UNTIL THE Middle East forced itself onto his agenda this week, President Joe Biden has had good reason to avoid the pursuit of peacemaking there that occupied so many of his predecessors: Not only does he want to focus on China, but the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has become the foreign-policy question that most sharply divides Democrats.
This intra-party disagreement is breaking out into the open as violence intensifies in the region, with Hamas raining rockets on Israeli cities, Israeli forces bombarding the Gaza Strip, and communal unrest spreading to Israel’s cities. About 130 people, mostly Palestinians, have died since the fighting erupted on May 10th. The Democrats’ ascendant progressive wing has no patience for the party’s traditional bedrock support for Israel, a position long held by Mr Biden.
On Wednesday the White House issued a statement summarising a call between Mr Biden and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. In keeping with such boilerplate statements by previous administrations of both parties, this one emphasised “Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself”. Progressives erupted.
Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, tallied the Palestinian children killed to that point—13—and mocked Mr Biden’s claims to be putting human rights at the centre of his foreign policy. “You aren’t prioritizing human rights,” she tweeted. “You’re siding with an oppressive occupation.” Another progressive congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, echoed that accusation and wrote that such statements “dehumanize Palestinians”. In previous days Ms Omar had taken to Twitter to accuse Israel of “terrorism” and “ethnic cleansing”—language that would have been astonishing coming from an elected Democrat just a few years ago.
The fighting has sharpened calls from some Democrats to put conditions on aid that America supplies to Israel. “Why are US tax dollars being used to fuel the repression, violence, and persecution of Palestinians?” asked Betty McCollum, the sponsor of a House bill to restrict such assistance, in an interview with Jewish Currents, a progressive journal. This year America is supplying Israel with $3.9bn in aid, almost all of it military assistance; Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of American aid, at $146bn, since the second world war.
Mr Biden has shown no interest in applying that kind of pressure to Israel. During his presidential campaign, he called the notion of putting any conditions on aid, proposed by the progressive candidate Bernie Sanders, “bizarre”. Mr Biden also reportedly intervened during the campaign to prevent Mr Sanders and his allies from including the word “occupation” in the portion of the Democratic Party’s platform that touched on Middle East policy. While the left was pushing one way, Mr Biden, then as now, was also under pressure from the right. Bidding for Jewish and evangelical voters, his opponent, President Donald Trump, tilted American policy sharply towards Israel and went so far as to accuse American Jews who support Democrats, as the vast majority do, of “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”.
President Biden’s views of the Middle East conflict are squarely in line with what, pre-Trump, had been the bipartisan establishment consensus in America for decades. Mr Biden supports a two-state solution, and he has been trying as president to return America to its traditional aspiration to serve an honest broker between the antagonists. He has restored aid to the Palestinians that Mr Trump eliminated. His aides are being careful now to call on both sides to de-escalate.
That said, Mr Biden has not been trying very hard. President Barack Obama named a special envoy for Middle East peace on his second full day in office. Mr Biden has named several special envoys, but none for that purpose. He has not yet appointed an ambassador to Israel. He has also not fulfilled a campaign promise to re-establish the American consulate in Jerusalem, which historically functioned as a shadow embassy to the Palestinians. On Mr Trump’s orders that consulate was absorbed into the actual embassy.
Mr Biden’s lack of urgency about the Middle East has reflected his foreign-policy priorities, and also reality: neither side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in much shape to negotiate. After four inconclusive elections in two years, Israelis are struggling to form a government, while the Palestinians, factionalised, are adrift. But turning his attention to Asia has also allowed Mr Biden, until now, to avoid heightening intra-party tensions when he needs Democratic unity to pursue his domestic priorities. “The biggest area of disagreement in Democratic foreign policy, without question, is Israel,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice-president at Third Way, a centrist think-tank.
Many influences are at work in the progressives’ assessment of Israel. The Holocaust is fading from living memory, and the rising generation of Democrats knows Israel not as a fragile, isolated nation but as the region’s pre-eminent power, the only one with nuclear arms. Despite the departure of Israeli settlers from Gaza, the relentless expansion of settlements in the West Bank has made Israel, to them, seem like a colonial state; its denial of rights to Palestinians has drawn comparisons with apartheid from such credible sources as Human Rights Watch. Questions of racial injustice that are dominating America’s domestic political debate appear to have a parallel in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and of its own Arab citizens. Progressives also watched as Mr Netanyahu identified Israel’s interests with those of the Republican Party, first seeking Republican support in an attempt to block Mr Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and then embracing Mr Trump.
The sheer length of the occupation is a key factor, says Jodi Rudoren, the editor of the Forward, a long-running Jewish publication, and a former New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem. “It becomes harder and harder to take a position that is pro-Israel and pro-human-rights and pro-a-two-state-solution when there’s been a stalemate for more than 50 years,” she says.
At the same time, the polarisation of the American media and the power of social platforms have made it easier to advance only one version of a tangled story. “The left is talking only about the human-rights issue, and the right is talking only about Israel’s security,” Ms Rudoren said. “It seems to me terribly troubling that elected officials and activists increasingly ignore one side and the incredible complexity of this conflict.”.
Yet beyond its ally in the White House, Israel retains strong bipartisan support in Congress. Last month an overwhelming majority of House members signed a letter to the leaders of the House Appropriations Committee urging them to permit no conditions on aid to Israel. That may be a lagging indicator of political reality, however. A Gallup poll in March showed that, although 75% of Americans felt favourably toward Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians was rising. A majority of Democrats—53%, a jump of ten points since 2018—favoured putting more pressure on Israel than on the Palestinians to resolve the conflict. Should the Middle East conflict continue to escalate, so will the one within the Democratic Party.