In his 2020 presidential campaign, US President Joe Biden pledged to restore what he said was America’s eroded standing on the global stage. He was looking to make a turnaround from what had been a very unorthodox US administration under Donald Trump.
Biden is, after all, a politician who for decades posited himself as an authority on global affairs, especially from his time chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early 2000s.
In the first year of his presidency, the chaotic and deadly US military withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years was perceived as a failure by his own bureaucrats for the way it was executed.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden was widely credited for banding together a western coalition that cut off Moscow and bankrolled Kyiv.
And as a self-described Zionist – a label he adopted when courting pro-Israel donors for his fledgling Senate campaign in the 1970s – he has been adamant about fulfilling Israel’s military needs with little oversight.
In October, a year after Israel’s onslaught on Gaza began, Israeli forces killed Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar.
Biden quickly took credit for what he viewed as a victory. He had delivered on a key Israeli American goal, even though at least 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed at the time, nearly half of them children.
Even then, experts suggested that the overall casualty figure could be much higher – when factoring in disease and starvation.
Protesters had marched, consistently, in their tens of thousands across the country, demanding an end to what the United Nations had referred to as “acts of genocide” by Israel. There were anti-war disruptions at Biden’s public events, and his secretary of state could not leave his home without red paint being splattered across his vehicle.
Resignees from his administration said the situation had become untenable. In November, his own White House staff sent him a dissent letter begging him to act to end the slaughter.
Given Biden had stepped aside so his vice president, Kamala Harris, could lead the Democratic ticket for the 2024 election back in July, he already knew he had limited time to shape his legacy.
That is, only if he wanted to. But Biden left his Middle East policy unchanged.
In the final months of the Biden presidency, Middle East Eye spoke to several US academics, historians, and political analysts for this story, in addition to former administration officials.
Their positions varied on what capabilities a president has when it comes to Israel, which could be motivated by ideological and political factors rather than practical ones. But most agreed that Biden was not realistically likely to go the extra mile to secure a ceasefire before leaving office.
That left Israel to raise the death toll to nearly 48,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children.
Speaking to the US broadcaster MSNBC on Thursday in his last television interview as president, Biden revealed that during his visit to Israel, just ten days after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he could not “indiscriminately bomb civilian areas”.
“I told them we were going to help, I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well, you did it… You carpet-bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war’.”
Yet as the bodies piled up in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught on the enclave, Biden committed almost $30bn dollars to go to Israel in separate bills authorised by Congress. No other country backing Israel comes close.
The Biden administration refused to leverage the billions of dollars it was spending on Israel to secure a ceasefire.
And in the end, in the words of Biden’s own team, it was President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy who personally pressured Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal that had been on the table – according to Qatari mediators – for more than a year.
Biden’s admission more than 15 months into Israel’s war on Gaza that he knew Israel had indiscriminately wiped out civilians and was intending to continue that strategy is “embarrassing and very un-self-aware, which is perhaps a metaphor for this administration’s policy on Gaza as a whole”, Washington Post columnist and political scientist Shadi Hamid told Middle East Eye.
Not long after that visit to Israel, in remarks outside the White House in October 2023, Biden disputed figures shared by a reporter and said the death toll in Gaza was inflated.
“What’s perhaps most striking is that Biden seems somewhat sympathetic to the idea of bombing civilians if there are ‘bad guys’ somewhere in the vicinity,” Hamid said.
The most ardent critics of Biden’s Gaza policy have – for over a year now – dubbed him “Genocide Joe”.
By the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, many argued it was already too late to pursue meaningful change that would shift Biden’s reputation.
“Biden’s legacy has already been cemented,” Will Todman, the deputy director of the Middle East programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told MEE in October.
Netanyahu was already banking on Trump winning the November election and behaved accordingly, he said.
“I think it’s really unlikely that Netanyahu would be willing to provide a diplomatic win to President Biden… I just don’t see that being in his interests,” Todman told MEE then.
“He would rather wait until Trump comes back into office, and then he might get better terms, or he at least can provide Trump with a win early on, to sort of cement him in his good graces.”
Todman ended up being right.
The Gaza war also had a knock-on effect that left Biden without any major foreign policy victories.
“[Biden] had grand hopes about a Saudi-Israel normalisation agreement, and I think he really hoped, and perhaps even expected that that would be his legacy,” Todman told MEE.
But the longer the war dragged on, the more notoriously out of reach the deal became for the Biden administration – and now it’s foreseeable that the Trump administration will, at some point, claim that achievement, leaving Biden with no tangible win in the Arab world.
At the very least, Biden should have set the stage for the Saudi-Israel deal by further weakening Iran, James Jeffrey, the previous Trump administration’s special envoy to the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and former ambassador to Turkey, told MEE.
Biden’s role after Sinwar’s death should have been to “finish the job” by dealing a military blow to what Jeffrey described as the third Iranian proxy in the region after Hamas and Hezbollah: the Houthis in Yemen.
Then, Jeffrey added, the Trump administration can “pivot to a diplomatic offensive that will focus on the Abraham Accords” and expand them to include diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv.
‘What’s perhaps most striking is that Biden seems somewhat sympathetic to the idea of bombing civilians’
– Shadi Hamid, Washington Post columnist
There was also the question of whether a movement like Hamas can, in fact, be completely eradicated – something Biden said he was unconditionally supporting Israel to do.
It was an unrealistic goal that could not be met – and indeed, as the images showed from Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire on 19 January, Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, appeared even more defiant, arriving in the centre of Gaza in droves to cheering Palestinians.
“I think if [his] administration’s position is that Hamas must be completely removed from power and it wants the release of the Israeli hostages [in order to] make a deal to end the war in Gaza, I’m not sure those two things go together,” Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told MEE last year.
Wertheim pointed to the oft-reported line that Biden has tried to use his clout with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by offering him advice – privately – to scale back the military assault on Gaza. But Netanyahu consistently shunned that advice.
“Could [Biden have made] a much greater effort in this regard? Absolutely,” Wertheim said.
Even though no other G7 leader has embraced Netanyahu as warmly, some believe Biden’s influence always was, by nature, going to be limited.
“Israel is a separate country. It’s not a client state of the United States. It’s not controlled by the United States or by Biden or someone else, and ultimately, Netanyahu can make decisions independently,” Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government at American University in Washington, told MEE.
However, many will point to Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff’s ability to pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire before even taking office to contradict that notion.
Hala Rharrit, who held various roles at the US State Department and resigned in the spring over the handling of the war on Gaza, staunchly disagreed with the notion that a US president does not have the necessary leverage to significantly hinder Israel’s assault on Gaza.
She is one of at least a dozen people who left their posts because of frustrations with the lack of will to rein in Israel.
“The notion that the Biden administration could not do anything… is a complete farce,” she told MEE. “We have laws in place to ensure that situations like this don’t happen.”
The tools at any US administration’s disposal include the Leahy Laws, which prohibit US military assistance to units that violate human rights laws; the Export Control Act, which bars the transfer of weapons abroad if they could end up threatening US national security; and section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which stipulates that the US government cannot provide weapons to a government that is hindering access to humanitarian aid.
The Export Control Act, in particular, states that countries can only receive US weapons if they use them defensively, not offensively.
Rharrit said that’s why her former boss turns to the refrain that “Israel has a right to defend itself”.
“It’s not by accident, the words that [came] out of his mouth,” she said, referring to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“From my perspective, as someone that was on the inside, as a diplomat, what they have been doing is willful violation, or they’re trying to figure out how to bypass laws,” Rharrit said of the US government.
“We’ve never enforced our own laws when it comes to Israel,” she said.
‘We’ve never enforced our own laws when it comes to Israel’
– Hala Rharrit, former US State Department
Khaled Elgindy, director of the programme on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute and former adviser to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, told MEE that all of this boils down to the sacrifices Biden wanted to make on his way out.
Elgindy said that Biden didn’t have the political will and “didn’t want to pay a political cost”, referring to the pro-Israel lobbyists that can make or break a public figure.
“He [wanted] a ceasefire on the cheap.”
“He wants to be forever remembered as the American president who stood by Israel in its greatest time of need. He’s not going to abandon that narrative in the last weeks and months of his administration,” Elgindy added. “And for what, just to save Palestinian lives?”
The president is likely also banking on his legacy taking on new life when he leaves the White House, especially given that he has expressed interest in writing a book about it.
“I think none of us know the whole story,” Edelson, the American University professor, said of Biden’s strategy vis-a-vis Israel.
“And I don’t mean that in a way that suggests something favourable or unfavourable for Biden… It’ll probably take historians to uncover exactly what’s been going on.”
But whatever did go on didn’t work.
That’s why just weeks before the November election, Tariq Habash, who was the first Palestinian American to resign from the Department of Education in 2024, announced the formation of a new political action committee alongside Josh Paul, who was the very first person to resign from the State Department over Gaza.
He told MEE that the president’s hands were “absolutely” not tied when it comes to Israel, hence the launch of a lobbying effort which focuses on the US Capitol, where legislation is crafted.
Entitled “A New Policy”, the organisation is built on the principle of advancing a fairer US policy in the Middle East that upholds US laws and ensures the application of US values.
Habash told MEE that he had to look ahead to the future – and that lobbying Congress is the best bet to help shift policy.
“What we’re trying to achieve is working with the existing ecosystem of people who have already been doing this work and adding another perspective,” he said.
Habash agreed that the US is at an inflection point and that the US political system requires a new way forward.
“But I also want to be clear: nothing is going to change overnight,” Habash said.
Even under the new Trump administration, “policy may shift, but I don’t think it’s going to be a substantial shift”, he explained.
Rharrit, who was based in the Middle East and whose role at the State Department included compiling reports on how Arab media is covering Gaza and how audiences in the region were responding, said Biden, by enabling Israel’s war on Gaza, has effectively done the opposite of public service to the country: he has caused people to turn against the US.
“I’m seeing this even from [Arabs] who, for example, went to American universities in the region and have always loved America, have always dreamed about going to America. They’re now telling me, ‘I would never set foot in that country because I would not want to spend a dollar of mine in the United States.’ That’s heartbreaking.”
Rharrit said that despite the so-called “war on terror”, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and countless other scandals, many Arabs believed in the American dream and wished their children could go there.
“Now, as I’m told, ‘You’re the country of child killers’.”
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