Former President Barack Obama speaks to attendees at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum on Nov. 03, in Chicago, Illinois.Scott Olson/Getty Images
Poor Joe Biden just can’t catch a break.
It is bad enough that the U.S. President has to deal with foreign friends and enemies alike whose public positions on the Israel-Hamas conflict are intended for their own domestic political audiences, and which even run contrary to what they say and believe in private.
Just when Mr. Biden needs all the backup he can get, as he navigates perhaps the trickiest geopolitical challenge of his presidency amid disastrous domestic poll numbers, the man he served under as vice-president chose to make his job even harder.
Under pressure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza from within his own Democratic Party and from Arab leaders staring down the pro-Palestinian mobs taking over their streets, the last person Mr. Biden needed a lecture from on past U.S. failures in dealing with Israel was Barack Obama. But the former president chose to give one anyway.
“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean. That all of us are complicit to some degree,” Mr. Obama said last week on a podcast hosted by four of his former aides. He referred to the Israeli “occupation,” even though Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, and declared that “what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” as if to suggest the West is complicit.
There are few moral certainties surrounding the current crisis in Gaza. Unlike the war in Ukraine, in which Russia’s unprovoked invasion is the result of one ruthless dictator’s naked ambition, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a compendium of rights and wrongs that make it much harder to chart a clear moral path.
That’s why discerning U.S. leadership is so critical right now.
Mr. Obama offered what amounted to a self-indulgent graduate seminar. He sounded like a detached academic observer of the situation, rather than a former U.S. president whose words reverberate throughout the world. The American media naturally seized on them. “Obama breaks with Biden on how to support Israel,” ABC News declared.
The former president’s comments have also made it harder for Mr. Biden to hold together a fractious Democratic Party, whose progressive wing embraces the Palestinian cause, just as he embarks on a 2024 re-election campaign that promises to be brutal. In that respect, they play into the hands of the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump.
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state during Mr. Obama’s first term in the White House, offered a far more cogent and constructive analysis of the situation in Gaza. In an appearance on ABC’s The View, Ms. Clinton explained why trying to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas is a fool’s errand.
“Remember, there was a ceasefire on Oct. 6,” she said, referring to the day before Hamas militants launched the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. “Hamas chose to break it… [A] ceasefire done prematurely benefits those who do not abide by any laws, by any rules, by any human character value about the value of life.”
Even Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a bred-in-the-bone progressive, can see that. “I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, [a] permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel,” the former Democratic presidential candidate told CNN last week.
Mr. Biden has been around long enough to know that Hamas does not seek peace – that, as Ms. Clinton said, it uses civilians in Gaza “as, really, just tools of war.” That calling for a ceasefire now would allow Hamas to regroup and rearm.
“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders and that the Arab world will stand with us,” one Hamas member told The New York Times in a report this week on the origins of the Oct. 7. attack. Another said the aim of the attack was “to change the entire equation and not just have a clash.”
The images of civilian casualties and suffering emerging from Gaza are gut-wrenching. But they do not tell the whole story, and they also provide Hamas with the propaganda material it seeks to fan the flames of antisemitism throughout the Arab world and beyond.
If it is to be expected that some earnest undergraduates would take the bait, or even that some politicians who do not bear the weight of power might jump on the bandwagon, Mr. Biden has a deeper obligation to separate right from wrong and fact from fiction.
No one can envy him. He deserves praise and support, not lectures from Mr. Obama.