Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran … And there are really two paths before the region.”
There are indeed multiple paths before the Middle East. For nearly three years, the Biden administration chose a path of magical thinking, where it tried to strengthen an alliance between Israel and Arab dictatorships – and ignored the plight of millions of Palestinians. That path led to disaster, but the Biden administration still hasn’t grasped that the US and its allies must deal with the reality of Israel’s occupation and subjugation of Palestinians.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University
