President Joe Biden arrives back at the White House in Washington, ending his weekend in Delaware a day earlier than planned, on April 13.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times News Service
When Joe Biden interrupted his weekend beach reverie to rush back to Washington to attend to the Iranian attack on Israel, he subtly underlined the complexities of several relationships: Israel and the United States. The Democratic Party and American Jews. Mr. Biden and the progressive wing of his own party. American statecraft and American politics.
The United States has several complicated special relationships, a phrase that Winston Churchill introduced in his landmark 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. There are the ties between Britain and the United States, frayed by a late-18th century independence revolution and an early-19th century land and maritime war but generally robust, especially in the 20th century. There is the link between the United States and Canada, complicated because of the size and power differential between the two countries and recurring trade tensions but reflecting a common border and, generally, common outlooks.
But the special relationship between Israel and the United States – sometimes rock-solid, sometimes rocky – is one with profound global and domestic implications, seldom more so than in a period when Israel is under worldwide criticism for its reaction to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and when Mr. Biden is struggling to keep together his political coalition in the face of a second election battle with former president Donald Trump.
All these complexities converged in recent days when Iran, with its massive though not massively destructive drone attack, widened a Middle East war that has caused mass destruction, mass casualties, mass protests and threatens mass realignments of political allegiances in the United States only a half-year from a vital election.
No American personnel ever have been in boots-on-the-ground combat on behalf of Israel, but American armaments and anti-missile defence weapons have been a major part of the Jewish state’s military profile for three-quarters of a century. In this weekend’s confrontation, the United States complemented Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defence system by shooting down, from aircraft and offshore naval vessels, some of the Israel-bound drones.
That action came with Mr. Biden’s weekend reassurances to Benjamin Netanyahu of what he told the Israeli Prime Minister was “America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel.” Although several American presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama, have had frosty relationships and, in some cases, specific public breaks, with Israel, the relationship has endured.
None of those breaks was as significant as Mr. Eisenhower’s condemnation of the 1956 joint British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt in the Suez crisis. But few presidents have been in a political iron vise as difficult as the one Mr. Biden confronts today.
The Hamas invasion of Israel last autumn drew immediate sympathy, and immediate support, from Mr. Biden and most American political figures. But the ensuing destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza swiftly caused important and unprecedented divisions among Americans and among the country’s political leaders. In Democratic primaries in several states – including the 2024 election swing state of Michigan, with its large Arab-American population – voters expressed impatience and, even more damaging to the President, disapproval of Biden administration policies in the Middle East.
At the same time, Mr. Biden increasingly has expressed opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s aggressiveness while other prominent American officials, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, a long-time supporter of Israel and a resident of a Jewish-oriented enclave of Brooklyn, have called for new elections that would produce an alternative prime minister in Israel.
This comes at a moment when about a third of Americans believe the way Israel is responding to the Hamas invasion is unacceptable, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
Mr. Biden, an accomplished diplomatic dancer with years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (and as chair of the panel in the early years of the 21st century), faces a difficult political gavotte.
He must retain the support of progressives who are an essential element of the Democratic electoral coalition – and who are increasingly critical of Israel and sympathetic with the Palestinian cause – even as he does not alienate the Jewish voters who are a sturdy part of the Democratic calculus and who could help provide the decisive margin in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois, all now considered battlegrounds.
Jews have voted for the Democratic nominee in every election since 1924, three times (in the Franklin Roosevelt campaigns of 1940 and 1944 and the Lyndon Johnson campaign of 1964) reaching the 90-per-cent level and five times (in 1932 and 1936 for FDR, in 1960 for John F. Kennedy, in 1968 for Hubert Humphrey and in 1992 for Bill Clinton) at the 80-per-cent level. On average, Jews have given the Democratic presidential nominee 71 per cent of their vote since 1968. Mr. Biden took 68 per cent of Jewish votes in 2020.
American presidents always say that their postures in diplomatic matters are separate from domestic considerations, but the one inevitably bleeds into the other. Mr. Biden has in fact defied some of his party’s constituent groups by repeatedly asserting his support for Israel but he has attempted to shift his political profile by matching that support with his skepticism, private and public, of Mr. Netanyahu’s policies and with his mounting criticism of the civilian toll in Gaza. Just last week, days before the Iranian drone attack, he told Mr. Netanyahu of his support for a ceasefire to allow increased humanitarian aid.
At the time, however, he made it clear that the United States would stand by Israel in the event of Iranian attacks on the country. With the onset of the drone attack, all the other complications crumbled.
But they crumbled with consequence. Although Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Sunday morning that the confrontation with Iran “is not over yet,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Netanyahu that the United States would not aid in any fresh counterattack on Iran. “Take the win,” the President told him.