What is Joe Biden’s endgame in Gaza?
I’ve been asked that question repeatedly in recent days. What does Biden see as the desired outcome in the Gaza Strip, as he backs an assault by Israel that has lasted more than three weeks and, as of October 30, has killed 8,306 Palestinians in Gaza, including 3,457 children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as reported by Defense of Children International – Palestine?
The question assumes that Biden actually had a plan in backing Israel from October 7, when Hamas launched its bloody attack, resulting in the death of over 1,300 Israelis and taking some 230 hostages. That’s a faulty assumption. Instead, Biden was committed to supporting Israel’s actions in response to the attack, responses which, from the outset, were clearly intended to go far beyond anything that could reasonably be called “self-defense.”
Therefore, in order for Biden to have had an endgame, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have had to have an endgame. He didn’t, and that was also clear from the beginning. His declaration that Israel was going to “eliminate Hamas” was empty sloganeering echoing the disastrous Global War On Terror, not a tactical aim. More to the point, Israel embarked on a campaign of bombing civilian sites throughout the entire Gaza Strip, including areas to which it had ordered Palestinians to flee. As the Israelis themselves said, their goal in the bombing campaign was to maximize damage, not precision.
Biden’s goals in all of this have been short-term. He tried to delay Israel’s ground operation so that he wouldn’t have to explain to the American people why a record number of U.S. citizens were killed by Israel’s decision to ignore the welfare of the captives. Beyond those American citizens, Biden, despite his rhetoric, has shown no more concern for the hostages than Netanyahu, who has treated all of the hostages as a political tool.
Initially, Biden hoped that Egypt and perhaps even Jordan could be convinced to take in the people of Gaza that Israel would drive out. But neither King Abdullah nor President Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi were receptive to an idea that would throw their countries into massive turmoil and rob them of their credibility by making them accessories to an ethnic cleansing campaign by Israel that could very well turn out to be more massive than the 1947-49 campaign.
That leaves Biden without any sort of endgame. Neither he nor most Israelis can even imagine allowing Palestinians to determine their own fate and choose their own leadership. That would be much too close to acknowledging their basic rights, and Biden, and certainly Netanyahu, can’t have that.
Instead, Biden falls back on nonsense like a two-state solution and paying off the Saudis to normalize their relations with Israel. Ultimately, he is in this position because he blindly supported Netanyahu’s strategy, born of the same flawed thinking that led Israel to nurture Hamas in the 1980s in the first place: using the Islamist group to undermine the Palestinian Authority, which, because it was willing to sell out just about any Palestinian interest in the name of getting a state, was a greater threat to the Israeli right’s eliminationist agenda.
With no strategy behind the wanton destruction in Gaza and the more subtle, creeping ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank, Biden and his representatives Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield can only continue to run interference for Israel while mouthing disingenuous platitudes about efforts to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza.
On Tuesday, in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Blinken—when he wasn’t being interrupted by protesters rightly calling him out for his support of Israel’s actions—mentioned one piece of what Biden wants to see after the dust settles.
“At some point, what would make the most sense would be for an effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza,” Blinken said, again glossing over the root of all the trouble: the inconceivability of Palestinians making their own decisions. That’s aside from the absolute lack of any credibility the PA has now, which has only been diminished even more dramatically by its unwillingness to defend the Palestinian people in either the West Bank or Gaza since October 7.
Biden’s search for an endgame
As the days grind on and the death toll in Gaza grows during Israel’s aerial bombardment of the 2.2 million helpless Palestinians in the Strip, so have voices of protest in the United States and elsewhere. One of the good things for progressives in the United States is that Biden is a consummate politician. Whatever values he might hold, they’re easily shed if he understands that they threaten him politically. That’s the only reason there has been anything positive in his administration because he knows that progressives had played a major role in his electoral victory, and he needs to keep them on board.
Unfortunately, as I’ve repeatedly noted, Biden mistakenly believes that the issue of Israel is a significant one for him electorally in 2024. He thinks that his blind support for Israel will win him pro-Israel support that he didn’t have in 2020. It’s a disastrous political miscalculation.
Electoral concerns do not fully explain his disastrous policy toward Palestine since the very start of his administration, but it does offer a partial motivation, especially when it concerns his obsession with a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal. But even at the height of Biden’s support for Israeli actions, it is clear that pro-Israel forces that oppose him are unmoved. However, now he has alienated the American Arab and Muslim communities to a degree one might have thought impossible given Republican Islamophobia. And progressives are being forced to choose between a fascist madman in Trump and a purveyor of genocide in Biden. That’s a recipe for immobilization, which Biden cannot afford, with clear disapproval ratings despite a strong economy and polls showing him trailing Trump.
Biden’s weakness as a leader, utter lack of ethics, and absence of any serious thought in his administration on a strategy for the Middle East left him in a confused position when, as he was repeatedly warned would happen, Palestine and Israel erupted into a level of violence that is already rivaling even the 1947-49 war in carnage, death, and destruction.
So, when it started, he simply did what American presidents always do: he ran cover for Israel. But this wasn’t like the other times. The Hamas attack was unprecedented in Israeli history, and the entire populace was shocked, traumatized, and, most of all, enraged. Israel isn’t just isolating and bombing Gaza this time, it is killing at a rate it has never done before, while cutting off the entire Strip from water, food, medicine, fuel, in short, everything. And this is being broadcast throughout the world.
Biden remains committed to Israel’s murderous campaign, and has even attacked the many American Muslims and Jews, along with a handful of Congress members who have called for a ceasefire as, in the words of his spokesperson, “repugnant” and “disgraceful,” among other things.
But in more recent days, Biden has been forced to at least hint that there needs to be an end to this slaughter. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday, “We do not believe that a ceasefire is the right answer right now,” adding that, “We do not support a ceasefire at this time.”
This was a slight change in tone, implying that the time when Biden would support a ceasefire was coming at some future point. Yet it’s very difficult to see Biden doing that as long as Netanyahu is pressing forward with his offensive and that action is supported by the vast majority of Israelis and American supporters of Israel, even if many, perhaps most, of them would have preferred Israel try to free the hostages before taking more aggressive action.
Biden lays out shallow thinking
On October 25, at a press conference in the Rose Garden with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Biden laid out a very vague notion of what he envisioned when the current Israeli onslaught is over.
“[T]here’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October the 6th. That means ensuring Hamas can no longer terrorize Israel and use Palestinian civilians as human shields,” Biden began, immediately defaulting to a framework that is meant to deflect all culpability from Israel. “It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution.”
Biden presented this as if it is something new, when, in fact, it represents a desperate clinging to a fantasy that hasn’t been feasible since he was still representing the conservative wing of the Democrats in the Senate.
Biden is also reacting to the desperation of liberal supporters of Israel who have clutched at the Hamas attack on Israel as “proof” that a two-state solution is the only one that can work, a mantra that is as false today as it has been for the decades that these folks have been parroting it.
Biden then tried to put a new wrinkle on this threadbare case.
“In the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with leaders throughout the region — including King Abdullah of Jordan, President Sisi of Egypt, President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, and just yesterday with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — about making sure there’s real hope in the region for a better future; about the need — and I mean this sincerely — about the need to work toward a greater integration for Israel while insisting that the aspirations of the Palestinian people will be part — will be part of that future as well.”
Here, Biden gives the game away. His words continue to show that he is obsessively committed to the Israel-Saudi normalization deal while seeing Palestinian rights as an afterthought, a small “part of the future” that Israel enjoys as a full trade and military partner of Saudi Arabia.
But these are just old ideas rehashed, none of them even Biden’s. His “two-state” thinking is a mere echo of the monotonous rhetoric from Washington since Bill Clinton. And his normalization idea is a mere continuation of Donald Trump’s policy, a policy which Trump, like Biden, also promoted as “good for the Palestinians.”
The reason so many people are puzzled about Biden’s strategy or vision for an endgame is that he has neither.