The Backlash Against Biden on Gaza
The administration’s position on this conflict is wildly at odds with what most Americans think the U.S. should be doing.
Biden is already starting to pay a political price for his response to the war in Gaza:
The first national poll of Arab Americans since the war in Gaza began shows how deep that sense of betrayal goes, with only 17% of Arab American voters saying they will vote for Biden in 2024—a staggering drop from 59% in 2020.
“This is the most dramatic shift over the shortest period of time that I’ve ever seen,” James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, which released the poll on Tuesday, tells TIME.
Biden’s response to the war and to the Israeli collective punishment of the people in Gaza has truly been abysmal. To make matters worse, Biden and his officials haven’t begun to grasp how badly they are doing. That is why you have the spectacle of the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, insulting the public’s intelligence by claiming that the administration is deeply concerned about and is working to address the humanitarian crisis when their policy has been to support the Israeli government to the hilt and to endorse the punishing siege of Gaza. The same administration that vetoed a resolution calling for a humanitarian pause and voted against the motion in the General Assembly calling for a humanitarian truce wants you to believe that they are doing “everything they can” to aid a population that they are helping to bomb and starve.
The president has conducted his foreign policy as if the only kind of political backlash he might face would come from hawkish detractors. Biden has kept many terrible Trump-era policies in place partly because he feared antagonizing hawks that care about those issues, but his uncritical, automatic support for Israel’s war may end up costing him far more with his own voters.