Could Bibi Netanyahu Sink Biden's Re-Election?
President Biden, like many Presidents before him, is confounded by Binyamin Netanyahu
It was one of the most striking images of 2023. The picture of President Biden bear-hugging an anxious Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is unforgettable. Biden, who is leading an existential fight for democracies in an age of democratic backsliding, embracing Israel’s strongman manqué. It was an odd couple, to be sure. And understandable — up to a certain degree.
The Hug screen capture via Times of Israel
A little context here: The President, now 81, was born on November 20, 1942, as World War II was being fought overseas. Everyone in Scranton, PA sacrificed for the Great War; that is from where the President came. And that landmark event of the 20th Century has been a benchmark for Biden’s moral life, beside his Roman Catholicism. The President referenced the wartime effort during the Second World War often in his administration’s Covid-19 response. The President also made sure to reward survivors of the Great War with no-cost VA health care entitlements.
Further, as patriarch, Biden, like his father before him, enshrined Holocaust remembrance as a part of Biden family values. “‘Never again’ was a promise my father first instilled in me at our family dinner table, educating me and my siblings about the horrors of the Shoah,” the President remarked on International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year. “It’s a lesson I’ve passed on to my own children and grandchildren by taking them to Dachau to understand for themselves the depths of this evil—and the complicity of those who knew what was happening, yet said nothing.”
And regarding the state of Israel, Aaron David Miller wrote, in Foreign Policy, “For Biden, who has a deeper history with Israel and its leaders stretching back decades and a love for the idea of the country and its people, the desire to accommodate and not confront is even greater.”
image: [Brendan Smialowski/AFP]
So, to put it mildly, the image was jarring of the President offering something approximating a “no limits friendship” to someone as autocratically-inclined as Binyamin Netanyahu. Having made a study of Netanyahu for several decades, I was worried about such a move and its consequences. I wrote in this newsletter on October 23:
Still, imagine that: The largest wholesale killing of Jews since the Holocaust is seen by many Progressives in the United States as a revolutionary, even anti-colonialist act of liberation. This is a harrowing sentiment. And yet it is a view gaining traction in the Global South — the majority of the world — and those voices of protest will continue to grow in number and volume should Netanyahu continue his operations in Gaza with a hammer and not a scalpel. A scalpel is used in restrained, precision cuts while a sledgehammer is an instrument of demolition. This is also precisely what Hamas wants Netanyahu to do — to overreact. To eschew the scalpel. For that is how the trap — turning global opinion decidedly, definitively against Israel — is sprung.
Is that what happened? Is that what is happening now? Does Hamas know Netanyahu’s character? Do they know that Character, as Thucydides told us untold millennia ago, was Destiny? Why did President Biden grant Netanyahu a blank “no limits friendship” check?
From The President’s remarks on October 17 in Tel Aviv, once week after the Hamas terrorist attack:
October 7th, which was a sacred to — a sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people.
The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
To those who are living in limbo waiting desperately to learn the fate of loved ones, especially to families of the hostages: You’re not alone.
It is difficult — especially for the young — to digest the level of deference that Biden is showing Netanyahu. “Israel told the Biden administration it wants Hezbollah's forces to be pushed roughly 6 miles from the border as part of a diplomatic deal to end tensions with Lebanon, three Israeli and U.S. officials told Axios,” reported Barak Ravid. To which, any sane person might ask: Just who is the Senior partner in this relationship? And who is the Junior?
The mega-death rate of civilians is nearly incomprehensible. This, too, is an aspect of Netanyahu’s authoritarian-manqué personality disorder. He sees kindness and deference as weakness, not as signs of civilized democratic norms. The scale of Palestinian loss is incomprehensible. But that doesn’t seem to phase the Prime Minister — allegedly of all inhabitants of Israel — or the IDF, who are racking up a truly shameful record of human rights abuses for an alleged democracy (and don’t think the Global South doesn’t notice). To put it in perspective: by Thanksgiving, one out of every 200 Gazans had been killed in the Israeli-Hamas War, most of them, by the way, women and children (some newborns). About 20,000 Palestinians have already been killed and the horrific images on social media are, at this point in time, almost impossible at this point to ignore.
Already one month into the Israel-Hamas War the polls were softening for Biden among 18-34 voters. An NBC poll in early November cited the lowest approval rating of his Presidency — 40%. “The erosion for Biden is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza, and among voters ages 18 to 34, with a whopping 70% of them disapproving of Biden’s handling of the war,” NBC’s Mark Murray wrote of the results last month.
And we cannot fail to note here that President Biden’s bear-hug of Netanyahu highlights every single question about his age to the young observer. It is an visual argument on steroids as to why young voters should abandon the Biden administration altogether and either stay home or vote elsewhere. Voters aged 18 to 34 can barely remember a time when Netanyahu’s increasingly further and further to the right ruling coalitions were not in power (Does anyone remember Olmert? Barack? And, Whatever happened to Tzippi Livni?). Further, the colonialist narrative — thanks to the utter maleficence of the settler movement — is dominant among those voters. And it is not entirely clear to me that at this point that Biden can even make it to the main event next November against Trump, so badly is the President hemorrhaging the youth vote by tying his destiny to that of Netanyahu. While we understand Biden’s principles of standing with the state of Israel, it might spell his political doom that in standing with the state of Israel, he stood with Binyamin Netanyahu. Biden, of course, cannot beat Trump without the youth vote. In 2020, he beat Trump among voters 18-29 with 60% of their vote.
What is to be done? One month later and thousands more Gazan deaths, the results are even worse, poll-wise. The New York Times/Siena College poll out today shows that 33 percent of respondents approve of Biden’s Israel policy, with 57 percent disapproval. So the hemorrhaging for Biden probably goes beyond 18 to 34 voters and Muslim-Americans (a voting block particularly strong in Michigan, where Biden beat Trump in 2020 by roughly 150,000 votes).
The inevitable rifts are now occurring in real time and they are seismic. The “tensions” are in full flower for all the world — particularly Russia, China and Iran — to see and exploit in making their appeals to the Global South. The length of the ground war has become a major sticking point. And whether or not Israel will — or even can — win a war of occupation is another. If Binyamin Netanyahu cares a whit about international law or even the Global South, he has not shown it.
Biden should have known this. He saw, up close as Vice President, how the Prime Minister made Barack Obama’s life miserable. So noxious was his personality that James Baker —something of a stinker, personality-wise, himself — barred him from the State Department. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has confounded so many American Presidents, appears to be at the end of his rope. But that has been said about him before. In fact, I have been newslettering and blogging about “the end of Netanyahu” since 2012! A decade later, he is still at it, confounding me.
But this time he might not just confound a US President — he might just bring one down.
“The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations took out a full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times headlined ‘Hatred of Israel Is Endangering American Jews.’ I had to read that line several times. It could more plausibly have warned that the unqualified embrace of Israel’s policy right or wrong is endangering American Jews. Or that the actions and arrogance of Prime Minister Netanyahu are endangering American Jews. Jews have been safer in America than in any other country. Jews thrived and were safe in medieval Spain, and later in Germany and Austria, until they weren’t. For more than two centuries, America has been the Jewish haven. Abruptly, American Jews have been shaken out of their complacency. Incidents of antisemitism were on the rise well before the Hamas massacre of October 7 and Israel’s military response to it. (Maybe you remember the chant ‘Jews will not replace us’ in Charlottesville?) Though Trump’s dog-whistle support for the antisemitic right is camouflaged both by his Jewish son-in-law and by his own alliance with Netanyahu, there is no doubt that the rise of the far right, which is always antisemitic, has been spurred by Trump’s indulgence of hatred.” (Robert Kuttner/TAP)
“Britain’s ruthless tabloid newspapers often make headlines themselves. The phone hacking scandal of 2011, which centered on Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday News of the World newspaper, accused tabloid reporters of spying on actors, royals, politicians, and even a murdered schoolgirl and victims of a London terror attack. Prince Harry and other celebrity claimants are currently pushing other cases alleging tabloid overreach and nefarious reporting tactics, with a court on Friday awarding them damages for illegal information gathering by the Mirror. Both have sparked a debate in Britain—are the tabloids crossing the occasional line in service of the good, or are they endemically corrupt? Are they, to quote one left-wing British politician, operating ‘out of casual malice, for money, for spite, for sport’? Recently, another case—one of Britain’s longest-standing unsolved murders—has shed new light on what former British prime minister Gordon Brown called the ‘criminal-media nexus,’ in this case the point at which the police, private detectives with close links to the police, and the tabloid press meet.” (Jem Batholemew/CJR)
“On the eve of its invasion of Iraq in 2003, America seemed gripped by a fever. The White House warned a nation still traumatized by 9/11 that Iraq was hatching terrorist plots involving chemicals, biological weapons, and nuclear suitcase bombs. U.S. infantry soldiers on the Iraqi border, where I was a news reporter, ritualistically shaved their heads before battle. Their commanders told them to expect Saddam to retaliate with chemical weapons that could stop their hearts in an instant. It turned out much of that panic was manufactured, so that President George W. Bush could boast his invasion would protect the ‘homeland’ and the rest of the world. U.S. military commanders parroted Bush’s language during the mismanaged war and occupation that followed. Yet those bloody years uncovered no weapons of mass destruction and instead unleashed legions of new terrorists. The U.S. occupation of Iraq normalized torture, impunity, manipulation of intelligence, and a new level of official mendacity. I have dedicated much of the last two decades to chronicling the damage and suffering in Iraq; now, as we mark twenty years since the invasion, I want to take stock of another victim of the United States’ fateful war of choice—America itself.” (Thanassis Cambanis/Century)
“In response to Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, the IDF invaded Gaza with a stated purpose of destroying the terror group. As such, the IDF is fighting what many have come to call a ‘war of counter-insurgency.’ Hamas has no ‘army’ in any well accepted sense of the word. Rather, Hamas’s military arm is reasonably well-organized (and well-funded) confederation of guerrilla fighters. The IDF’s aim is to kill or otherwise incapacitate Hamas’s fighters and, insofar as possible, leave civilians alone. But the IDF is not really fighting a war of counter-insurgency in Gaza. What it is fighting is best understood as a “war of occupation.” The Israelis left Gaza in 2005, and now they are back as de facto occupiers. This characterization isn’t to imply that the IDF will stay in Gaza in the long term. They may, they may not. It is rather an apt description of the challenging and dangerous military situation the IDF faces as it stands today. What is the difference between a war of counter-insurgency and a war of occupation, and is it useful for understanding the war in Gaza?” (Marshall Poe/Responsible Statecraft)
“On 14 December, the European Union decided to start membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova and to grant candidate state status to Georgia. The decision was kept under wraps until the last moment because despite the positive recommendations of the European Commission, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán opposed the start of negotiations with Ukraine. The range of reasons given by the Hungarian side was wide and in part tailored individually for each of the parties involved. First, Budapest insistently and consistently pointed to the violation of the rights of national minorities in Ukraine. At the same time, Orbán’s demands were changing: first, it was about making corrections to the 2017 Ukrainian Law on Education. The Hungarian government was not satisfied with the teaching proportions in the languages of national minorities. Then, the statements of Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó began to include demands to return to the 2014 norms. Probably, the Hungarian minister was referring to the scandalous Law ‘On the Fundamentals of State Language Policy’, that was adopted in violation of the regulations and cancelled by the Parliament in 2014 after the fall of the Yanukovych regime, and that, in 2018, was recognised by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine as unconstitutional and invalid.” (Sergiy Gerasymchuk/IPS)