If President Biden wants to create a peaceful, two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, he must dramatically change his approach to the current conflict.
President Biden is the most supportive world leader of Israel right now. He has a long history of standing with Israel for over half a century as an elected official: one of his first overseas trips as a senator was to Israel on the eve of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Biden states his support comes from his belief of how the existence of a Jewish state is the only thing preventing another Holocaust, equating support for Israel to the famous phrase “never again,” often associated with the Holocaust.
According to an article from Time Magazine, “Biden’s predecessors have traditionally decided how to handle Arab-Israeli wars by making calculations about geopolitics and American politics … It’s less clear that he’s acting in a way congruent with U.S. strategy and his own political needs.”
As Biden has proven his profound desire for the survival of a Jewish state, he has begun to act emotionally on the issue in ways his predecessors have avoided. Though it might seem like he is expressing this desire by ignoring the humanitarian disaster caused by Israel in Gaza, his policies are also affecting the much more political issue of his reelection bid.
Recent polls have seen Biden falling behind Former President Donald Trump, showing Trump leading in 5 key swing states. Biden’s lack of enthusiasm is due to the young electorate of the Democratic party and the considerable ideological gap between Biden’s generation and the younger generations. Biden was born just after World War II when the events of Nazism and the Holocaust were recent and fresh, a key fact to remember when considering his steadfast support of Israel. Meanwhile, millennials and Gen-Zers are typically more pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist. For example, on TikTok, where two-thirds of the users are between 18-34 years old, the hashtag #freepalestine has over 30 billion posts, compared to 590 million for #standwithisrael.
As seen in the recent university protests, young people’s anger with Biden is dangerous to the Biden campaign. An NPR/PBS national poll found Trump 2 points ahead among Millennial and Gen Z voters, and a Wall Street Journal poll found Biden at only 50% with the same demographic, significantly less than his 2020 numbers.
Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a close Biden ally, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and national co-chair of the Biden reelection campaign, has acknowledged this alarming trend. He told NPR, “I think what matters is what happens next. I fully expect that there will be a change … If that doesn’t happen over the next couple of months, I do think that there’s segments of the Democratic base that will be more and more concerned and disenchanted.”
So, due to Biden’s failure to appeal to young voters due to his stance alongside Israel, Biden would most likely lose due to his alienation of young voters over Israel. Many young voters want this result to be a so-called “punishment” for Biden. Still, they fail to recognize how a Trump victory would only be a punishment to the millions of Israelis and Palestinians at war.
Trump is certainly no friend to the Palestinian Arab community, as he has shown in his consistent anti-Muslim rhetoric. Still, he has surprisingly drifted away from his support of Israel after Benjamin Netanyahu recognized Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 elections. At the same time, Trump has repeated anti-Semitic tropes, such as that Israel is to blame for the wave in anti-Semitism and that Jews who protest Israel “hate everything about their religion,” bringing up the anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty towards the U.S. and Israel.
Trump has also pledged to cut all aid to Gaza if reelected and has said he would bar the more than 600,000 people displaced in Gaza from refugee visas under an expansion of his ban on Muslim-majority countries’ visas. Additionally, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel recently proposed a plan for Israel to annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, completely eliminating any Palestinian state. His rhetoric, the same as Trump’s, is that “a Palestinian State is an existential threat to the State of Israel.” These proposed policies would not only be detrimental to Palestinians but also to Israelis, as it would almost guarantee an increase in resentment and terrorist attacks by Hamas and other militant groups.
Biden has proven to care deeply about the peace and survival of the State of Israel, but his current alienation of young voters due to his steadfast support of Israel’s violent offensive in Gaza is gearing him up for defeat in November. Another Trump presidency would be detrimental to the two-state goal in the region, and Biden needs to reconsider whether his policies are actually making Israel and Palestine safer or if he is too out of touch with voters.
Thus, Biden should realize that his very policies are endangering a future for peace in Israel and the Middle East.
