Joe Biden will be remembered as a landmark U.S. president when it comes to America’s relationship with Israel — and maybe the last of his kind.
As a member of the generation that came of age in the years immediately after World War II and the establishment of Israel, Biden has throughout his political career been a friend of the version of Israel that dominated the discourse in those years. It was seen as an underdog country, central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, turned into an unlikely success story by a plucky people marked by the devastation of the Holocaust.
To Biden and his peers, Israel was seen as having laid a marker in the sand — not just for the Jewish birthright in the Holy Land but also for Western civilization in the Middle East.
Biden not only became the only U.S. president to visit Israel during wartime during a trip last October, but also, a little over a year before, visited Israel and declared himself “a Zionist” in conversation with Prime Minister Yair Lapid. This, in an era in which the word has become a slur in much of the West.
As Biden on Sunday announced he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place, the vision of a president who might approach the Jewish state with such warmth and admiration dissipated. However Biden chooses to deal with Israel in his remaining months in office, the fact is that Israelis are unlikely to be so lucky in the American leaders who will follow him.
Forget the gaslighting from Israel’s far-right government, which would have us believe that Biden has been bad for Israel.
That false impression is based on valid disagreements about how to conduct the Gaza War — and also on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal antipathy to the liberal world, and to the U.S. Democratic Party. Even if Biden held up some munitions to Israel in recent months, amid disagreements over the war in Gaza, the fact is that the administration mostly enabled Israel’s hugely unpopular effort to remove Hamas from Gaza despite the enormous cost in the lives of Gaza civilians, among whom Hamas is embedded and whose lives Hamas is knowingly and even giddily sacrificing.
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Moreover, the Biden administration has made mighty efforts since Oct. 7 to help Israel create an exit plan from the war it launched in reaction to the Hamas invasion — a gesture of friendship, as he understands how devastating a longer-term war in Gaza would be to Israel.
His plan would involve Israel agreeing to restore some version of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza and entering talks (which could last forever) on Palestinian statehood — and receiving in return an alliance with not just Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations, but also increased diplomatic ties to the West, arrayed against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
A proposal like this is a proposal born of respect. If Israel’s government were rational, it would embrace this plan with extreme prejudice, and even take some risks and make some sacrifices to bring it about. That’s especially true because, given how the tide of public sentiment has turned against Israel across the West since the onset of war, Israel is practically unlikely to have an American president present such a well-formed and advantageous plan to it ever again.
And Biden’s plan is a reasonable response to the challenge posed by Iran, which has surrounded Israel on all sides with proxy militias dedicated to its destruction.
I don’t think this is a high-probability scenario, but it is at least possible that Biden will be freed, in his lame-duck status, to try to push this project forward with some new fierceness. It could be interesting, if he does so, to see how Israel’s relationship with the U.S. evolves through the rest of his term.
But there are also other possibilities, depending on what happens with the project of replacing Biden.
The easiest thing for the Democrats will be to rally behind Harris, who has been somewhat cooler toward Israel than Biden, but not so much as to meaningfully threaten a serious downgrade in support from the U.S.
Whatever happens, the exit of Biden will be a changing of the guard. I do not believe that Harris is some sort of closet supporter of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, as some elements in the Israeli and Jewish right will likely suggest. She is a centrist and a former prosecutor, and a savvy political operator who understands how and why the U.S. must maintain a close relationship with Israel. She will support Israel, as would the other potential new leaders of the Democratic Party, and as American public opinion in fact demands.
But will she love Israel? Will she or the others manifest the emotional and visceral connection that Biden does?
I think not. In what is clearly and manifestly bad news for Israel, that ship has sailed.
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