With the world on fire, it’s Joe time
On Air Force One, while flying from Tel Aviv back to Washington, D.C., early Thursday morning, President Joe Biden paid a rare call to the plane’s press section.
Having shed a business suit for a casual zippered sweater for the 14-hour hour flight home, Biden told the reporters that “not many people thought we could get this done. And not many people want to be associated with failure.
“Had we gone and failed – and then, you know, the United States failed, the Biden presidency fails, etc. Which would have been a legitimate criticism.
“I thought it was worth the chance to get it done. I came to get something done. I got it done.”
What the president “got done” last week during his whirlwind trip to the Middle East was to embrace Israel in the wake of the horrific attacks of Oct. 7 by the Gaza militia group Hamas. The attacks claimed 1,500 Israeli lives, most of which were civilian, including many innocent women and children; another 4,500 were wounded, while some 200 Israelis were taken hostage by Hamas, including, again, women and children.
The United States would remain at Israel’s side during this difficult period, Biden promised.
Partially on the strength of an in-flight conversation with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Biden helped to broker a deal to untangle delays in rushing humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza. Since the Hamas assaults of Oct. 7, nearly 3,500 residents of Gaza have died with another 12,500 injured, almost all as a result of retaliatory Israeli air strikes. (Some of the casualties are Hamas fighters).
Israel has imposed a total ban on travel into and out of Gaza, and clamped an embargo on the delivery of fresh water and electricity to the Palestinian enclave.
To be sure, the aid will be meager; only 20 trucks loaded with supplies of food, water, and medicine will be allowed to cross from Egypt into southern Gaza. Hopefully, this trickle of relief is only the beginning, although there are no guarantees. (As the weekend approached, the aid trucks were still stuck in Egypt.)
In a speech in Tel Aviv at the end of his seven-hour stay in Israel, the president conveyed to government officials and to the Israeli public his concern about by the possible next step. The war cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to dismantle Hamas once and for all, presumably with an all-out ground war.
As most everyone realizes, the counterattack the Israelis apparently have in mind will necessarily entail house-to-house, underground-tunnel-to-underground-tunnel fighting, during which even more innocent civilian lives will be lost.
Israeli blood is boiling. Not since the Holocaust had so many Jewish lives been taken in one day as were taken on Oct. 7.
But think before you leap, Biden cautioned. Without mentioning the American incursion into Iraq, Biden warned Israelis not to repeat the mistakes the U.S. made following 9/11.
“Don’t be consumed by [rage],” however justified, the president said. “We were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice, and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Be “deliberate.” Find “clarity.” There may be another path, the president implied, than the one Israel is on to “achieve the objectives” it seeks.
On Thursday evening, Biden spoke from the White House to the nation and world. He said he would ask Congress for a humanitarian aid package for Gaza and military hardware for Israel (and for Ukraine fighting for its national existence against Russia).
None of this was, or will be, easy. If Israeli blood is boiling, then the vaunted “Arab street” is on the edge of exploding, not least because it blames Israel for a deadly explosion at a Gaza City hospital. The specter of the United States as the devil incarnate is once again rising across the length and breadth of the Middle East. An immediate result was the cancellation of a meeting Biden had scheduled with El-Sisi, the Palestinian Authority’s Abbas, and King Abdullah of Jordan. There is even the appearance of cracks in Biden’s governing coalition at home: the Democratic Party left has long harbored doubts about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian Muslims crowded into Gaza and the West Bank. The dysfunction of the Republican House of Representatives will remain palpable, even after it chooses a new Speaker – if it ever does.
The president is up against it. He’s trying, but so much is out of his control. “American leadership is what holds the world together,” he said Thursday from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. We shall see.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.