How Biden’s Israel Policy Could Become a Costly Error for the U.S.

This article was originally featured in Foreign Policy, the magazine of global politics and ideas. For news, expert analysis, and background on the conflict, read FP’s latest coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

In war, it is commonplace to note that the longer a conflict’s duration or the more intense it grows, the denser the pall of fog becomes that prevents the public from concurring on a common set of facts.

This principle was powerfully ratified with the bombing of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday, an event that drew claims and counterclaims in the hours that immediately followed the calamity, as well as a mounting sense of outrage over the likely death of hundreds of Palestinians, most of whom it can be safely assumed had nothing directly to do with the conflict itself.

First from Israel and then the United States, in the voice of U.S. President Joe Biden, came quick assertions that the explosion that visited devastation upon the hospital complex was the product of a failed rocket launched toward Israel by the Gaza-based militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and not an aerial attack by Israel. The Palestinian side and its supporters, of course, placed the blame squarely on Israel.

If still not wholly conclusive, as time passed and more evidence began to gather, the Israeli version of events has become increasingly plausible. Some important questions linger for both sides, though. Did Israel mount any previous attacks on the hospital, or urge its evacuation prior to the bombing, as some have claimed? And was the death toll at the hospital greatly inflated by Hamas or other Palestinian parties to maximize its propaganda value?

Whatever the case, we should expect many people to resist buying into the notion of a grievous wound inflicted on Palestinians by Palestinians. Such is the norm in most conflicts, where the opposing sides and their respective sympathizers typically buy into interpretations of events that comfort their preexisting views.

In this case, though, Biden’s statement that Israel was not to blame for the hospital attack is likely to be even less persuasive to a broad public than the norm because of the unusually strong support that Biden has shown for Israel since Hamas’ attack, which began on Oct. 7 and has killed at least 1,400 Israelis, most of them unarmed civilians.

In terms of recent history, Biden’s fervent and airtight support for Israel is oddly reminiscent of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s announcement of his country’s unlimited friendship with Russia on the very eve of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Xi’s unusually close identification with Russia is now seen by many as a serious tactical error, at a minimum. Russia planted both its feet on the wrong side of history, morally speaking, by launching a brutal and unprovoked 19^th century–style imperial war of territorial aggrandizement against a much smaller and weaker democratizing neighbor.

Biden’s emotional and barely nuanced support for Israel may also come to be seen as a costly error for the United States. That is not because Hamas’ tactics were in any way just. They were not, and there is no place for moral ambiguity about organized and murderous militia raids against villagers and kibbutz members. These were clear atrocities.

Rather, this potential criticism is because of Biden’s complete unwillingness thus far to discuss how Israel’s own behavior toward Palestinians living under its direct control, or on contested territory, has played a role in fueling violence in that region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s successive governments have presided over a steady expansion of Israeli settlements in lands claimed by Palestinians, and they have permitted countless and almost constant acts of small-scale violence, discrimination, and degrading arbitrary impositions against Palestinians.

Yet even within Biden’s own administration, some of the president’s aides have complained of the impossibility of raising such matters in internal conversations about U.S. policy since the war began.

The damage that may accrue to the United States as a result of this could come from two quarters. The first is that, at a time when the Middle East needs a diplomatic and honest broker more desperately than ever, the United States is seen evermore as an outright partisan in the region’s conflicts. The best that Biden has been able to do thus far is to issue a vague call for Israeli restraint.

None of this, it bears repeating, should be taken as a justification of the Hamas approach of conducting mass terror attacks against civilians. For years, though, Israel and the United States have made peaceful resistance by the Palestinians increasingly impossible. It is only logical, therefore, to expect that more and more violence will result. This was explained with great sensitivity and care by Peter Beinart in his recent New York Times column.

The second source of damage to the United States is closely related to the first and has to do with Washington’s diplomatic standing both in the Middle East and in the broader world. Not a few observers have begun to note that the biggest collateral damage to the United States in the recent violence between Israel and Hamas is to Washington’s image in the world. This is about far more than the already widely noted fury toward Israel and the United States that has been seen in many parts of the Arab and Muslim world in recent days. Beyond those regional confines, perhaps the most immediate impact will be to support in the Global South for the United States’ position in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

A graphic symbol of this shift came in the wake of the Gaza hospital bombing with the abrupt reversal in the willingness of Arab leaders from Egypt and Jordan (two of the United States’ closest quasi-allies in the region), as well as the head of the Palestinian Authority, to meet with Biden after his visit to Israel. Sure, this meeting seems to have been made impossible by the hospital bombing itself, but being convoked as a group to meet with the U.S. president as an afterthought or aside after Biden spent time in Israel also seems to have finally rubbed leaders in the Arab world the wrong way.

Even more fundamentally, at a level that goes beyond symbolism and optics, it seems likely that Biden wanted to work on pressuring Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to do more than allow his country to open a humanitarian aid corridor to Gaza. A broader and more important goal would be to get him to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees into Egypt. The same can be assumed about Jordan. But toward what end, and at what price?

If a U.S. president can no longer pull off the customary, if mildly patronizing, goal of bringing Arab leaders together for a group summit, then the feat of getting them to allow their countries to serve as an escape valve for Israel seems impossible.

That’s because Egypt, Jordan, and other neighboring countries seem to have reached a definitive conclusion about U.S. diplomacy in the region. Whenever there is a crisis, Washington’s first and strongest reflex is to help Israel through the exigencies of the moment rather than making strenuous efforts to resolve the more stubborn and enduring fundamental problems of the region—problems that neighboring Arab countries feel they are repeatedly asked to pay for. That the present crisis was sparked by a clear outrage committed by Hamas does not change this fact.

Israel has responded by vowing to completely eliminate Hamas, and some of its leaders have spoken not only of Hamas but also of Palestinians in Gaza more generally in dehumanizing and extremist ways. Even if one says “fair enough” with regard to Hamas, though, the means and the ensuing consequences of targeting the group matter enormously. The catastrophe at the hospital aside, Israel is said to have dropped more bombs on Gaza in a week than the United States dropped on Afghanistan in a typical year during its long-running war there. If that were not enough, Afghanistan is as vast as the U.S. state of Texas, while the Gaza Strip, with 2.5 million residents, is roughly the size of the U.S. city of Las Vegas.

Bombing on this scale, as well as the order to evacuate northern Gaza and Israel’s decision to cut off the water and electricity supply to Gaza, are concomitant with a goal of largely emptying Gaza of its Palestinian population—and this is consonant with an even broader and longer-running Israeli aim of gradually occupying or taking control of lands claimed and customarily inhabited by Palestinians. Who can believe that Palestinians, once evacuated from Gaza, would be allowed back onto lands they claim as their own?

The United States has long maintained that it supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But the reality is that little more than lip service has been paid to this goal, and with each passing crisis, Washington grows more and more aligned with Israel. As can be seen with Biden’s emotional public diplomacy, the more violent and outrageous that the behavior of militant Palestinian groups gets, the stronger this trend becomes.

A further word must be said in conclusion about the tactics of Hamas. As fully deserving of retaliation as this group is for its targeting of Israeli civilians for the most brutal and senseless of deaths, there is a problem with the frequent charge that Hamas uses the Palestinian population as human shields in this conflict. There is a narrow, tactical element of truth in this, in that Hamas has been accused of storing weapons and ammunition in civilian facilities, including mosques, universities, and residential buildings, and in this latest conflict, the group is holding nearly 200 people kidnapped from Israel as hostages in Gaza.

But this characterization also omits a lot of context: Namely, where would the place be from which Palestinians would be allowed to organize their defense and resistance? As has been widely noted, Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth. Is it conceivable that Hamas could build an above-ground headquarters that could survive the first hint of tension with Israel, which is armed by the most powerful nation on earth and protected with sophisticated shields, such as its Iron Dome anti-missile system? Never mind Hamas, though—who can presently imagine Palestinians being allowed to field any kind of army, or even a defense force?

This brings us back to the Beinart essay. As utterly reprehensible as Hamas is, until Palestinians are able to freely organize themselves politically or peacefully protest their shrinking purchase on land and on self-determination, this is what we are left with.

There is nothing commendable at all about terror, and nothing to justify it, either. But when human beings are reduced to utter desperation and oblivion, only awful things can be expected.