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Joe Biden’s hopes of presiding over a relative lull in conflict across the Middle East were shattered by the surprise attack on Israel by Hamas, upending the US president’s foreign policy priorities and exposing him to a torrent of domestic political criticism.
The outbreak of war has forced Biden and his national security team to shift to rushing munitions and other assistance to meet Israel’s immediate needs while ramping up diplomacy to try to prevent the conflict from spreading further. At the same time, the administration is attempting to protect stranded US citizens and weighing how to respond to the possibility that Americans have been captured by Hamas. On Monday, Biden said that 11 Americans were among the dead.
The attack jolted the White House following a week dominated by Biden’s efforts to reassure allies that the US would stick by Ukraine even though Congress had dropped funding for Kyiv from legislation to keep the government running.
“They were trying to focus on China, they were trying to focus on Russia, and hoping to keep the Middle East on the back burner. But as the Middle East has a way of doing, it thrust itself upon them,” said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
The White House has already faced vitriolic attacks from Republicans in Congress and on the 2024 presidential campaign trail in connection with the strike on Israel. Critics accuse Biden of being caught off-guard by an attack against its top ally in the Middle East and emboldening Israel’s foes, including Hamas and its backer Iran.
“Joe Biden betrayed Israel,” Donald Trump, the former president and frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, said in prepared remarks for a rally in New Hampshire on Monday night.
“America is incredibly distracted and incredibly divided and when America is distracted the world is less safe,” Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate and former US ambassador to the UN, told NBC on Sunday.
The conflict could become even more difficult for Biden if Israel presses ahead with a lengthy invasion and siege of the Gaza Strip, which could lead to many more civilian casualties on the Palestinian side, making it harder for the White House to defend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Israeli-Palestinian relations have long divided the Democratic party, with generational splits among politicians and supporters about how to best address the Palestinians’ plight.
Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, did not join many others in her party in condemning Hamas’s attack. “I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today and everyday,” she said over the weekend. “As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
Biden administration officials have vowed to remain steadfast in their support for Israel despite tensions between the US president and Netanyahu over the years. “Biden has considered himself strongly pro Israeli for almost 50 years. That’s bigger than the relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“We expect the Israeli response to this horrific set of attacks to continue for quite some time,” deputy national security adviser Jon Finer told ABC on Monday. “We expect more US steps to show support and solidarity for Israel.”
Many Republicans tried to argue that Biden had helped fund the attack after the US transferred $6bn to Iran as part of a prisoner swap deal last month. But that criticism was quickly debunked as misinformation because the money remains untouched in an escrow account in Qatar and can only be used for humanitarian aid.
Although Iran has traditionally backed Hamas, US officials have not to this point found any evidence of direct involvement by Tehran in Saturday’s attacks.
Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow in the centre for Middle East policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, has however warned that Biden’s main diplomatic initiative of the past few months in the region — securing a normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia — would have to be put on hold.
“Saudi Arabia is not going to normalise with Israel, in the midst of a war in Gaza. It’s just not going to do it. So what was always a long shot, now I think become a dead end,” he said.
But Alterman said that whenever the time came for a settlement between Israel and Hamas, Biden should be ready to broker a deal, which could brighten the picture for Washington. “The Biden administration came in, and neither the Israelis or Palestinians felt a necessity or urgency to engage in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy. That is suddenly changing,” he said.
“Henry Kissinger made a lot of his reputation negotiating the end to the Egypt-Israel war,” Alterman added, referring to the former US secretary of state and national security adviser under Richard Nixon. “I don’t recall anybody criticising Henry Kissinger for missing the signs in 1973.”
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