Biden’s Israel-Palestine Policy Could Cost Him the Election
US President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2023. (Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) / Handout/ Anadolu via Getty Images)
The president’s blank-check support of Israel’s war on Gaza is alienating many of the Black and brown voters he needs to win reelection.
by ELIE MYSTAL
I am neither Israeli or Palestinian, nor am I an expert on Middle Eastern geopolitics, terrorism, security, or colonization. I am an expert in American constitutional law, which, in this situation, is as useful as being an expert in sand-castle construction during a tsunami. As such, I have little to add to the current international conflagration and the foreign policy discourse around it. Instead, I have tried to read, listen, learn, and generally not say anything that could be used by the most morally bankrupt people to justify the murder of children, both Israeli and Palestinian.
However, I am an American, a Black one, who has a lot of experience listening to actual people of color even as their voices are drowned out or dismissed by the prevailing white media. As such, I believe it is in my remit to warn white readers that Joe Biden’s unwaveringly pro-Israeli stance has the potential to do significant harm to his prospects for reelection among voters he needs: young Black and brown people.
I know many people will not want to think about American political realities so soon after a terrorist attack—while Israel continues to pummel Gaza with air strikes, and Hamas continues to hold Israeli hostages. But, as a person who desperately wants to stop the antidemocratic tide of MAGA-style fascism in my own country, I cannot help but be concerned.
Biden risks labeling himself as a president who is in favor of colonization, and one who will turn a blind eye to ethnic cleansing and war crimes—and those are tough labels to shake once they take hold in communities of color. Voters of color are strategic, and willing to swallow a lot of nonsense and vote for the lesser evil. But there are some who will simply not pull the lever for any president, in any party, who stands aside while an oppressed people is besieged, starved, and bombed into oblivion. Even if you don’t think Israel is a colonial power, or don’t think the Israeli government is violating the human rights of Palestinians as they wage war against Hamas, the Americans who do think those things are voters Biden is losing right now. Those are the kinds of voters who, once lost, Biden will never win back.
Separate and apart from Israel’s legitimate efforts to secure the release of its citizens taken as hostages, and secure itself from terrorist threats, there are those in and around the Israeli government who have used plainly genocidal language to describe the conflict, calling Palestinians “human animals,” denying that Palestinian “civilians” have any rights because Hamas is their elected leadership (elected in 2006, by the way, and Hamas has not allowed those civilians to hold an election since), or saying that the war is between “the children of the light and the children of the dark.” Biden has not condemned this language nor has he issued public warnings to Israel that the United States will not stand for human rights violations, nor has he stood shoulder to shoulder, “in solidarity,” with any Palestinian American (or any Muslim American, or any Arab American, or any non-white American) calling for a basic respect for human rights.
Instead, his State Department warned diplomats not to use the words or phrases “de-escalation,” “ceasefire,” “end to violence,” and even “restoring calm.” His press secretary said calls from Democratic Congresspeople calling for de-escalation and peace were “repugnant” and “disgraceful.”
Biden’s refusal to publicly call for peace or even restraint could be doing irreparable harm to him (to say nothing, obviously, of the harm it’s doing to millions of people in the region). There is scant polling data on the issue so far, but what there is suggests a huge generational divide, and a racial one. An NPR/PBS poll taken last week showed that while 65 percent of Americans overall think the country should publicly support Israel, including 86 percent of baby boomers, that number drops to 48 percent in the case of Gen Z Americans. The racial divide is also dramatic, with 72 percent of white Americans favoring US support for Israel, compared to just 51 percent of what the pollsters call “nonwhite” Americans.
Beyond these numbers, it doesn’t take a degree in political science to know that Biden already has a problem with young voters and especially young voters of color. Recent polls taken even before Biden’s response to the Israel-Gaza war have shown Biden losing to Donald Trump among voters under 30. And there have already been significant warning signs that Biden is slipping with Black voters.
Does anybody really think that giving a foreign government free rein to bomb areas of land as densely packed as the island of Manhattan is helping Biden with young voters and people of color? Or did everybody just not think about that in their zeal to make sure college students who support Palestine can never get a job?
People should remember that Biden’s age is already a turnoff to young people, and his domestic policy agenda has largely been frustrated by Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Republican control of the House, and the Supreme Court. The issues Biden is running on in communities of color are, essentially, democracy and the rejection of racism. He’s running against the MAGA brand of nativism and fascism. He’s running on his own personal decency.
Biden can, entirely appropriately, call terrorist attacks against Israelis “pure evil,” but he can’t seem to fix his mouth to say “turn on the water to civilians living in a desert.” He can say that Palestinian people deserve dignity and respect, but can’t unequivocally say “cutting off electricity to civilians is a human rights violation.” I’m sorry, but it’s hard to see Biden’s personal decency when he can’t speak up for the thirsty. Biden is asking Black and brown voters to trust that he values all lives equally, but that becomes almost impossible to believe when he endorses the treatment of Palestinians as collateral damage to a counterterrorism campaign.
There are signs that Biden’s posture is causing rifts within his own administration. Last week, State Department official Josh Paul quit. Paul was responsible for processing arms sales to foreign nations. In his resignation letter, he said Biden’s “blind support for one side” were “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.” When the guy who oversees arms deals is essentially saying “this is too violent for me,” we may have a problem. More worrying, there has been a lot of private griping from Muslim Americans within the Biden administration, with some threatening to resign en masse.