Under Biden, a Generational Shift in U.S. Views of Israel

The Washington Post / Yasmeen Abutaleb

15:18 JST, December 24, 2024

In late November, the White House and its allies scrambled to kill a Senate measure blocking three weapons shipments to Israel – a delicate move, since the measure was led or sponsored by senators close to President Joe Biden, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland).

Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to plead that the measure would embolden Hamas at precisely the wrong moment. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) called senators into his office, one by one, to urge a no vote. The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee launched a blitz of online ads targeting the measure’s supporters.

Yet 19 senators – more than a third of all senators who caucus with Democrats – voted for at least part of Sanders’s proposal, sending an unprecedented message of dissatisfaction with Biden’s Middle East policy from his own party. It was the first time Congress had ever voted on blocking arms sales to Israel, and the White House was unable to head it off.

The episode highlights a fundamental transformation in America’s relations with Israel, a shift that began years ago but has exploded under Biden since the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. His response has contributed to a splintering in his party that is likely to be part of his legacy, though one he may not wish for, as the politics of Israel in America are unlikely ever to be the same.

For decades after the Jewish state was founded in 1948, support for the country, born three years after the end of Holocaust, was widespread among Americans. Now it’s a divisive, volatile issue, as Republicans led by President-elect Donald Trump firmly embrace the country, Democrats are increasingly critical and progressives stage impassioned protests against Israel and its policies.

“The younger generation of American voters sees Israel not as the aggrieved party, but as the party that has created the situation through its endless occupation and the lack of any negotiations with the Palestinian Authority,” said Bruce Riedel, an analyst who has worked on the Middle East under presidents of both parties. “The bottom line is, the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict have now changed significantly. And it happened on Biden’s watch.”

The reasons predate Biden. Israel has surged to the right, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Younger Americans have no personal memory of the Holocaust or Israel’s founding as a largely socialist state; many express more empathy toward the Palestinians, whom they view as suffering under a colonialist state after hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes as part of Israel’s founding. The American Jewish community, with its liberal Democratic tendencies, is more splintered than ever over a country that was once a source of near-universal pride for them.

Even so, the dynamic has accelerated and solidified during the Biden presidency.

After Hamas militants surged into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, Netanyahu launched a lengthy war that has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, fueled a humanitarian catastrophe and destroyed Gaza. While Biden criticized Israel throughout the war for endangering civilians and for blocking humanitarian aid, he has maintained a massive flow of military assistance, arguing that Israel’s war is self-defense against a terrorist enemy.

To many Democrats, that was more in tune with an earlier version of the Democratic Party – and Israel – than today’s reality. Biden seemed to them to reinforce his dated views with his fond reminiscences of meeting Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973.

“Part of Biden’s problem is he has such a depth of experience,” said Tommy Vietor, a former national security spokesman in President Barack Obama’s White House. “He still talks about meeting with Golda Meir, and that’s an Israel that’s all but disappeared.”

The Democrats who voted for blocking arms sales say the question is not whether to support Israel or whether the country has a right to defend itself. Rather, they say, the crux of the debate in their party is whether the time has come to rethink a relationship that involves the United States shipping enormous amounts of military aid to Israel with virtually no restrictions.

“All Senate Democrats support a close partnership with Israel. But a partnership should be a two-way street, not a one-way blank check, and that’s the core of the issue,” Van Hollen, a vocal critic of Biden’s Gaza policy, said in an interview. “There’s a significant and growing group [of Democrats] that believes in the U.S.-Israel partnership, but believes the United States needs to more effectively use its influence to ensure compliance with American law.”

Netanyahu has exacerbated Democrats’ frustration by seemingly abandoning previous Israeli leaders’ policy of careful bipartisanship and often aligning with Republicans. He committed a startling breach of protocol in 2015 by addressing Congress, at the invitation of Republican leaders, to attack then-president Obama’s policy on Iran. In July, Netanyahu made a similar decision when he addressed Congress at the invitation of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) as he and Biden were publicly at odds.

“This movement in the Democratic Party predates this war in Gaza,” said Vietor, who now co-hosts the Pod Save America podcast. “Bibi Netanyahu began to poison the relationship with Barack Obama as early as 2009, but the 2015 visit and his address to Congress made clear who he was and what his plans were. It’s been a steady erosion of support among lawmakers.”

Biden’s embrace of Israel after the Oct. 7 assault could hardly have been more enthusiastic, and it was applauded by both parties. He delivered a prime-time speech less than two weeks after the attacks, vowing the United States would stand with its ally as it sought to eliminate Hamas. He traveled to Israel, boasting that he was the first U.S. president to visit the country during wartime. He hugged Netanyahu when they met, a moment that many Democrats and even administration officials say came to symbolize the often-criticized “bear hug” approach Biden took to the Israeli prime minister.

But the political mood among liberals turned as quickly as the military tide. Israeli airstrikes yielded daily images of suffering and desperation in Gaza, including Palestinian buildings leveled by Israeli airstrikes and children pulled dead from the rubble. Israel’s sharp restrictions on humanitarian aid despite repeated U.S. pleas have led to widespread hunger, disease and devastation in Gaza, with outrage building over images and stories of children starving. Within months, Biden faced demonstrators at virtually all of his public appearances chanting against “Genocide Joe.”

Almost overnight, Gaza had become a defining cause for progressives, who viewed the Palestinians as a marginalized group and Israel as a colonial power, a stark reversal from its onetime image among many Americans as the rebirth of a persecuted people. And even as many Jewish leaders stood by Israel, others increasingly spoke out against Netanyahu’s government, from liberal rabbis to politicians such as Sanders and Schumer.

In a statement, AIPAC said that a majority of Congress and the American public supports Israel.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, while relatively small, argue that Israel’s militarism is not only out of step with American values but with Jewish ones as well. “Like generations of Jewish leftists before us,” the group’s website declares, JVP seeks to “advance a Judaism aligning with our spiritual and moral commitments” through solidarity with “the Palestinian freedom struggle.”

Ilan Goldenberg, a former White House policy adviser, said people on both sides of the divided Jewish community have dug in over the past year.

“The first camp is already skeptical of Netanyahu, then became more so because of the war, and moved further away from this right-wing Israeli government. That’s a large part of the Jewish community,” said Goldenberg, who served as Jewish outreach director for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. “The other part is Republicans and conservative Democrats who after October 7th and the war in Gaza have doubled down on their support for the Israeli government’s actions.”

Arab Americans and Muslims underwent their own cultural shift. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many felt they were vilified after every attack by Islamist militants, and they hesitated to speak out or bring unnecessary attention to their religion or ethnicity, according to numerous interviews with community members.

But the Gaza war upended that, particularly among younger members of the community. Many Arabs and Muslims became outspoken about the Palestinian cause and donned kaffiyehs, the headscarf that has come to symbolize solidarity with it.

Other activists, including from the Black Lives Matter movement, saw Palestinians as fellow people of color targeted by a brutal police state and joined the cause. (Israel’s supporters say that about half its residents are people of color themselves, and they warn against viewing the Middle East through the prism of America’s racial dynamics.)

By October, a poll from the Pew Research Center found that 50 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents thought Israel’s campaign against Hamas had gone too far, while 13 percent of Republicans and GOP leaners felt that way.

As the presidential campaign entered the home stretch, both Harris and Trump sought to court the Arab and Muslim community, especially in Michigan, which has one of the largest concentrations of Arabs and Muslims in the country.

“We may look back on 2024 and say this is the first presidential vote in history where the Arab vote helped determine the outcome,” Riedel said. “The Arab and Muslim vote has never really mattered in American elections before because it’s always been tiny.”

As Biden stuck with his traditional, permissive approach to Israel, the agitation outside Washington began infiltrating the halls of Congress. In many ways, this resembled the trajectory of the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, which began on college campuses but ultimately found champions on the House and Senate floors.

Sanders said he believes there would have been even more support for his measure to block the weapons shipments if Biden’s team and Schumer had not mobilized so forcefully against it. The White House circulated talking points among lawmakers with assertions like, “Now is the time to focus pressure on Hamas to release the hostages and stop the war. Cutting off arms from Israel would put this goal even further out of reach and prolong the war, not shorten it.”

The pressure put his colleagues in a tough spot, Sanders said.

“You had the president of the United States and his administration, literally on the day of the vote, doing everything they could to move against us,” Sanders added. “You had the majority leader doing everything that he could. And you had AIPAC, a very powerful super PAC … playing a very active role.”

Several senators and White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters, said they became frustrated when the Biden administration on several occasions made an announcement seemingly designed to placate critics of Israel, only to avoid following through.

In October, for example, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote a letter warning Israel that absent “concrete measures” to surge food, medicine and other basic supplies into the ravaged Palestinian territory within 30 days, it could risk losing some U.S. military assistance.

Israel did not take significant steps in that direction, but the United States imposed no consequences, they said.

Earlier this year, the White House published a memo saying that countries receiving U.S. weapons must provide written assurances that they will abide by international law and let American aid into stricken areas. That came after Van Hollen led a push to amend the foreign aid bill to require that any country receiving American assistance follow international law, an amendment that attracted 18 co-sponsors.

The Biden administration concluded in May that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had violated international law in Gaza, but it also found that Israel’s insistence to the contrary was credible. That seemingly contradictory finding allowed Biden to continue sending military aid to Israel.

For all this support, Netanyahu repeatedly defied Biden in public – in the view of some Israelis, as a way of bolstering his domestic image of toughness. In February, Netanyahu denounced a hostage deal at the same time Biden officials were in the region trying to negotiate one. Around the same time, he announced that Israeli forces would invade the Gazan city of Rafah after Biden’s team publicly urged him not to.

Such repeated snubs, Sanders said, have strengthened Democrats’ distaste for Netanyahu and their willingness to publicly oppose him. “It was a growing recognition that Netanyahu was actively involved in American politics, trying to make Biden look weak and stupid, and supporting Trump,” Sanders said.

Now, with Biden exiting the political stage, Democratic lawmakers who want to challenge Israel’s actions will no longer be defying their own party’s president. Rather, the powerful alliance between Trump and Netanyahu could make it easier for Democrats to criticize Israel.

In his first term, Trump endorsed Israeli control of the Golan Heights and moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, generating two enormous political wins for Netanyahu – and significant setbacks for the two-state solution. In turn, Netanyahu named an Israeli settlement after Trump and erected a large campaign billboard of the two leaders together.

Trump has signaled an intent to continue this embrace of Netanyahu in his second term, naming several staunchly pro-Israel figures to his Cabinet, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) as secretary of state and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel.

Amid the transformed political landscape, few figures embody the shifts in America, the Jewish community and the Democratic coalition more than Sanders, who at 83 is a year older than Biden. A socialist and a Jew, Sanders volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s.

He recalled in the interview how different Israel was at that time, pointing to prime ministers who still engaged in negotiations over a Palestinian state.

“Thirty or 40 years ago, you had leadership there who understood that at the end of the day, you had to work with the Palestinians – people who supported a two-state solution, people who understand it’s imperative you treat the Palestinian people with dignity and respect,” Sanders said. “What you have now is not just Netanyahu, it’s people worse than Netanyahu … who would just as soon drive every Palestinian out of the area if they could.”