In the early days of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, President Joe Biden took some time to congratulate himself on a job well done.
“For weeks, his administration had been pursuing a “bear hug” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: heaping billions in aid on the US ally and insulating it from international diplomatic pressure.” The idea was that massive military and public support for Israel would give America leverage over Netanyahu in private meetings. Biden believed this was working. He thought his pushes had slowed Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The president—who had once been famously ridiculed by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates for being “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”—bragged by asking an aide about Gates’s comment: Who is wrong now?
The answer then, as today, is clear: Joe Biden was wrong.
His bear hug has been one the biggest foreign policy mistakes in modern American history. It did not give Biden or the US leverage in private. Again and again, Netanyahu ignored Biden’s pleas to change policy. Red lines were drawn that Israel could not cross. Israel crossed them and faced no consequences.
Biden’s incompetence is what has allowed Trump to take a victory lap before even taking office.
Over that time, tens of thousands of people have been killed. And the destruction in Gaza has been so great that those within his Biden’s own administration have either quit or admitted to reporters the strategy has totally failed. “This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” a senior US diplomat told ProPublica.
Even more tragically: It was entirely predictable that Biden’s strategy was all but bound to fail miserably. Both as vice president and president, Biden made it obvious that he was there to be played by Netanyahu. The bear hug—along with the near total refusal to hold Netanyahu accountable that went with it—allowed the Israeli prime minister to walk over Biden, time and again.
On Friday, the Israeli security cabinet voted to approve a ceasefire and hostage release deal. It’s expected to pass the full cabinet later on Friday. Hamas supports the agreement, according to the New York Times.
There is already, and will continue to be, debate over who secured a ceasefire deal: Trump or Biden. But early reporting strongly indicates it was the incoming president who made the difference. In Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent progressive newspaper, Amos Harel wrote bluntly, “negotiations would not have reached their final lap without Trump.” He added, “For years, people have been saying that Netanyahu is the sum of all his fears; it turns out that Trump scares him even more, perhaps justifiably so.”
The Washington Post shared a similar perspective from an unnamed diplomat who said the recent negotiations had been “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.” Biden seemed to push back on Wednesday by saying, “This is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring.” Yet, in doing so, he undercut his own point—underlining that it was the person pushing, not the plan, that had changed.
A tracker maintained by Al-Jazeera shows that 17,492 children have been killed since October 7. It means that, on average, Israel’s war has killed more than one child per hour since October 7.
One does not have to reconstrue Trump as a champion of Palestinians and their struggle for sovereignty to accept his role in securing a ceasefire. His record is clear. Trump’s first administration pushed forward a range of hardline pro-Israel policies that sidelined Palestinians—notably moving the US Embassy to Israel and pursuing the Abraham Accords. (Both were continued by the Biden administration.)
Trump has now picked for Ambassador to Israel former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who once said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” There also isn’t a clear sense of what Netanyahu may have gotten at Palestinians’ and others’ expense in exchange for agreeing to the ceasefire. And from a Palestinian perspective, there are many reasons to be skeptical about how Trump will respond if Israel violates the ceasefire, refuses to take the steps in future phases of the agreement to end the war indefinitely, or takes extreme steps like trying to formally annex parts of the West Bank.
But those caveats should not obscure the fact that it was a Democratic president who so thoroughly failed in pushing Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to accept a ceasefire deal—and that Biden’s incompetence is what has allowed Trump to take a victory lap before even taking office.
This failure had catastrophic consequences. According to the official death toll, Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza. Public health researchers estimate the actual death toll, which will only be known after buried bodies after pulled from the omnipresent rubble, is far higher.
A majority of the dead are women, children, and the elderly, according to public health data from the Gaza health ministry, and most of the younger men killed likely had nothing to do with the attack on October 7. A tracker maintained by Al-Jazeera shows that 17,492 children have been killed in Gaza since October 7. It means that, on average, Israel’s war has killed more than one child per hour since October 7. Gazans who have survived—the vast majority of whom are internally displaced—are missing limbs, family and friends, homes, schools, hospitals, and any semblance of a return to a pre-war reality that was itself dominated by a devastating Israeli blockade.
When I spoke this summer with two American doctors who had recently returned from volunteering in Gaza, they had no doubt they had witnessed a genocide. They are not alone in that conclusion. Along with many genocide scholars, including some who are Israeli Jews, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have since concluded that Israel is guilty of genocide. Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
The atrocities that Gazans and people across the world have seen for the past 15 months could not have happened without the United States and the billions of dollars in weapons it continues to provide to Israel. If Biden had celebrated the destruction of Gaza, the steady flow of American-made bombs would have been ghoulish but legible. Instead, for the better part of a year, Biden has tried and failed to end the war while funding it.
The reason why was always the same: He refused to use America’s extensive leverage over Israel. Biden reportedly said mean things about Netanyahu behind his back and maybe even sometimes said those things directly to the Israeli prime minister, but he never issued a true ultimatum. He scolded but he did not demand.
This was the worst possible combination. It allowed Netanyahu to help rebuild his domestic political standing by publicly flaunting Biden, while also continuing the war with America’s bombs. The overall effect was to allow Israel to flip the table and assume the role of superpower.
Biden’s defenders, of course, tell a different story. Theirs has always been some version of: It could have been worse. For months, they pointed to having prevented Israel from invading Lebanon. Then Israel invaded Lebanon—with the Biden administration offering perplexing tacit support that contradicted its previous position. The potentially positive changes in the region like the decapitation of Hezbollah contributing to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria have been effectively accidental rather than the result of well-thought-out plans.
Like with former President Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, meritocrats atop America’s foreign policy establishment facilitated failure. Instead of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, there was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and senior Middle East adviser Brett McGurk—a former William Rehnquist clerk who went to Iraq in 2004 as a legal adviser to help shape the George W. Bush’s administration’s post-invasion policies in the country.
When it comes to Israel and Gaza, Sullivan is perhaps best known for writing a horrifically timed Foreign Affairs essay that hit newsstands just after October 7. “Indeed,” he claimed in a line excised from the online version of the article, “although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
Stories like these have minimized or disregarded the many steps these men were taking to stifle dissent within their own government. As ProPublica reported, Blinken rejected the conclusion of two US government bodies that Israel was deliberately blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza. The problem was that American law blocks presidents from providing military assistance to countries that restrict access to US humanitarian assistance. Reality was ignored to keep the weapons flowing.
Like Bundy, who ended up in charge of the Ford Foundation despite his role in dragging America into Vietnam, Sullivan and McGurk have been keen to rehabilitate their images. In a feature in The Atlantic, they are depicted as good men trying to secure that “single day of success” at the negotiating table needed to end the war—only to be stymied by obstacles big and small like McGurk leaving his passport at home on the way to one of his countless failed missions abroad.
Still, it would be a mistake to blame this war primarily on Biden’s staff. The most charitable thing that can be said about them is that they served their boss within the constraints he placed on them. It was Biden, in the end, who decided not to use US leverage. Netanyahu and his staff knew that. As a result, anyone negotiating on the president’s behalf was all but certain to fail. As Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who is now the president of the US/Middle East Project, said in March, “I think many of us who had very low expectations of the US and of Biden have had a rude awakening as to how much lower the actual performance has been [compared] to even the lowest of low expectations.”
Perhaps most maddeningly, Biden should have known better than almost anyone how Netanyahu would try to manipulate him. As vice president, he had had a front-row seat as the Israeli prime minister tried to tank President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal—including by speaking directly to Congress. Instead of holding Netanyahu accountable during the Obama administration, Biden repeatedly tried to shield him from consequences. As he reportedly told once told a Netanyahu aide earlier in the Obama administration, “Just remember that I am your best fucking friend here.”
His constant sidling up to Israel ignored one of the most obvious facts about US-Israeli relations: The fear of real consequences, not cajoling, is what gets Israeli leaders to respond to American presidents. That could be seen in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan stopped Israel’s bombardment of West Beirut by calling Prime Minister Menachem Begin to warn that the Lebanon war was threatening the “entire future relationship” between the two nations. As Reagan wrote in his diary, “I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with [its] arms blown off.” Twenty minutes later, a cowed Begin called to say he’d ordered a halt to his army’s artillery fire. Biden never had his version of that call.
His actions were rooted in a deep-seated affinity for Israel and the ideals the Jewish state was more likely to espouse when he was a younger man. While he also appears to have been motivated by more crass—and increasingly outdated—domestic political calculations, he considered himself a true friend of the country and its people. In other contexts, Biden’s loyalty to someone he decided was the underdog proved to be a virtue. In this one, his biases enabled atrocities. It was one of his own former officials who told me in the early months of the war, “The President does not seem to acknowledge the humanity of all parties affected by this conflict.”
A less stubborn and more reflective president might now be reconsidering Gates’ knock on him. Was he wrong again? Had he abetted one of America’s first foreign policy catastrophes of the century by voting for the invasion of Iraq only to take the helm for another? What did it mean that Trump—the reality TV buffoon replacing a former Senate Foreign Relations chairman who sees himself as a master statesman—is the one who appears to have gotten what Biden could not?
And yet, if Biden is one thing it is a believer. As the press conference announcing the deal yesterday ended, a reporter yelled to him as he walked away: Who should get credit, you or Donald Trump?
“Are you joking?” asked Biden in one of his final acts as president.
There was time for one more pat on the back.
