Courting the Antisemitic Vote

They make news—they make noise—and Joe Biden needs them

Some of the ballots that Biden must harvest

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According to this story on Axios, President Biden is “running out of patience” with Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s not conducting the war with Hamas in accordance with the Biden Administration’s preferences. Among other things, US officials are said to be “frustrated by Netanyahu's unwillingness to seriously discuss plans for the day after the war and his rejection of the U.S. plan for a reformed Palestinian Authority to have a role in post-Hamas Gaza.”

The idea that “a reformed Palestinian Authority” should be given some role in the postwar government of Gaza is of course ridiculous. How precisely is the PA to be reformed? A good first step might be to get rid of its current president, Mahmoud Abbas, who—I kid you not—has a Ph.D. in Holocaust Denial. Let’s just say that a guy with a credential like that is unlikely to be a reliable peace partner. And the organization he heads is a lost cause, given the PA’s long and distasteful history of misgovernment, terrorism, and institutional antisemitism.

Biden & Co. are also flogging the moribund idea of a “two-state solution” as the basis for Mideast peace—this despite the obvious realities on the ground. The US State Department prefers to overlook the unpalatable but undeniable fact that public opinion on both sides of the long-running conflict rejects a two-state solution. This has long been the case on the Palestinian side, and since the October 7 Hamas pogrom, Israelis have turned against it as well. They’ve concluded that a Palestinian state would be a terrorist entity, probably under the thumb of Iran: a permanent, deadly threat to the security and survival of the Jewish state.

While it’s true enough in principle that a two-state solution is the preferable solution, in the present circumstances its implementation is a practical impossibility. Nor will that change any time soon. And unless the Biden Administration’s foreign policy team is made up of absolute idiots, they must recognize this reality. But if they do, why don’t they acknowledge it and craft their policy accordingly? The answer, of course, is politics.

Joe Biden is up for reelection this year, and if his opponent were anybody besides the likely GOP presidential nominee, he’d lose in a landslide. And even against Donald Trump, Biden could very well lose, for the wheels have come off his clown-car presidency. Biden’s approval rating isn’t just underwater—it’s lower than whale turds, and they’re on the bottom of the ocean. Strong majorities of the electorate believe that the President is too old and too decrepit to serve another term. They turn thumbs down on Bidenomics. They blame him for the catastrophic situation on the country’s southern border. They don‘t trust him to manage foreign policy at a time of crisis around the world. He’s already botched Ukraine, he has no answer to the burgeoning threat posed by China, and now he’s starting to waver in his support of Israel, so strongly expressed in the wake of October 7.

Biden’s problem with the Israeli-Hamas War is rooted in the Democratic Party, whose progressive wing is “anti-Zionist” and, let it be frankly stated, pro-Hamas. Members of his own administration are in open revolt over the President’s pro-Israeli stance—as if they, who were hired to execute policy, are empowered to dictate it. These insurrectionists should all be sacked, of course. But Biden won’t do that because the distemper of his minions is more broadly reflected in the Democratic Party. The President and the people around him are in a panic at the thought of losing the progressive anti-Zionist, i.e. antisemitic vote.

Now of course, progressive antisemites are a minority within the Democratic Party. Nor do they represent American public opinion, which remains strongly supportive of Israel. But they’re highly visible. They make news. They make noise. And a significant number of them are young Americans, the toxic products of progressive education— you should pardon the oxymoron. They know nothing about the history or the current realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, their heads are stuffed full of postmodern blather, they’re intolerant, dogmatic, self-righteous prigs. And Joe Biden needs their votes in 2024.

This explains the incoherence and fabulism that has come to characterize the Biden Administration’s policy—if that’s the word for it—in the course of the current Mideast crisis. The President and his foreign policy team are now engaged in an effort to align Israel’s war strategy with Joe Biden’s reelection strategy. The progressives scream that Israel is committing war crimes and demand a cease-fire; the administration fumes on background that Israel is not winding down the war quickly enough. The Israeli government very sensibly balks at committing to a peace plan before the war is concluded; the administration complains on background that Netanyahu is pandering to the “ultranationalist ministers” in his government while giving Joe Biden the finger.

“We supported you,” runs the self-serving message from Washington to Jerusalem. “Now you have to do what we say.”

Over at National Review, Noah Rothman has concluded that the inexorable logic of Democratic Party politics will compel Joe Biden to throw Israel under the bus. Given the President’s all-too-obvious decrepitude and his congenital pusillanimity, that’s very likely. Just as with Ukraine, Biden’s response to the Mideast crisis began with strong words, only to collapse like a failed soufflé. It might be said that he lacks the courage of his convictions, but that assumes that Joe Biden has any convictions—which I doubt.

For Further Reading: The question of Palestinian support for a two-state solution and peaceful coexistence with Israel, touched upon here, receives attention in the second of four essays posted here by Claire Berlinski at The Cosmopolitan Globalist. The essay originated as an answer to a question I put to Claire, and she has my thanks for addressing it in such detail, with due regard for the complexities and uncertainties involved. Highly recommended.