Opinion
Guest Essay
Biden’s
Moral Failure in Israel
Oct. 8, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/opinion/bidens-moral-failure-in-israel.html
Peter Beinart
By Peter Beinart
Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times.
Joe Biden’s presidency has a distinct origin story. As he
tells it, he was done with politics, happily retired from public life. That
changed after Donald Trump’s equivocal response to the 2017 white supremacist
march in Charlottesville, Va. It was then that Mr. Biden realized that Mr.
Trump and his allies threatened what he called the “soul of this nation”: its
commitment to equality. So he re-entered the fray.
Ever since, Mr. Biden has argued that championing equality
is the key to preserving American democracy at home and enhancing American
influence abroad. He began a 2019 campaign announcement video by noting that
Charlottesville was home to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the words “all men are
created equal.” In his acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National
Convention, he claimed America’s “great purpose” was “to be a light to the
world once again. To finally live up to and make real the words written in the
sacred documents that founded this nation that all men and women are created
equal.”
In his 2021 Inaugural Address, he described American history
as a “constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created
equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization
have long torn us apart.” He promised to make the United States once again a
“beacon to the world.” Since taking office, the president has framed a
commitment to equality as the answer not only to the rise of domestic white
nationalism but also to the authoritarian powers who threaten democracy overseas.
This self-presentation now lies in ruin. Through his
unwavering backing of Israel, Mr. Biden has effectively supported its unequal
treatment and oppression of Palestinians — especially in Gaza — and undermined
the ethical rationale for his presidency.
Domestically, Mr. Biden counterposed equality to his
predecessor’s ethnonationalistic tendencies. Mr. Trump has repeatedly implied
that Americans who aren’t white and Christian are not truly American. In 2016,
he said that Gonzalo Curiel, a judge born in Indiana, could not rule fairly on
civil lawsuits against Trump University because of his Mexican heritage, given
Mr. Trump’s promises to build a wall between this country and Mexico. In 2019,
Mr. Trump demanded that the four congresswomen of color who constitute the
so-called Squad — three of whom were born in the United States — “go back” to
the countries they were from. Mr. Biden, by contrast, declared in a May 2023
speech to Howard University’s graduating class that America was based on an
idea — equal rights — “not religion, not ethnicity.” Throughout his presidency,
Mr. Biden has depicted himself as defending that principle from authoritarian
impulses both at home and abroad.
But Israel’s political system is explicitly based on
religion and ethnicity. Its controversial 2018 nation-state bill declares that
Jews alone can “exercise national self-determination.” Most of the Palestinians
under Israeli control — those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — can’t
become citizens of the state that dominates their lives. A minority of
Palestinians who live within Israel’s 1967 borders do enjoy citizenship and the
right to vote. But when Arab Israeli politicians advanced a bill that would
have made legal equality between Arab and Jewish citizens a foundation of
Israeli law in 2018, the speaker of Israel’s parliament refused to allow a vote
on it because it would “gnaw at the foundations of the state.”
As I have previously argued, there was a Zionist tradition
that envisioned Jews living equally alongside Palestinians in a binational
state — although many Americans now take for granted that Israel gives Jews
legal supremacy.
But when it comes to Israel, Mr. Biden hasn’t supported
equality under the law. The war in Gaza has made that contradiction impossible
to ignore. It is most glaring when Biden expresses deep empathy for Israeli
suffering but relative indifference to the far larger number of dead
Palestinians, or when his administration seems to distinguish even between
American citizens, showing more concern for those murdered by Hamas than for
those killed by Israel’s military.
No wonder, according to a September survey by the Institute
for Global Affairs, Democrats consider Mr. Biden’s policy on Gaza his greatest
foreign policy failure. Young Americans are especially alienated by the chasm
between Mr. Biden’s actions and his stated ideals. A March poll by Harvard’s
Institute of Politics found that more than three-quarters of Americans under
the age of 30 disapprove of his policy toward Israel’s war in Gaza.
Mr. Biden’s near-unconditional support for Israel’s actions
has damaged his reputation overseas, as well. He has long claimed that the
United States, unlike Russia and China, defends a “rules-based” order in which
all countries, irrespective of their power, are bound by certain standards.
That rhetoric reached a crescendo after Russia tried to overrun Kyiv in
February 2022. At stake in Ukraine, Mr. Biden told a Polish audience the
following month, was the choice “between a rules-based order and one governed
by brute force.” That September, Mr. Biden told the United Nations that members
of the Security Council should “refrain from the use of the veto, except in
rare, extraordinary situations.” It was another swipe at Moscow, which during
Mr. Biden’s presidency had employed its veto seven times, and an effort to
associate the United States with a fairer international order, in which even
the most powerful nations cannot act with impunity. To strengthen those rules,
the Biden administration in July of last year reportedly ordered the United
States to share evidence on Kremlin officials that could help the International
Criminal Court in its investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine.
Then came the Oct. 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent
invasion of Gaza. In the war’s first seven months, the Biden administration
vetoed four resolutions concerning Israel and Palestine. Mr. Biden denounced
the I.C.C.’s chief prosecutor for requesting warrants for the arrests of Hamas
and Israeli leaders. While Mr. Biden has warned against Israel’s
“indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza and the loss of civilian life, he has also
repeatedly reiterated his support of Israel and supplied the country with vast
quantities of arms.
Whatever chance Mr. Biden had of convincing large numbers of
foreigners that the United States believed that international law applies to
all has now largely collapsed. Over the past year, according to the Pew
Research Center, the percentage of people who trust Mr. Biden “to do the right
thing regarding world affairs” has dropped by double digits in Britain, Japan,
Australia, Spain and Sweden — all key allies in the great power struggle Mr.
Biden is waging against Moscow and Beijing. Britons, Canadians and Italians
have less faith in Mr. Biden today than they had in George W. Bush in 2003, the
year he invaded Iraq.
Last month, in his final speech to the United Nations, Mr.
Biden acknowledged that “many look at the world today and see difficulties and
react with despair.” What he didn’t acknowledge is that for many who believe in
the vision of equality Mr. Biden himself once outlined, he has contributed to
that despair — by effectively treating Palestinians as lesser human beings, and
by treating Israel as above international law.
A few days before Mr. Biden’s speech, the Gaza Health
Ministry released a catalog of the names and ages of Palestinians killed in
this war. According to The Guardian, the first 100 pages are composed entirely
of the names of children who died under the age of 10. Their lives will need to
be accounted for when historians gauge how Mr. Biden shaped the “soul of this
nation.”
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a contributing Opinion
writer at The Times. He’s also a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism
at the City University of New York, an editor at large of Jewish Currents and
writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. His book “Being Jewish After
the Destruction of Gaza” is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.
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