President Biden is sounding tougher toward Israel these days and showing more compassion for people starving in Gaza. “There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying,” Biden said. “And it’s got to stop.”
But it’s not going to stop on its own — indeed, it may get worse if Israel invades Rafah, or if hunger tips into famine. And Biden’s concern for Palestinians rings hollow to me because he has been unwilling to lean hard on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make it stop.
So we’re now in a bizarre situation: American bombs and American aid are both falling from Gaza’s skies.
In 1948, the United States and its allies undertook the famous Berlin Airlift to rescue West Berlin from a Soviet blockade. Now we are engaged in another humanitarian airlift — this time because of the actions not of an enemy but of our partner. Israel is insisting on painstaking inspections of every aid truck going into Gaza. A senior administration official told me that Israel was turning back entire truckloads if they contained emergency birthing kits, apparently because these include a small scalpel for cutting umbilical cords. UNICEF tells me that Israel is refusing to allow it to bring in portable toilets. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley visited the Gaza border and found that Israel has blocked water purifiers. A British member of Parliament said that Israel had blocked 2,560 solar lights.
Because Biden couldn’t persuade Israel to ease up on this nonsense and allow in enough aid to avert starvation, he moved to airdrops and a sea corridor — better than nothing and also woefully inadequate. Cindy McCain, head of the United Nations World Food Program, warns that road access to Gaza is essential, and that “if we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas, famine is imminent.”
Diplomacy is about arm-twisting as much as persuasion, but Biden seems unwilling to act in ways that give force to his words. Simply put, Netanyahu ignores the White House because there is no cost to doing so.
That’s not entirely new. “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice,” the Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan told a visiting American Zionist leader in 1967. “We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”
Avi Shlaim, the historian, recounts that the visitor asked what would happen if America said that Israel would get aid only if it took the advice. Dayan replied: “Then we would have to take the advice, too.”
Under tough-minded presidents, that has occasionally happened. My first visit to the Middle East involved backpacking through a battered Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion, which left many Palestinians dead but hasn’t improved Israel’s security. I didn’t know that behind the scenes President Ronald Reagan called up Prime Minister Menachem Begin after one particularly horrific artillery barrage and, instead of pleading for a halt, commanded it.
“I was angry,” Reagan wrote in his diary, as The New York Review of Books noted. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”
“Twenty mins. later,” Reagan added, “he called to tell me he’d ordered an end to the barrage and pled for our continued friendship.”
I wish Biden would show similar mettle. He could attach end-use restrictions to shipments of offensive arms, limiting how they can be used (as he does with Ukraine). He could simply adhere, as eight senators have urged, to American law that ends military support to any country when the president finds that it “restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”
Under congressional pressure, Biden last month issued National Security Memorandum 20, which amplifies the law and will require Israel to confirm by late March that it is allowing humanitarian aid delivery; otherwise, it risks its supply of offensive weapons. That is leverage, but only if Biden is willing to use it.
The president can also publicly urge Egypt to let aid trucks now stalled at the border while awaiting Israeli inspections to pass into Gaza even without Israeli approval. (It could do its own inspections if necessary.) Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation is important, but not if it keeps food from Gaza.
The U.S. can also abstain on humanitarian resolutions at the U.N. instead of vetoing them. Biden can bypass Netanyahu and speak directly to Israelis — maybe at the Knesset — and make the case for humanitarian aid, a cease-fire and a path to a two-state solution.
Biden might deny that he actually has much leverage. It’s a fair point: Israelis were shattered by the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and aren’t in the mood to hear outsiders who are sitting safely in distant lands call for restraint. One depressing poll last month found that 68 percent of Israeli Jews oppose allowing food and medicine into Gaza.
On the other hand, Israel has responded — albeit inadequately so far — to public pressure and criticism. Just in the last few days, officials have signaled that they want to see more humanitarian assistance, with a military spokesman saying it was trying to “flood” Gaza with aid. A convoy of six aid trucks was allowed to enter northern Gaza directly from Israel, which was encouraging.
The truth is that we don’t know how much leverage Biden has because he hasn’t truly tested his power. When Biden seemed to suggest this month that invading Rafah would cross a red line and might have repercussions, the White House immediately walked his statement back.
Perhaps Biden believes he is projecting friendship and loyalty to a beleaguered ally. To Netanyahu and most of the world, it looks like weakness.
Meanwhile, Gazans starve unnecessarily, and this may become part of Biden’s legacy.
To explain how the present policy is failing, I’ll give the last word to the Gaza linguistics scholar Mohammed Alshannat, whose texts I quoted in my column last week. In a new message, Alshannat told how he tried to collect food from an airdrop to avert starvation:
“Me and my wife decided to go to the beach hoping that we get something to feed our children. There were dozens of thousands of people waiting. Around 2:20 three planes started to drop their parachutes across the beach. People started chasing them. We chased one of these parachutes. However, when it was opened, we found water bottles and vinegar bottles. Two children died of stampede. Because we are so malnourished and have not eaten anything, it took us three hours to get back home, as we had to take a rest every 10 minutes. We wept all the way back.”
