As the war in Gaza drags into its eighth month, and as the Palestinian death toll mounts and their suffering continues to flood social media, and as Israeli hostages return as bodies rather than living people, Joe Biden and his national security team are continuing to try to thread a seemingly impossible policy needle: How do you maintain America’s traditional support for Israel while reining in the Netanyahu government’s prosecution of a war that, even according to the State Department, has likely violated international law? And how do you do all this while mollifying your domestic critics, both on the left and the right, on an issue that has become one of the most polarizing in a generation?
The answer, according to multiple administration officials and people close to the president’s national security team, seems to be: You can’t. Biden’s policy, which stems from his own deeply held views, has evolved with the war but has still managed to infuriate just about everyone. To wit: When Biden announced that he would be pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of the civilian carnage in Gaza, absolutely no one was happy with the micro-adjustment. The left sneered that it was too little too late, and the right screamed that Biden was abandoning Israel during a time of existential danger. Senior officials and Biden advisors sighed: What could they do that wouldn’t precipitate this kind of bipartisan fury?
On some level, it’s always been impossible to navigate these issues. It’s why this decade-old Jon Stewart bit about trying to discuss Israel-Palestine only to get yelled at by everyone is still so painfully relevant. “I don’t think there’s a path that pleases everyone,” said a senior administration official who is frustrated with both the policy and the response to it. “This is an issue that’s going to alienate and even infuriate large swaths of America.”
For decades, after all, America has committed itself to a foreign policy of bipartisan support for Israel, with very few conditions. And, despite the loud criticism from progressives over the past few months, most polling indicates that a majority of Americans believe this is the right course of action. They still see Israel as a key ally—even if Americans do increasingly feel bad for the Palestinians—which means there’s only so much wiggle room any president has, let alone one who hails from a generation of American politics when unflinching allyship was an article of faith. “Joe Biden’s support for Israel is reflexive; it’s not analytical,” said a source close to the administration. “Once you commit to that, there are costs to departing from that that are just as big as there are to sticking with it.”
Then again, some of the administration’s policy positions are simply irreconcilable with the complex reality of the situation. How do you allow Israel to wage a war with American-made weapons while telling it to limit the number of civilian casualties when you know that Hamas is doing everything it can to maximize Palestinian casualties to further isolate Israel as a pariah state? How can you simultaneously appease critics on the left, who want you to cut off Israel entirely, and critics on the right, who want you to support Israel even more while disregarding the Palestinians, whom they see as terrorist sympathizers and unreliable narrators of their own demise?
“They’re trying to strike a balance between ensuring that Hamas doesn’t emerge from this war and reconstitute itself on the one hand, and, on the other hand, having the Israelis conduct the war in a way that minimizes the civilian loss of life and addresses humanitarian needs of the population,” said retired ambassador Dennis Ross of the Biden administration’s policy. “That’s a hard circle to square. These objectives are in and of themselves very hard to reconcile.”
The Leaks
Before this war, the Biden administration resembled the largely leak-free Obama White House. The national security and foreign policy teams were disciplined, earnest, and eager to right the ship of state after four years of the Trump wrecking ball. Much to the chagrin of D.C. journalists who had grown fond of the informational sieve that was the Trump White House, after January 2021, leaks were suddenly hard to come by. This administration, reporters complained, was boring.
That has all changed with the war in Gaza. There have been constant petitions, resignations, and—worst of all if you’re sitting on the N.S.C.—leaks, including those of classified information. Some administration officials tell me it’s the result of a deepening frustration with an insular policymaking process where only a select few trusted by Biden—Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Amos Hochstein, Brett McGurk—have true input.
But others ascribe the frustrations—and the leaks they spawn—to the unbridgeable divide outlined by Ross. When it came to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, there were internal disagreements on tactics, not on strategy. The question was more Should Washington send Kyiv ATACMS and F-16s? not Should we stop supporting Ukraine and agree with Vladimir Putin? Now, there are people in the administration who don’t like what they perceive as the president’s wavering on his commitment to Israel, and others who feel just as strongly that the president should abandon Israel entirely.
When the I.C.C. requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, I’m told, some in the administration wanted to support the court’s request, while others demanded the U.S. return to the Trump policy of imposing sanctions on the court. How do you reconcile that? “The spectrum of policy debate is much wider and the views are much more fervently held,” said a second senior administration official, “and it leads to people becoming more radical in how they express those opinions.” (“[Biden] knows,” N.S.C. spokesman John Kirby told me when I called him for comment. “He’s not insensitive that there are many views and many opinions and there’s a lot of critique for everything he’s doing, but he believes that trying to do both things”—supporting Israel, an American ally, and getting aid to Palestinians, “who didn’t ask for this war”—“while being very candid with the Israelis, is still the right approach.”)
In other words, if people have such radically opposed and mutually incompatible policy proposals, and the president believes what he believes, how productive would a more inclusive policymaking process even be? And is it then surprising that those whose input is not included turn, as one senior administration official put it, to “policymaking by other means”?
The Politics
Senior foreign policy and national security officials have, at this point, largely accepted their fate. Anything they decide on Israel-Palestine will be unpopular with White House critics on both ends of the political spectrum. Anything that hems in or punishes Israel will be seen by the American left as cosmetic and ineffectual, and as a betrayal by the American right.
“It’s inevitable that we’ll lose some people for a period of time,” said the second senior administration official of the progressives frustrated with Biden’s Israel policy. “Some percentage of them will come back. If the war ends anytime soon and we get into the period of rebuilding and reconstruction [in Gaza], then we get even more of them back. I don’t think we’ll get all of them back. And I don’t think we had all of them before.”
That’s a sentiment I’ve heard a lot from Biden officials: How many of the president’s critics on this issue were ever in his camp, or even winnable? Would Republicans really ever flip their vote to Biden because of his support for Israel? And of the young people fuming on college campuses, how many of them even vote? There’s still a weary optimism that progressives, young people, and voters of color will pull the lever for Biden when faced with the choice between the man who tried to follow through on his promise of a Muslim ban and another with whom they disagree but who at least hears them and responds.
But there’s also a grim acceptance in Bidenland that there simply won’t be enough time before the election for the images from Gaza to recede and other concerns to take a front seat. The I.D.F. recently said that they will need another six months to root out Hamas, ceasefire talks have broken down, and both Hamas and Netanyahu refuse to end the war. After eight months of this horror, there’s an increasing sense that some Biden voters have been lost for good. “It’s unusual for foreign policy to be a prism through which people are expressing their discontent about their own society,” said the source close to the administration. “The plight of the Palestinians has become a way to conjure up the way people of color are treated here—this crisis has become an emotional touchstone that no policy solution can really address because we’re now swimming in a soup that is in many ways about us. I don’t think ending the conflict in Gaza would solve it. The genie’s out of the bottle.”