Biden’s Israel Stance Continues to Make Less and Less Sense

More than 30,000 have already died in Gaza, but little has changed in six months of war. Hamas is still holding its hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu’s siege forges on, with Palestinian civilians bearing the brunt of it. And President Joe Biden, for all his public frustrations with the Israeli government’s bombardment, has continued to supply the country with the weapons it has used to carry the war out. But even amid such relentless suffering and carnage, the killing of seven aid workers in an Israeli Defense Force attack Monday still managed to shake the international conscience. “This is unforgivable,” Erin Gore, CEO of the World Central Kitchen nonprofit, said in a statement, confirming the deaths of seven of its workers.

Netanyahu, who has rebuffed international scrutiny of his war effort, expressed “regret” for the incident and said it would be investigated—but also seemed to excuse what he called an “unintentional” killing. “It happens during war,” the prime minister said. Yet, the attack was a damning indictment of the way Netanyahu has executed this war, and ramped up calls for an end to the violence. “Israel is better than the way this war is being waged,” chef José Andrés, founder of the humanitarian organization, wrote in a powerful New York Times op-ed Wednesday. “The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.”

Such calls aren’t new, of course. But Andrés, the celebrated restaurateur and humanitarian, is particularly influential—including within the Biden administration, which quickly sided with WCK and condemned Israel’s attack Tuesday. “This is not a stand-alone incident,” Biden said in a statement, describing himself as “outraged and heartbroken” by the deaths. “This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed.”

“Incidents like yesterday’s simply should not happen,” he added, saying that Israel has “not done enough to protect civilians.”

The attack—which included three strikes on a marked aid convoy traveling in a “deconflicted zone”—reveals “Israeli carelessness toward Gaza civilians and international humanitarians alike,” as a Biden administration official told Politico, and should be a long-overdue turning point in the conflict. “This can only be understood as a decision that was equal parts devastating and pointless,” the board of Haaretz, one of Israel’s most widely-read newspapers, wrote in a fiery editorial. “The number of dead and wounded in Gaza, along with the hunger and vast destruction and now Monday night’s incident should tell us that the time has come to end the war.”

But Netanyahu has thus far resisted any efforts to get him to change course, and Biden has not applied the level of pressure necessary to get him to do so, despite the growing outcry at home that threatens to upend his reelection bid. (Voters in the key swing state of Wisconsin were the latest to express their disapproval with Biden’s Israel policy, with nearly ten percent of Democrats who turned out there Tuesday voting “uninstructed” in protest—enough, potentially, to cost him the state in November.) Indeed, even as the president condemned the WCK “tragedy” and more freely criticizes Netanyahu, his administration has continued to push Congress to authorize the sale of $18 billion in fighter jets to Israel—which would be, as the Times noted Tuesday, one of the largest arms sales to the country in recent years.

That kind of behind-the-scenes dealing would seem to undermine the public admonishments he and his administration have made about Netanyahu’s offensive, as well as his calls for a humanitarian ceasefire he said last month would “ease the intolerable humanitarian crisis, and build toward something more enduring.” “No more innocent lives lost,” Andrés said after the attack Monday. “Peace starts with our shared humanity. It needs to start now.”