It was a messy compromise. On Friday, after a week of wrangling, the United Nations security council (UNSC) staggered across the finish line, approving a watered-down bid to boost aid to Gaza and calling for urgent steps “to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities”.
The US, a staunch ally of Israel, abstained to allow the 15-member council to adopt the resolution. Joe Biden’s allies will claim that it represents progress of sorts. But it will have little impact on the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe as Israel’s bombardment continues.
And to get even there, the president gave the impression of a man being dragged to the dentist for a root canal.
Like America after 9/11, Israel has squandered much global goodwill following the 7 October terrorist attack in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 taken hostage.
There is instead global outrage over its ruthlessly imprecise prosecution of the war. The death toll in Gaza now stands at 20,000. Most people have been driven from their homes. The World Food Programme says half of Gaza’s population is starving.
“While it is clear that Israel has the absolute right to respond militarily against a brutal terrorist attack, it is also clear that [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s rightwing, extremist government is waging that war in a deeply reckless and immoral way,” US senator Bernie Sanders said in a floor speech this week. “A just cause for war does not excuse atrocities in the conduct of that war.”
Yet by wielding the threat of a veto, Washington forced days of vote delays and negotiations at the UNSC.
It objected to an initial draft that called for “an urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities”. It also ensured that the resolution does not end Israel’s control over all aid deliveries to 2.3 million people in Gaza.
The US continues to oppose a ceasefire, contending that it would only benefit Hamas. Earlier this month the 193-member UN general assembly demanded a humanitarian ceasefire, with 153 states voting in favour of a move that had been vetoed by the US in the security council days earlier.
Critics say Biden, praised for the empathy he displayed during the global pandemic in 2020, has certain blind spots.
He seemed strangely disconnected regarding the plight of Afghan civilians after America’s botched withdrawal. He questioned the reliability of the Palestinian death toll while failing to capture the emotional weight of dying children.
His grudging, inch-by-inch concessions over the latest resolution should come as no surprise given his lifelong faith in Israel and its right to defend itself – seemingly at any cost.
He has described himself “a Zionist in my heart” and told how his father impressed on him the value of establishing the Jewish homeland in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Biden has met every Israeli prime minister over more than half a century in elected office, starting with Golda Meir in 1973. As they were posing for a photo after their meeting, Biden often recalls, she whispered to him that Israel had a “secret weapon” to protect them — “we have no place else to go”.
Less well known is an anecdote related by prime minister Menachem Begin, who in 1982 was grilled by the Senate foreign relations committee in Washington about Israel’s allegedly disproportionate use of force in Lebanon.
The Times of Israel reported in 2020: “‘A young senator rose and delivered a very impassioned speech – I must say that it’s been a while since I’ve heard such a talented speaker – and he actually supported Operation Peace for the Galilee,” Begin told Israeli reporters after he returned to Jerusalem.
“The senator – Biden – said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.
“I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin said. “I said to him: ‘No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war … sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.’”
From 1990 to the present, Biden was the Senate’s biggest ever recipient of donations from pro-Israeli groups with more than $4m, according to the Open Secrets database, well ahead of fellow Democrats Robert Menendez and Hillary Clinton at just under $2.5m each. In the aftermath of the 7 October attacks, all his empathy was on display and he has since urged Congress to send Israel $14bn in military aid.
Aaron David Miller, a former state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues, says: “Alone among modern American presidents, his bond and/ or experience with Israel is unique. His preternatural support was guaranteed. It’s his default position to accommodate, not to confront.
“I don’t think you can underestimate the impact on him emotionally and personally of the brutality and savagery of October 7 and the hostage situation.”
The US position has evolved in response to the exponential increase of Palestinian deaths and the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Washington is now pressing Israel to find different ways to prosecute the war to minimise casualties and create corridors for humanitarian aid, as well as to plan for the long term.
But Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adds: “If the president were on this call, he would say we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if it wasn’t for October 7 and, while I understand that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t begin on October 7, it reached a new level of brutality and violence that we had not witnessed, and that’s on Hamas.
“All of this reinforces the president’s disposition. [The Biden administration] wants to see a fundamental change in the pictures and the ground campaign in Gaza in January.
“The deeper you get into the spring without that happening, the more they’re going to be very concerned about the impact this could have on the president politically.”
Indeed, for all Biden’s pro-Israel instincts, the countervailing forces include his own political survival heading into likely rematch with Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election.
Nearly three quarters of voters aged between 18 and 29 disapprove of the way Biden is handling the conflict in Gaza, according to New York Times/Siena College poll.
Come November, some might be tempted by the clarity of a pro-ceasefire candidate like Cornel West or simply not vote at all. Biden has often managed to hover somewhere in the middle of the Democratic party: when it moved left, he went with it.
As more Democrats shift in favour of a ceasefire and imposing conditions on military aid, the president may find himself not leading but following.
