https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/23/joe-biden-young-voters-israel-palestine-arab-muslim-americans
There’s a big reason Joe Biden is losing younger voters: Israel and Palestine
The US president’s hawkish support for Israel has alienated younger voters, progressives, and Arab and Muslim Americans
The
2024 presidential contest should not be close. Joe Biden’s opponent,
Donald Trump, is a bigot, a liar and a crook, with dozens of credible
sexual assault allegations, a disastrous track record of enabling
sadistic racism in both his policy and his rhetoric, a frank admission
of his own authoritarian ambitions, and 92 pending felony charges.
The
Republican party that the former president leads has become beholden to
a small but extremely powerful base of voters with wildly unpopular
social views, particularly regarding abortion – views that have driven
the Republicans to election losses in virtually all major contests since
the summer of 2022. Voters hate them, and reject their vision for the
US; few politicians have ever been so unpopular as Trump is, and few
political platforms have ever seemed so determined to alienate and anger
voters as the Republican party’s.
Yet Joe Biden could lose. If the election were held today, it’s likely that he would. Much was made of a New York Times/Siena poll,
published earlier this month, that showed the US president losing to
Trump in five key swing states. The Biden campaign largely downplayed
the numbers, shrugging that the election is far away.
Now,
a new NBC poll also shows Biden in dire straits, with his approval
rating falling to the lowest it has ever been: 40%. The poll found that
he was faring especially poorly with Democrats and young voters, large
numbers of whom are dissatisfied with his handling of an issue that is
exposing a growing divide within the party: Israel’s assault on
Palestinians in Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attack.
From
nearly the first moments of Israel’s war, the Biden administration has
staunchly supported its Middle East ally, and allowed little public
daylight between their own official statements and those of Israel’s
rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The aid and arms deals
continue to flow to Israel unconditioned, even as Israeli bombings have
now killed more than 14,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than
5,000 children and displaced upwards of a million people.
The
hawkish support for Israel’s war has been intense, with rhetoric from
the White House often appearing indifferent or outright hostile to
concerns about the deaths of Palestinian civilians. On 10 October,
Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
described calls for a ceasefire as “wrong”, “repugnant” and
“disgraceful”. “There are not two sides here,” Jean-Pierre said,
signaling that the White House would not brook any concern for
Palestinian lives.
In an especially disturbing
moment, Biden himself cast doubt on the official death toll from the
Gaza health ministry – saying on 27 October that he had “no confidence in the number the Palestinians are using” – even though figures from this agency have been previously deemed reliable
by the United Nations and international human rights agencies. The
implication seemed to be that the Palestinians were cynically
overstating the number of their dead, and that the real number was some
smaller, supposedly more acceptable figure.
Since
he made that comment, the Palestinian casualties in Gaza are said to
have nearly doubled. It’s unclear whether Biden believes it.
As
the corpses pile up and Gaza’s buildings tumble down, the Biden
administration has seemed to hedge on this unqualified pro-Israel,
pro-war stance, at least at the margins. People identified as
“administration officials” have given off-the-record quotes expressing “frustration” and “concern”
with the Israelis’ determination to press forward with a Gaza invasion
without any long-term plan for the region. Asked if the Israelis were
making any real effort to minimize civilian casualties, the US national
security council spokesman, John Kirby, said: “We have seen some
indications that there are efforts being applied in certain situations
to try to minimize, but I don’t want to overstate that.”
Alon Pinkas of Haaretz interpreted
those remarks as a signal of a growing distaste for the Israeli
operation within the Biden US security state. This is what amounts to
distancing from the Biden administration when it comes to Israel’s
operation in Gaza: hedged off-the-record statements about long-term
strategy, and a single response to a question of whether Israel is
acting as if it cares about preserving innocent Palestinian lives that
amounts to a coded and heavily euphemistic “no”.
That’s
the official line. But there are growing indications that the
Democratic party is heading for a revolt over the issue. Young voters
are not the only ones who are angry. Arab and Muslim American voters are
voicing outrage at Biden’s stance, endangering his re-election
prospects nationwide but especially in the crucial battleground state of
Michigan, which is home to a large Muslim American voting bloc.
Even within the party bureaucracy itself, there are signs of trouble. The state department has fielded an unusual number of internal complaint memos about US policy over the issue; large numbers of Democratic congressional staffers joined a Washington DC protest calling for a ceasefire.
The House voted to censure
representative Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan, the only Palestinian
American in Congress, over her calls for Palestinian liberation –
particularly her use of the phrase “from the river to the sea”, which
Tlaib explained was a call for peace, freedom, dignity and equality for
all in the region, but which her detractors alleged was an antisemitic
call for Jewish elimination. (Such has been the nature of much of the
debate around the conflict in the halls of US power: arguments over
rhetoric have frequently distracted from substantive issues of policy.)
But that did not stop
a growing number of her fellow Democratic members of Congress from
joining her in calls for a ceasefire. The White House may be calling
them “repugnant”, but the pro-ceasefire camp in Congress looks more and
more like the future of the Democratic party: it is younger, it is
further to the left, and it is majority non-white.
Handwringing
about Biden’s age and its relevance is overstated. But few issues have
done more to highlight the problem of gerontocracy within the Democratic
party, and of the growing generational gap in US politics,
than this internal dispute over Israel-Palestine. In a way, the divide
between Biden and his loyalists on the one hand, and the pro-ceasefire
left and Democratic base on the other, might be a matter of historical
references.
Biden comes from a generation that
came of age much closer in time to the Holocaust; he is in that sense
perhaps more acutely aware of Jewish vulnerability – and certainly more
convinced that Zionism’s nationalist project can mitigate it – than
younger people are. The younger staffers, state department
functionaries, members of Congress, and voters, meanwhile, are not
thinking of the second world War, but of the war on terror; of September
11, and the disastrous, brutal and ultimately futile wars of revenge
that the US fought in its aftermath.
Each side
is proceeding from what they feel are the definitive lessons of their
era – the 20th century for Biden, and the 21st century for the
pro-ceasefire camp. The results of the next election may well depend on
whether they can find each other in time.