Biden is preparing to defy Israel in wartime — something no president has done since Eisenhower
Many presidents have yearned to push back on Israel. Biden is actually doing it.
President Joe Biden has met major backlash over his support for Israel through war. Are things about to change? Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Eric Alterman February 27, 2024
The United States has vetoed three United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza — most recently last Tuesday, on the grounds that the resolution would “put sensitive negotiations” between Hamas and Israel “in jeopardy.”
That’s business as usual when it comes to the U.S., Israel and the U.N.: Between 1946 and 2012, more than half of the vetoes the U.S. deployed in sessions of the U.N. Security Council were in defense of Israel.
But it’s not the whole story. By proposing last week an alternative resolution that contradicts Israel’s war aims in two ways, President Joe Biden is preparing to publicly defy Israel in wartime — something no president has done in nearly 70 years.
Biden knows that the U.S. has squandered a great deal of the goodwill it earned from its support for Ukraine by insisting on sticking by Israel through this disastrous war. With this proposed resolution — and through taking a strong stance against the expansion of Israeli West Bank settlements with his reversal of the “Pompeo Doctrine,” plus his new willingness to recognize a future state of Palestine — he appears ready to shake up the U.S.-Israel relationship than to a degree that, only weeks ago, would have been difficult to imagine.
Given the destructiveness of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, it might seem like too little, too late. But think for a moment. When was the last time that the United States took a public position in opposition to Israel while the latter was at war? (It hardly happens in peacetime, either.)
The U.S. proposal is notable for two things: Using the word “ceasefire,” which the administration had previously avoided — albeit dressed up by the adjective “temporary” — and stating “that under current circumstances a major ground offensive into Rafah would result in further harm to civilians and their further displacement including potentially into neighboring countries.” (Biden doubled down on the calls for a ceasefire Monday, telling reporters that he hopes to have one in place within a week.) Also consistent with U.S. policy, the resolution condemns those in Israel’s coalition government who suggest that the solution to the crisis is a second “Nakba,” as well as “any actions by any party that reduce the territory of Gaza, on a temporary or permanent basis.”
Eisenhower’s example
You need to go back to President Dwight Eisenhower, back when Israel conspired with Britain and France to invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in October 1956, to find a similarly strong statement on Israel from an American leader in wartime.
That invasion came in response to an announcement by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, that he had nationalized the nearby Suez Canal and shut off Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran — effectively blockading Israel’s southern port of Eilat, and cutting off its access to the Indian Ocean. From an American point of view, it was a particularly inopportune time for Israel to enter a war. Eisenhower was preoccupied with the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which was seeking to detach itself from the Eastern bloc and praying for American intervention, and his administration had been wooing Egypt into a U.S.-led Middle Eastern alliance to counter Soviet influence in the Middle East.
That the invasion occurred on the eve of a U.S. presidential election only added to the president’s fury.
So Eisenhower did what is almost unthinkable today: demand a stop to the Israeli attack. Britain and France acceded — especially once faced with the possibility of the Hungarian situation devolving into a world war. The Israelis, per usual, stuck to their guns, demanding access to the Suez Canal and refusing to consider unilateral withdrawal without it.
Eisenhower was irate. In a special “memorandum for the record” that was not made public at the time, but was no secret inside the bureaucracy, he instructed the State Department to “inform Israel” that the United States would proceed “as if we did not have a single Jew in America.” He threatened to suspend all U.S. government assistance to Israel, and to do away with the generous system of tax credits designed to facilitate private-sector investment in the country. And he very nearly went further. In his memoir, he said he wanted to propose a U.N. resolution to cut off “not just governmental but private assistance to Israel” until it withdrew, and that he even considered using U.S. forces against Israel if its leaders did not agree to stand down.
There are reasons to look askance at Eisenhower’s model. First, the world has changed quite a bit since 1956, especially as it relates to America’s relationship to Israel. Second, there’s the role of Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who broadly embraced antisemitic tropes and blamed Jews for costing him his 1949 New York Senate race. Dulles, an avid supporter of Eisenhower’s response to Israel, was particularly interested in cutting off loans to Israel from what he considered to be “Jewish banks” — a category he extended so far as to include Chase Manhattan and Bank of America.
And yet, it’s notable that Eisenhower and Dulles succeeded in condemning Israel’s actions without paying any discernible political price.
Both the polls and the editorial pages supported their tough response, and Eisenhower’s performance among Jews in the 1956 presidential election would constitute a high point for Republicans of the era, with Eisenhower earning 40 percent of the Jewish vote. (Israel did eventually withdraw from the Sinai in early 1957, after Eisenhower and Dulles compromised far more than they had intended on the country’s demands.)
Domestic consequences
No president since has gotten away with a similar feat — although many may have wanted to.
According to Robert Gates, a longtime high-ranking national security staffer in both Democratic and Republican administrations, literally “every” U.S. president would at some point “get so pissed off at the Israelis that he couldn’t speak.” They would all “rant and rave around the Oval Office” out of “frustration about knowing that there was so little they could do about it because of domestic politics,” Gates said.
An example: In March 1975, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who furiously referred to Israeli officials as “psychopathic,” “fools,” “a sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits,” convinced America’s new president, Gerald Ford, to order a “reassessment” of U.S. foreign policy in the region. Israel’s Washington lobbyists, not yet remotely the powerhouse they have since become, immediately circulated a letter signed by 76 senators demanding that the president be responsive to Israel’s “urgent military and economic needs,” and that he “make clear, as we do, that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future negotiations.”
Bertram Gold, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, warned that without a turnaround, “we will go directly to Congress, and 1976 is not that far away.”
Even in those days, before AIPAC became the Capitol Hill behemoth it is today, Kissinger and Ford backed down. Soon, Ford lost his attempt at his own election to Jimmy Carter; Kissinger later told an aide that Israel “has treated us as no other country could.”
In 2001, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a group of West Bank settlers while being secretly recorded: “America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction … They will not bother us.” He was not wrong.
A historic problem
Today, Netanyahu is the leader of Israel’s most extreme government in its history, fighting a war that has little support across the globe, aside from the U.S. The potential consequences for American domestic politics are enormous, as anger at Biden’s support for Israel threatens to tear apart the Democratic Party, possibly ushering in an unthinkably horrific second Trump administration.
Biden has a problem unlike any other president before him. He has paid dearly for his intense support for Israel after Oct.7, even as it embarked on a war that is killing tens of thousands of civilians, without any real hopes of achieving its aim of destroying Hamas. The fact that the now deeply unpopular Netanyahu may be looking at a jail sentence once the war ends and Israelis are able to return to the polls gives him all the incentive he needs to continue on this nihilistic path, regardless of its cost — in innocent lives, in Israel’s standing in the world and of course, in the political prospects of Biden, his most important and influential supporter.
The president knows this. He knows that polls demonstrate that most Americans oppose his embrace of Netanyahu, particularly in the base of the Democratic Party. And he knows that Netanyahu cares only about his own personal and political well-being. So perhaps the jig is finally up. Perhaps future historians will see Biden’s proposal in the Security Council as the beginning of a declaration of independence from the ruinous policies pursued by the Netanyahu government. Perhaps Joe Biden, long one of Israel’s most devoted champions in American politics, has had enough of Netanyahu’s contemptuous treatment of Israel’s only real friend and most generous supporter.
Perhaps Biden will continue cracking down on settlements in the West Bank. Perhaps he will insist on doing everything possible to prevent the likely starvation and massive health-related emergencies on the horizon in Gaza. Perhaps he will use the credibility he has spent decades earning with America’s “pro-Israel” community to throw the full force of U.S. diplomacy behind a genuine solution that will allow Israelis and Palestinians to live peacefully and in dignity, side-by-side.
As a historian of the conflict and its role in U.S. domestic politics, I am deeply skeptical of predicting anything like this. Clearly, neither side is ready for such a peace at the moment; it’s hard to imagine they will be in the foreseeable future. But I can confidently predict that if Biden does decide to reverse course and travel down this road, future historians will admire and appreciate his courage, as we do Eisenhower’s, nearly seven decades ago.
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