How Biden administration shifted from ‘unwavering’ support of Israel to criticism over Gaza deaths

On the day of the 7 October Hamas attack, which killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis, President Joe Biden proudly proclaimed his “unwavering” support for Israel’s security and its “right to defend itself and its people.”

Each day since, outrage – in Congress, on protest-clogged streets around the world, within the US government itself – continues to grow against an Israeli response that has annihilated large parts of Gaza and killed over 17,000 people, a large majority of them women and children.

Two months later, that unwavering support is beginning to waiver, though only barely.

This week, the Biden administration has offered its most specific criticisms yet of Israeli tactics, though has still balked at demanding big-picture strategy changes or formal constraints on military tactics that would meaningfully alter the course of the war over the long term.

“As we stand here almost a week into this campaign into the south [of Gaza]… it remains imperative that Israel put a premium on civilian protection,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a press conference in Washington on Thursday. “And there does remain a gap between… the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.”

The criticisms mark a major change from the administration’s initial tone at the outset of the war.

Throughout the weeks immediately following Hama’s brutal attack on Israel, the White House appeared intent on showing as little daylight between them and Israel as possible.

However, as the weeks wore on, reports began appearing, always from unnamed officials, that the Biden administration was pushing the Israelis on whether an all-out ground invasion, likely to kill numerous civilians, was the best way forward.

Following an October trip to Tel Aviv, one Biden official told The Associated Press the president had asked Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “tough questions” about the direction the war seemed headed, and had a “long talk” about “alternatives” to a full-on siege.

The administration wasn’t afraid to mention the idea of protecting civilians, exactly.

“Netanyahu and I discussed again yesterday the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war,” Mr Biden said in one October address, while Secretary Blinken told the UN Security Council “every civilian life is equally valuable” that same month.

But the White House seemed loathe to directly comment on whether Israel, as its critics alleged, was violating international norms by killing numerous civilians in strikes on schools, border crossings, hospitals, and refugee camps.

The footage out of Gaza, whose population of of 2.3m million is now mostly homeless, however, became hard to ignore.

“How do you look at one atrocity and say, ‘This is wrong,’ but you watch as bodies pile up as neighborhoods are leveled?” Democrat congresswoman Ilhan Omar said in October.

King Abdullah II of Jordan, meanwhile, a close US ally, said later that month that the continued siege of Gaza and the mass displacement and suffering it caused was “a war crime” and “a red line” for nations in the Middle East.

“Anywhere else, attacking civilian infrastructure and deliberately starving an entire population of food, water, electricity and basic necessities would be condemned,” he said at a summit in Egypt. “Accountability would be enforced, immediately, unequivocally. … But not in Gaza.”

In on high-profile defection that month, a senior State Department officials resigned, arguing Mr Biden’s “blind support for one side” had fueled an Israeli campaign that was “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.”

Still, such criticisms were largely met with responses ranging from resignation to indigation from the White House.

In late October, when UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres accused Israel of carrying out the “collective punishment” of Palestinians, a war crime, and said Israel policies like its “suffocating occcupation” of Palestinian territories were partly to blame for the Hamas attacks, the White House pushed back.

Xural.com