The Incorrigible President and His Indefensible Gaza Policy

The Court and the president could scarcely be more out of alignment.

Nick Kristof makes the mistake of taking Biden at his word:

This should be an easy call, and it offers Biden a chance to rescue his failed Gaza policy, for, in this case, Biden and the World Court are fundamentally aligned [bold mine-DL]: They both oppose an all-out invasion of Rafah, and they both want Israel to allow in more humanitarian aid. But for seven months, Biden has allowed himself to be ignored and steamrolled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the question now is whether the court ruling will help Biden find the gumption to pressure Israel to obey the decision.

It should be clear by now that Biden has no intention of using U.S. leverage to halt Israel’s offensive in Rafah. It is also impossible to miss that Biden and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have taken opposing positions. The ICJ has ordered Israel to halt its current operations whether they qualify as an “all-out invasion” or not. The Biden administration is pretending that the offensive is “limited,” no matter how devastating its effects are. The ICJ takes the danger to the Palestinian population of Gaza seriously. The Biden administration obviously does not. The Court sees a possible genocide in the making. Biden flatly denies this. The Court and the president could scarcely be more out of alignment.

Kristof is right about Biden’s Gaza policy, but he keeps entertaining the fantasy that Biden will suddenly decide to do the right thing after more than seven months of proving to everyone that he won’t. Yes, it should be an easy call for Biden to endorse the ICJ’s order to end the attack on Rafah, but then it should have been an easy call for Biden to oppose the indiscriminate slaughter and mass starvation that have been taking place for more than half a year. It should have been an easy call to conclude that the Israeli government had violated international law and impeded the delivery of aid, but instead the administration ignored the evidence and the views of its own experts so that it could keep transferring weapons to them.

The president fails to get these easy calls right because preventing harm to the civilian population in Gaza and averting famine have never been priorities for him. We don’t have to guess about this. We need only review the record of what he has done and what he refuses to do.

It is understandable that critics of Biden’s indefensible policy want to be constructive by urging the president to take the actions he has refused to take, but at some point we all have to acknowledge that he isn’t going to make the necessary changes to the policy. We may hope that the president completely changes his position, but it would require something like a Damascene conversion for him to get there. Biden has spent more than seven months showing the world what he truly believes about international law, war crimes, and the humanity of Palestinians. There is no reason to expect a sudden change after he has been enabling war crimes and mass starvation for all that time.

Will the ICJ ruling “help Biden find the gumption” to pressure Israel? It is a safe bet that the answer is no. Many of Biden’s foreign policy critics have assumed that Biden wishes to do the right thing in this case, and so they explain away his failure by saying that he lacks the courage to do what he knows he should. That assumption hasn’t held up very well.

If Biden had wished to bring an end to the war or to avert famine in Gaza, his policy would have been radically different. He wouldn’t have been going out of his way to funnel weapons to the Israeli military. The U.S. wouldn’t have vetoed three Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Above all, the U.S. would have been demanding a ceasefire and insisting that all crossings into Gaza be opened to prevent mass starvation, and then it would have backed up those demands with penalties if they were ignored.

The president isn’t going to use the considerable leverage at his disposal because he doesn’t want to force an end to the war. He has never wanted to do that. He will continue providing weapons to fuel the war and he will exert no real pressure to make the Israeli government change course. All the evidence tells us that Biden is incorrigible.