Israel exposes Obama-Biden friction

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An unexpected rift that has been brought out by the Israel-Gaza crisis is the passive aggression between Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Former aides to America’s 44th president have made it clear that they disapprove of how America’s 46th has been handling Israel since October 7. If Obama were in charge, they say, the US would be putting conditions on military aid to Israel and calling out Benjamin Netanyahu’s egregious failings. That is precisely the point, Biden’s people reply; only by hugging Israel closely can America exercise leverage over its actions. Without Biden’s embrace, there would be no temporary ceasefire, hostage-prisoner exchange or humanitarian aid getting through to Gaza.

Leaving aside the disquieting implication that Bibi needs to be arm-twisted to permit humanitarian relief, I am not sure the Biden supporters are winning this argument. About 15,000 Gazans have lost their lives, according to health authorities in the Hamas-controlled enclave. Even if 3,000 of those were Hamas fighters, that is still an unimaginably high toll (the equivalent to more than 250,000 British civilians, or 1.3mn Americans). How could any kind of “day after” political settlement be possible following death on that scale? Then again, I am not sure former members of the Obama team are winning the argument either. It is not as though Obama’s criticisms of Netanyahu had any effect when he was president. Quite the reverse; Israeli settlements continued to expand and Netanyahu broke all diplomatic protocol by giving a speech to US Congress attacking Obama’s Iran nuclear deal when he was in the midst of negotiating it. 

Leave Israel aside for a moment. My point is that there is not much love lost between Obama and Biden. Were it not for the fact that Donald Trump came in between their presidencies, we would be focusing a lot more on what divides these two men. Some of it is personal. Biden felt disrespected as vice-president. His advice was routinely ignored. Obama staffers did little to disguise that they saw Biden as someone who had to be tolerated, rather than solicited. He was from a different generation and learned his politics in an era that seemed to have lost its relevance. Biden felt slighted.

The friction between them was capped by Obama’s preference for Hillary Clinton over Biden in 2016 in spite of the fact that he had given eight years of loyal service. Obama thought Hillary was better equipped to win the election and preserve his legacy. We all know how that ended. Arguably both Obama and Hillary lost to Trump since she was seen as the continuity president. Only Biden, in his own mind, can defeat Trump. 

Some of their friction is also political. If you compare Obama’s foreign policy record to what Biden is doing, they are often on opposite sides. Obama doubled down on Afghanistan with his big troop surge; Biden pulled out precipitously in 2021. Obama responded weakly to Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea; Biden is all in for Ukraine. Obama talked about a pivot to Asia; Biden is doing it. Obama detested Netanyahu; Biden says they have been friends for more than 30 years (since Bibi was a staffer at Israel’s Washington embassy and Biden a youngish senator). “Bibi, I love you. I don’t agree with a damn thing you say,” Biden claims to have told him. Obama would agree with the second sentence but die a thousand deaths before uttering the first. 

Does any of this ultimately matter? After the Gaza pause ends, as it surely will, my guess is that this split will get worse. Reports of heated opposition to Biden’s Israel stance from within his administration, and the Capitol Hill walkouts by Democratic staffers, are no mirage. There is a genuine breach within the Democratic party, which also runs through Biden’s administration. The division is largely generational. Younger Democrats are far likelier to disapprove of Biden’s strategy than older ones. This is also reflected in the polls. As this war goes on, and when the Israel Defense Forces operation switches to southern Gaza, that generational divide is only likely to get more short tempered. In a very real sense, it is personified by Biden and Obama. 

It is extremely hard to picture how Israel gets out of its quandary, even were Netanyahu to be ejected. Hamas must be defeated but in the process many more civilians will die. Is there any other realistic prospect? In those circumstances it is hard to see how the Democrats’ generation gap would narrow. Rana, welcome back from Thanksgiving. Did you have any extended family conversations about this, and if so, did you also detect that age difference?

Recommended reading

• My column this week looks at the possibility that Nikki Haley could upend Trump. The odds are not high but a wild card Haley surge is by no means implausible.

• Do read this strikingly well argued and worrying Substack essay by Michael Podhorzer: “Is Biden’s age really the problem?” Podhorzer argues that the US economy is the problem; bringing in a fresh face as Democratic nominee would not make much of a difference.

• Few things are likelier to turn off the reader than seeing COP28 in the headline. That is a shame because few things matter more than our species’ ability to fight global warming — a prospect unlikely to be dramatically advanced by the United Arab Emirates-hosted event this year. My colleague, Pilita Clark, will be there — and covering her eighth COP. Sadly, Biden will not. Read Pilita’s expert (and decidedly not boring) primer.

• Finally, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my colleague, Gideon Rachman, alongside The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, for Gideon’s always high- calibre podcast, the Rachman Review. We talked about Trump versus Biden 2024 and other morale-boosting topics.

Rana Foroohar responds

Welcome back, Ed. Yes, indeed I did have conversations about Israel-Gaza over the holidays. We spent time with my daughter-in-law’s family, one of whom had to flee Israel with her small child as a result of the war. That side of the family, young and old, tends to see Biden’s support of Israel as proper and important. There are other young people on my side of the family that take the progressive college student approach to the conflict and seem to see the Palestinians as being on some sort of Black Lives Matter continuum of colonial oppression. I have to say, I think that this logic is weak. It’s as if we’ve all forgotten that Israel was created because 6mn Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and that the occupied territories were won during wars. Now, you can argue that the creation of Israel may have caused as many problems as it has solved. You can argue that Israel should have come up with a two-state solution and gotten out of the occupied territories sooner in the interest of peace. But either way, to equate what’s happening in the Middle East right now to America’s original sin of slavery, and/or to come up with some precisely measured hierarchy of victimhood that all right-thinking people must agree with is just wrong-headed. 

As I’ve said before, I see the conflict in Gaza as a three-part problem. First, Hamas is a terrorist group that orchestrated a massacre. Israel has a right to respond. Secondly, I think the US probably should be calling out Netanyahu’s failings and putting conditions on military aid (as Biden told him, don’t repeat our “mistakes” after 9/11). But we also have to step back and ask, what would be going on in the Arab world if Israel didn’t exist? I suspect nothing good. These countries have massive problems with modernity. They are oppressing half their populations and can’t seem to move towards democracy in any real and lasting sense. That’s why groups like Hamas flourish. Three things can be true at once. Sadly, that makes foreign policy quite difficult.