Biden’s food drops in Gaza underscore difficulties with Israel

If the U.S. airdrops of food into Gaza that began Saturday were meant to demonstrate the Biden administration’s strength and resolve to address a deepening humanitarian crisis, for many, the intervention had the opposite effect.

The White House seemingly intended to portray President Joe Biden as a leader taking decisive action to alleviate human suffering and mass hunger approaching starvation. But international aid groups with experience in addressing conflict-caused hunger roundly criticized the airdrops as woefully inadequate – more show than solution.

Moreover, the expensive and imprecise drops of thousands of ready-to-eat meals into a sealed enclave of more than 2 million hungry people – some pallets of the first 38,000 meals dropped Saturday fell into the sea – quickly came to symbolize the American superpower’s impotence and unwillingness to impose its will on close ally Israel.

It is Israel’s 5-month-old war on Hamas following the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel that has led to Gaza’s devastation – unprecedented rates of civilian deaths, vast infrastructure destruction, and looming mass starvation. And it is Israel’s security clampdown on border crossings (along with similar actions by Egypt, another recipient of significant U.S. aid) that is at least partially responsible for the crisis.

In particular, the airdrops – a second set was carried out Tuesday – only underscore for many Mr. Biden’s refusal since the beginning of the war to take any steps that might be construed as dictating actions to Israel or imposing any restraint on its right to self-defense.

“There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate to other countries’ sovereign decisions,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said at a press briefing Thursday.

To which a range of Americans, from national security experts to members of Congress and average citizens, are responding that of course the U.S. has leverage, as Israel’s largest benefactor and supplier of military aid.

On Sunday Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called on President Biden to invoke the Foreign Assistance Act to demand that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu restore humanitarian aid access to Gaza or lose U.S. military assistance.

Quoting the section of the act that bars furnishing assistance to any country that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance,” Senator Sanders said Israel was in “clear violation” for “prohibiting aid convoys from delivering desperately needed food and water.”

At the State Department press briefing, Mr. Miller added that the U.S. will continue to support Israel and its “legitimate right” to protect itself and pursue policies aimed at preventing anything like the Oct. 7 attacks from occurring ever again.

But he also hinted at growing daylight between the U.S. and Israel.

“Israel makes its sovereign decisions,” he said. “We make clear where we disagree with them.”

Those disagreements have largely been aired behind closed doors, although Mr. Biden did tell reporters at the White House last month that Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks was “over the top.”

But with polls showing that a plurality of Americans now think Israel has gone too far in its Gaza campaign, the White House appears to be getting the message and venturing into more forceful expressions of frustration with Israel.

On Sunday Vice President Kamala Harris deployed the administration’s harshest rhetoric yet, telling an audience in Selma, Alabama, that the war has caused a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. “The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid,” Ms. Harris said. “No excuses.”

She also called for a cease-fire – noting a deal is “on the table” that has Israel’s backing and which would halt fighting for perhaps six weeks – echoing a demand popular with many young Democrats and Gaza supporters, but one the president has until now shied away from articulating.

The newfound willingness to display widening differences with the Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war continued Monday, when Ms. Harris received Israeli wartime Cabinet member Benny Gantz at the White House. Mr. Gantz, a centrist, is a Netanyahu rival, with polls showing he would easily trounce the conservative prime minister if elections were held now.    

The vice president underscored the need for a credible plan to reduce the risk to civilians before Israel launches any major military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the White House said in a statement. But there was no word of a presidential drop-in at the Harris-Gantz meeting, as some observers had speculated Mr. Biden might engineer as a way to highlight his growing frustration with Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

As a growing number of foreign policy experts note, Mr. Biden has been great at deploying American power to support close allies in their moments of dire need, but not so good at pressuring them to change course when they falter.

As international affairs commentator Robert Wright observed in a recent column, the U.S. has “massive pressure” over Israel, but Mr. Biden has refused to use that leverage to influence a war Mr. Wright believes will ultimately not be good for Israel. (For the record, Mr. Wright says Mr. Biden is making the same mistake with Ukraine by not pressuring for an end to the war there.)

“Biden is good at showing love,” he says, “and catastrophically bad at showing tough love.”