In the aftermath of Hamas’ deadly October 7 rampage in which a thousand Israelis were slaughtered, women were mass raped, children and babies dismembered, and hundreds of dancing young people were mowed down in the prime of their youth, President Joe Biden was initially very supportive of Israel. But that support began to wane in the face of domestic concerns, as polls showed Biden trailing former President Donald Trump, his opponent in the 2024 presidential race. Biden’s erstwhile support for Israel curdled into consistent public criticism as he attempted to court young people, and Israel’s enemies were listening: Retaliating for the assassination of one of their generals, Iran attacked Israel for the first time from Iranian soil with a barrage of drones. And yet, as the 300 drones made their way toward Israel, an astonishing coalition came to Israel’s aid: Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and even Saudi Arabia joined France, the U.S., and the U.K. in shooting down the drones or providing intelligence, saving hundreds if not thousands of Israeli lives.
It turns out that if a U.S. president were to ever truly abandon Israel, a host of Muslim countries would be there in his stead.
How did we get here?
The same forces at work in Biden’s awful poll numbers explain how the Trump team was able to pull off a series of normalization agreements between Israel and moderate Sunni Arab states, the Abraham Accords, from whence the appetite for protecting Israel stemmed. The same mistaken view that led President Biden to turn on Israel as a desperate ploy for combatting his awful polling was at work obscuring the events that catalyzed this historic reversal of fortune in the Middle East.
“My Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering,” the President said in a statement issued by the White House on October 7 after a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A week later, the President himself traveled to Israel to ratify that support in person, and a State Department memo warned high-level officials not to issue press materials mentioning “de-escalation” “ceasefire” or an “end to violence/bloodshed.”
But that ironclad support proved to be made of some less durable mettle; since October, Biden’s language about Israel shifted, at first subtly, then less subtly. In November, he called conditioning aid to Israel a “worthwhile thought.” In December, he accused Israel of “indiscriminate bombing.” In February, he told reporters Israel’s actions were “over the top.” In his State of the Union address in March, the President uncritically and without qualification cited Hamas’ casualty count of 30,000 casualties and issued a public rebuke to Israel: “To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip.” Days later he lamented the lives being lost in Gaza on MSNBC and allowed a call for a ceasefire to pass unvetoed in the U.N., while Vice President Kamala Harris herself joined calls for a ceasefire. All of this culminated in Biden withholding a weapons shipment authorized by Congress for Israel.
The reversal reflected a desperation in the Biden camp that had been building all year as the 2024 presidential election began to bear down on the President, and poll after poll showed his chief contender, former President Trump, doing surprisingly well among demographics Biden had relied upon to secure his 2020 victory. As it became clear that Trump had made significant inroads with Black men, Hispanics, and young people, Biden’s foreign policy fell prey to domestic concerns.
If the President thought he could fix his poor polling by taking a harsher line on Israel, he was not alone; the liberal media has assiduously attempted to ascribe Biden’s wan approval ratings to his support for Israel, breathlessly inserting the topic into their discussions of Biden’s struggle to connect with voters. Mainstream media outlets consistently warned that Biden could lose the election over the war in Gaza, a narrative that gathered steam during the Michigan primary when 100,000 voters, most of them Muslims, chose to vote “uncommitted” instead of for Biden.
Something media would rather you not notice is that the person voters are abandoning Biden for is much more pro-Israel. More importantly, voters are not shy about their reasons for switching sides: In poll after poll, they listed the economy, inflation, immigration, the border, crime, and foreign policy as the issues they thought Trump was better on (Biden wins on abortion). Gaza consistently ranks last in the priorities of American voters, including young people, and the vast majority of Americans continue to back Israel in its war against Hamas.
If Biden loses Michigan, it won’t be because of 1oo,000 Muslim voters. It will be because of Michigan’s 600,000 autoworkers, who, like most of America’s working class, have had enough of a party that once represented their interests, then proceeded to abandon them to cater to an over-credentialed college elite which sneers at labor with its socially moderate and economically protectionist preferences. But because this is a hard thing for the Democrats to admit, and because the members of America’s journalism caste belong to the over-credentialed college elite, they prefer an explanation that’s less of an indictment, that’s more flattering to their sense of themselves as on the side of justice—hence blaming Biden’s support for Israel for his cratering support. It’s the move the Democrats have deployed again and again over the past few decades—substituting a culture war issue or identity politics to mask the way their economic agenda has betrayed the working class they used to represent.
Unfortunately, Biden seems to have been listening. The Biden administration, like the Democratic Party more broadly, doesn’t have any real foreign policy, be it in Israel or Iran or Eastern Europe; it only has a domestic policy based on a self-flattering mythology to mask its own failings.
In other words, they are gaslighting the American people, but primarily by gaslighting themselves.
The same error was at work masking the possibility for peace accords in the Middle East prior to the Trump administration and has continued to obscure the unbelievable impact the Abraham Accords have had in the few years they have been in place. The foreign policy expert class, like the mainstream media and many in power on the Left, has operated under the principle of maintaining the status quo at all costs as a way of protecting its own elite status. The reigning logic when it came to the Middle East, especially apparent in the years of the Clinton and Obama administrations, was that the U.S.’s role was to do its best to create parity between the actors—Israel and Palestine, Iran and Saudi Arabia—which effectively meant weakening Israel and strengthening the Palestinians or creating a nuclear deal that strengthened Iran and weakened U.S. ties to the KSA. The idea was that stability comes from evening the playing field, which was to be accomplished through pursuing a lowest common denominator under the paternalistic auspices of the United States. And the view was that normalization between Israel and the Gulf states would be impossible so long as the Palestinian issue was not resolved. Standard procedure at the State Department in the pre-Trump era had been to let Israel flex its muscles once every few years in between suffering consistent attacks from her multiple enemies, but never to allow Israel to truly accomplish anything. It was the protection of the status quo over all else.
The Abraham Accords completely upended this logic. By strengthening Israel’s hand and position with symbolic moves like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights, and defunding the Palestinian Authority over its pay-to-slay program, the Trump administration sanctioned Israel’s status as the party with the upper hand, which then made it an attractive partner to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and even Saudi Arabia, which is still seeking normalization with Israel, despite the war in Gaza. It turns out the “experts” were wrong; it is strength, not weakness, that attracts partners for peace. Peace cannot be achieved by weakening U.S. allies but rather by emboldening them and allowing them the autonomy to offer something to new allies. It was common sense that prevailed over expertise, as a group of Orthodox Jewish lawyers with an obvious spiritual affinity for Israel managed to bring peace deals that had eluded the more objective, less biased experts for decades—experts who sneered at Trump’s untested team right until the peace accords were signed.
The same hubris and self-deception being currently deployed by the Biden administration to hide its actual failures—from the American people and from itself—around the cost of housing, groceries, and education, was at play in Democrats’ foreign policy in the Middle East for decades, which, like their domestic policy, was guided by the paternalism that flatters the elites instead of the autonomy that animates the common man.
It is a mistaken reading of the American electorate that has resulted in Biden catering to the fringe as if it were the majority, misreading a far-Left elite on college campuses and cable news channels and on staff at his State Department as the voice of the masses, an error only possible for those with contempt for the average American—for the actual masses. It was a similar contempt for common sense and a corresponding use of the status quo to protect the status of the experts, that blinded the foreign policy expert class and the mainstream American media to the fact that something as historic as the Abraham Accords was possible—and what it in fact accomplished.
In seeking to weaken Israel, the Biden administration has only weakened its own position in the Middle East, as other actors are forming ties and reshaping the future.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek. She is the author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy and Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
