As Democratic split widens on Israel, politics grow treacherous for Biden

Of all the challenges President Joe Biden faces, one stands out today as particularly knotty: the war in Gaza and the United States’ role as Israel’s chief foreign backer. 

President Biden’s deeply held support for the Jewish state, seven months after a major assault by Gaza-based Hamas terrorists, is being tested like never before. After pausing a shipment of bombs to Israel, Mr. Biden has threatened to cut some weapons deliveries altogether if the Israelis follow through on a full-scale military operation in Rafah. Residents are fleeing the southern Gaza city, considered Hamas’ last redoubt, but some 700,000 people reportedly remain – many of them displaced Palestinians. 

Mr. Biden’s threat has alarmed supporters of Israel across the U.S. political spectrum, including in a Democratic Party already riven by the war. On the left, pro-Palestinian protesters hound the president in public with cries of “Genocide Joe” and have disrupted college campuses across the country for months amid what Mr. Biden calls a “ferocious surge” in antisemitism. 

With graduation season now in full swing and university leaders cracking down, pro-Palestinian encampments are dwindling. Over the weekend, some commencements saw protests – including a walkout at Duke University as vocally pro-Israel comedian Jerry Seinfeld received an honorary degree – though reports of disruptions were limited. Still, the Democratic convention this summer in Chicago may be fertile ground for a resurgence of unrest.

The potential looms for a schism in U.S.-Israeli relations, if Israel launches a major invasion of Rafah and Mr. Biden follows through on cuts to military aid. Among the president’s most devoted pro-Israel Democratic allies, the frustration is palpable. 

Mr. Biden “already doesn’t have great [poll] numbers on being a strong leader, and when you look like you’re giving in to protesters, you reinforce that sense of weakness – and that’s deeply problematic,” says the leader of a Jewish Democratic organization who asked to withhold his name so he could speak candidly. “This is a great lesson on how to alienate everyone.”

In political terms, the problem for Mr. Biden – locked in a tight reelection race with presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump – isn’t necessarily the Israel-Hamas war itself as a driver of votes. Polls show, in fact, that the war ranks relatively low on the list of voter concerns, even among young voters, who prioritize issues such as jobs, inflation, housing, and health care. 

But the news and social media have been awash with chaotic images of campus protests – including the takeover and subsequent police clearing of a building at Columbia University. Nearly 3,000 demonstrators have been arrested across the country.

“The optics are not good; people don’t like disorder,” says presidential historian George Edwards, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. “They see disorder, and don’t understand what these college students are doing – camping on campus, not studying. Remember, the typical voter didn’t go to college.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is struggling to help a difficult ally. In two TV interviews Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken strongly criticized Israel’s behavior in Gaza, where some 35,000 people have died in the war, according to local authorities. The war began last Oct. 7 when Hamas-led militants raided southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages. 

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Secretary Blinken decried “a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians,” and called on Israel to devise a “credible plan” to mitigate civilian casualties before going into Rafah. 

Mr. Blinken also acknowledged a Biden administration report to Congress on Friday that found the use of U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza likely violated international law, but added that the evidence was incomplete. 

A cease-fire and return of hostages would be the best way for Mr. Biden to silence his critics, analysts say, but negotiations have proceeded in fits and starts. And Israel’s expected assault on Rafah has cooled expressions of optimism. 

Mr. Biden has faced criticism, too, for being slow to respond to the campus protests. He finally spoke out May 2 in brief White House remarks, underscoring the right to free speech but insisting that “order must prevail.” 

The president also delivered a longer address last week in the U.S. Capitol at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony, speaking emotionally about the killing of 6 million Jews during World War II – a stain on history that Mr. Biden says made him a committed Zionist. 

That devotion has buttressed Mr. Biden’s steadfast support for Israel since the Oct. 7 attack – which many call that nation’s 9/11 – even as his relationship with the Jewish state, under conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shows unusual strain. 

For American Jewish leaders, it’s also a time of great stress amid spiking antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. They say expressing support for the Jewish people isn’t tricky at all. 

“That’s what the president realizes,” says Ted Deutch, CEO of the nonpartisan American Jewish Committee (AJC) and a former Democratic member of Congress. “He realizes that it’s not difficult to acknowledge the fear and anxiety that the community is feeling.” 

Many of the protesters, especially on college campuses, Mr. Deutch says, are marching “not in support of peace but in support of the terrorists who committed atrocities on 10/7.” According to AJC data, he says, nearly half of American Jews have changed their behavior so as not to be identifiably Jewish. 

Still, divisions within the Democratic Party over the handling of Gaza – personified on the left by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish – have complicated life for Mr. Biden, especially in an election year. 

Senator Sanders has made headlines suggesting Gaza could be “Biden’s Vietnam,” an inauspicious comparison to the election of 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson opted not to run for reelection, saddling his successor, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with an unpopular war. Republican Richard Nixon narrowly beat him. 

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mr. Sanders doubled down on the Vietnam comparison, saying, “I think a lot of people are very disappointed. ... It’s hurting [Mr. Biden] politically.” Still, the Vermont senator noted that he’s still “strongly supporting” the president on domestic issues. 

Conservative political analyst Henry Olsen sees in Mr. Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza a longstanding tendency to aim for the “center” of his party, wherever that may be at the time. 

“He’s doing what he’s done throughout his career, which is to look at both sides within a Democratic Party divide and try to occupy the middle,” says Mr. Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.  

“To that extent, he’s not satisfying anybody,” he continues. “But he’s not driving anybody irrevocably away, either – and that might be the best he can expect.”