Consider This from NPR - Is Biden's Unconditional Support Of Israel Nearing Its Limit?

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Israel has stepped up military operations in Gaza after the temporary ceasefire ended last week. Gaza health officials say several hundred Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more have been wounded since the fighting resumed, complicating how the U.S. maintains its alignment with Israel.NPR's Fatma Tanis speaks with analysts who say that U.S. support for Israel is undermining American interests and NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, about how President Biden's history with Israel is shaping current U.S. policy. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The temporary truce between Israel and Hamas has collapsed after little more than a week. The bombing was relentless in southern Gaza last night. James Elder, global spokesman for UNICEF, described the assault. I cannot stop thinking about the 1.8 million people here in the south. I don't think there was more than a five or ten minute period throughout the course of the night and I really didn't sleep where something wasn't flying overhead or the sky being lit up. Gaza health officials say several hundred Palestinians have been killed, hundreds more wounded since fighting started again over the weekend. UNICEF spokesman James

Elder again on the impact the intense attacks are having on Gaza's children. I feel like I'm running out of ways to describe the horrors hitting children here. I feel like I'm almost failing in my ability to convey the endless killing of children here. Consider this, fighting has resumed between Israel and Hamas. As civilian casualties continue to mount in Gaza, will the Biden administration maintain its unconditional support of Israel? From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Monday, December 4th. It's Consider This from NPR. The numbers are almost incomprehensible. Thousands of Palestinians have died since Hamas and Israel began fighting almost two months ago. Hundreds have been killed just since the weekend after the temporary ceasefire ended. And as fighting resumes between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, senior U.S. officials delivered their strongest

warnings yet that Israel should avoid civilian deaths. As Israel defends itself, it matters how that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale that we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south. So I have repeatedly made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative. That was Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In a moment, we will hear how their boss, President Biden, is steering the U.S. response. But first, NPR's Fatma Tanis looks at how the civilian toll poses a challenge for the U.S. to maintain its alignment with Israel. The toll has been high. Israeli attacks have killed more than 15,000

Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. And those who blame Israel also blame the U.S. The White House hasn't drawn red lines for Israel and says Israel can't be expected to live with the threat Hamas poses. But criticism for U.S. policy is growing. Merav Zonshine is the senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group. She's based in Tel Aviv. The U.S. up until now allowed Israel to kill a lot of people and target all kinds of civilian infrastructure. You know, it knowingly stood by Israel while it's continued with this operation. The White House has requested $14 billion in new aid to Israel, in addition to the $3 billion in annual aid, and has not called for a ceasefire. Supporters of the U.S. policy say Hamas is to blame. Bradley Bowman is the senior director for the Center on Military and Political Power

at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank. Have there been a lot of casualties in Gaza? Absolutely. None of them would happen if Hamas hadn't done one that they had done on October 7th. And the casualty tolls would be a lot, lot lower if Hamas wasn't employing human shields the way that they are in a very cowardly manner. But analysts say Israel's stated endgame, the eradication of Hamas, can't be realized without a whole scale destruction of Gaza itself. That seems to run counter to U.S. goals. President Biden says he wants to see a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the administration wants Israel to be secure in the region, have relations with neighboring Arab countries, and it wants to avoid

a regional war. There is a risk that the U.S. could get dragged into a wider conflict. Iran's proxies in the region have stepped up attacks against U.S. could get dragged into a wider conflict. Iran's proxies in the region have stepped up attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria and the Red Sea, with some analysts noting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged the U.S. to take on Iran more openly in the past. The prime minister of Israel has been known to want American presidents to engage in war with Iran, which both Obama and Trump had resisted. That's Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.

Arab states that recently made agreements with Israel have not pulled out, and Saudi Arabia hasn't taken a potential deal with Israel off the table. Hamas isn't popular among their leaders. But in the long run, Telhami says, the images of dead Palestinian children in the media make it more difficult for Arab nations to build on their relations with Israel because of the impact on public opinion. What is at stake is a possible blowback

because in the Arab and Muslim world, the U.S. is seen to be the principal enabler, if not part of the war. It is probably impacting the opinion of an entire generation that is likely to lose. And while supporters of U.S. policy say Biden's backing of Israel and appearances with its leader give him more influence over events, Netanyahu has opposed the two-state solution that Biden calls for. Analyst Mayrav Zonshine says at the core of it, this conflict is a political one that can't be solved militarily. When you think about the children and the people and the generation of Palestinians

who have only known occupation and siege and now only know aerial bombardments, that's just not going to breed anything that would provide, I think, stability or security for Israelis. In recent days, two months into the war, some around Biden have signaled a slightly new tone. But Telhami says the outcome won't change unless the president himself matches the tone and acts on it. I don't see anything in this president's resume in relation to this issue that suggests that he's capable of reaping the benefit of this embrace of Israel to restrain Israeli behavior. But he says there are growing signs that Biden's open support for Israeli military action in Gaza could be nearing its limit. Fatma Tanis, NPR News, Washington.

And that's where I want to pick up with our next guest. Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Biden is the fifth U.S. president he's covered, and he also served briefly as Jerusalem correspondent for The Times. Peter Baker, welcome. Thank you for having me. So let's start there. Do you see signs, as you report on Biden, that he may be reaching the limits of unconditional support for Israel and Gaza?

Yeah, I think you're seeing a hardening of the public rhetoric. Now, they have told us that in private for weeks they have, of course, tried to guide or give advice or counsel the Israelis to be careful, more cautious about civilian casualties, and to be more aggressive about allowing humanitarian aid in. But you're hearing the tone of these comments that you just played from the vice president, from the secretary of defense. It's a sharper tone and less about Israel's right to defend itself, which they still say they're for, and more about its responsibility to protect the people who are not the targets of the war. Step back and remind people listening why the U.S. is so invested in Israel, why for Biden the only response to the October 7th Hamas attack was to pledge unconditional U.S. support to Israel. Yeah, Biden is a creature of his era,

right? In his era, Democrats, and really Republicans too, but Democrats were particularly strong about Israel and believe in the project of the Jewish state in the Middle East. It's in the last decade or two that Democrats, many Democrats have moved away from that kind of unconditional support for Israel, much more concerned about West Bank settlements, much more concerned about the state of the Palestinians. And Biden isn't. He didn't move. He stayed where he was. And if you look back at his history, you know, he was of an era where it wasn't unusual to know people who had been in the Holocaust. And that was very powerful, I think, in formulating his thinking. His father talked about it at the dinner table. He hired Tom Lantos, who later became

a member of Congress, who was famously a Holocaust survivor, on his staff. This is something that was very real to him, was closer to his childhood, for instance, than it is to ours. And so I think that framed his thinking about Israel going forward. Yeah. So to what extent are domestic politics factoring in here? We keep seeing polls coming out, seeing how this is hitting President Biden's numbers, particularly when we come to younger voters, when we come to Arab American voters and so forth. He doesn't show much concern about it at the moment. I think the thinking in the White House is, look, yes, they're unhappy and it's not a good thing for us, but we're a year away from the election. And when it comes down to it a year from now, hopefully this conflict will be behind us. They'll have moved on to some

sort of reconstruction phase, maybe even a peacemaking stage. People will come to remember that the contrast is between a Democratic president they may not be particularly happy with on all fronts and Donald Trump, who in the view of these, you know, left-leaning voters are going to be far more, you know, objectionable and that they'll get these people back. But we don't know, obviously, it's a lot of ifs. I mentioned Biden is the fifth U.S. president you've covered, which prompts me to wonder, and this is unknowable, of course, but based on many years covering the White House, can you imagine past American presidents would have navigated this war in a fundamentally different way than Biden is? I think so. And I think we see it even just, for instance, with the president that Biden served,

President Obama, in just the last few weeks, you've heard him give across a much different type of message. He's much more of a, we have to understand both sides here. None of us have clean hands here. That's his phrase, I think. And it sounded very different than the way Biden sounds. And in fact, there's some friction there, I think, between the Biden and Obama camps because of that. They don't feel like President Obama's comments were very helpful to President Biden at this time. But I think President Obama, just as an example, would have certainly handled it differently, would not have been so full-throated in his support for Israel, would have been much more measured, maybe balanced in his phrase, in how he handled it.

So let me start to bring us to a close by looking forward. There have been all kinds of questions about the day after, meaning what happens the day after this war in Gaza eventually, we hope, comes to some kind of conclusion. When you look at the big picture about how this ends, U.S. policy is to support a two-state solution, an independent state for Palestinians alongside that of Israel. Is that a fundamental clash between U.S. goals and values and Israel's? Well, it is, actually. I mean, you know, the Israelis may give lip service at the moment to the idea of a two-state solution, but they have not been there for a number of years. And it doesn't feel like there's a lot of real possibility there at the moment for that.

The energy isn't there. The leadership on both sides isn't there. But having said that, you know, what we saw in history, we saw that after the 1973 war was four years later, Sadat comes to Jerusalem and then goes to Camp David and makes peace with the Israelis. So you never know how these things will work out. But I don't know that the two-state solution in and of itself has a lot of momentum at the moment. Peter Baker, sharing many years of reporting and expertise there with us. He is Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times. Thank you. Thank you. It's great talking to you. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.