The End of Joe Biden

“The guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody.”

Joe Biden has dropped out of the race, and the media narrative has quickly shifted from “Biden is too old and senile to run” to “Biden is a hero and a statesman.” Neither his catastrophic Gaza policy nor its disastrous electoral implications have been central to either discussion, so I thought I’d join the muted chorus of exasperated voices attempting to correct the record.

In an interview released last week, Biden told his incredulous host, “I'm the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody,” and then elaborated by sharing more about the kind of guy he is: “I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure that I got the Egyptians to open the border to let goods through, medicine and food.”

As the video aired, famine tore through Gaza, and polio festered in the wastewater running through the streets. American bombs rained down on designated safe zones, killing 231 Palestinians and wounding 700 others in the previous two days alone. America’s farcical aid pier had just turned to dust.

Benjamin Kunkel pointed out on Twitter, “This on Biden's part is honestly Eichmannesque.” He quotes Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker discussing the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann who, in the years before serving as the Holocaust’s chief architect, was involved in the attempted mass deportation of German Jews to Mandatory Palestine:

It was in the interests of the Jews—though perhaps not all Jews understood this—to get out of the country. “One had to help them, one had to help these [Jewish] functionaries to act, and that’s what I did.” If the functionaries were what Eichmann called “idealists”—that is, Zionists—he respected them, “treated them as equals,” listened to all their “requests and complaints and applications for support,” kept his promises as far as he could. “People are inclined to forget that now,” he added. Who but he, Eichmann, had saved hundreds of thousands of Jews? What but his great zeal and his great gifts of organization had enabled them to escape in time?

Biden’s repeated, menacing insistence that “No Jew in the world is safe without Israel” echoes Eichmann’s suggestion that it was simply safer and more sensible for the Jews to be over there.¹

But that connection is only incidental—Kunkel was, of course, referring to Biden’s relationship with the Palestinian community and the self-evident truth that setting a building on fire and then squirting it with a water pistol does not make you a hero.

Outside of Netanyahu, it would be difficult to name somebody who has been materially worse for the Palestinians than President Biden. He has provided unconditional support for Israel’s massacre in Gaza, vetoing multiple ceasefire resolutions and bypassing Congress to ship billions in weapons that he knows are being used to kill civilians and preserve Netanyahu’s white-knuckled grip on power. Through his rhetoric alone—rejecting the Palestinian death toll, sharing fabricated 10/7 atrocity propaganda, offering a figurative middle finger to campus protesters, drawing the Rafah red line in disappearing ink—Biden has built the permission structure for Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. He has deferred to Israel to investigate its own crimes (including those against Americans) and denied its brazen violations of international humanitarian law, passing the rules-based world order through a shredder in the process. He has refused to use his immense leverage to rein in the ramped-up annexation of the West Bank, most recently rejecting a proposal to sanction the two ultranationalist ministers (and settlers), Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, who are leading the effort; the president believes “the U.S. should not sanction elected officials in democratic countries,” which begs the question: does he think the West Bank is part of Israel, or that it’s democratically run?² One could point to figures like the early Zionists, Lord Balfour, or Ben-Gurion as worse than Biden, but even the Nakba “only” killed 15,000 Palestinians versus somewhere between two and a half and twelve times that number since 10/7 (and no other war has come close). With his assertion of having done “more for the Palestinian community than anyone,” President Biden reached the next level of Trumpian behavior: stating the opposite of the truth as fact with absolute confidence and hyperbole.

Biden will have at least one more opportunity to bear hug his friend Benjamin Netanyahu when they meet in the White House later this week.

I voted for Biden and believe he’s been about as good on domestic policy as any president in my lifetime, but I’ve long thought that he was uniquely qualified to be dreadful in this moment—he is a war hawk, a Crime Bill-era racist, stubborn as an old tree, detached from reality, and, most importantly, a staunch Zionist (and this may be where the Eichmann comparison ends; Biden’s motivation is far more ideological than banal). I’m fairly certain Trump would have been worse (particularly in the West Bank), but one could make the case otherwise; yes, he’s Islamophobic, and he panders to the Israel lobby, but he doesn’t like giving stuff away for free, and in his heart of hearts, he doesn’t give a shit about Jews or Israelis or anyone but himself, really. It’s the last point that matters here because I don’t believe Trump would be such a willing participant in the ritual humiliation at Netanyahu’s feet that Biden has endured for over nine months.

In fairness to the president, the rot extends far beyond the Oval Office. As Jeremy Scahill pointed out, “Joe Biden [showed] the world, in the most graphic and violent way possible, the clear bipartisan US policy toward not just Israel, but the Palestinian people.” Frankly, a willingness to stand up to Israel in a meaningful and lasting way—such as halting weapons shipments and demanding an immediate end to the illegal occupation and blockade—might disqualify a candidate from electoral viability. So, despite Kamala Harris’ marginally better rhetoric on Israel/Palestine, I’m not holding my breath that she’d bring a sea change in policy.

But it's undeniable that the president could have saved tens of thousands of lives by taking a different course of action after 10/7.³ If Biden’s career had once been defined by a deep well of compassion born from the tragic deaths of his wife and two children, then his utter disregard for Palestinian lives has revealed that well to be poisoned. Long after he’s departed the White House and then passed from this world, his legacy will still be smoldering in the charred remains of Gaza.

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Editor’s note: I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. I am, in fact, still working on two long-form reported pieces about the West Bank that should be published in the coming months. In the meantime, I’ll try to get into the habit of sharing my irregular thoughts here.

1. Joe Biden, the president of a country with 7.5 million Jews (including yours truly), also loves to quote Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s words to him in 1973: “Don’t worry, we Jews have a secret weapon in our fight: We have no place else to go.”

2. Check out the latest episode of Know Your Enemy for a discussion on the deep roots of Israeli illiberalism and its influence on the global right.

3. Read Mehdi Hasan on how Biden could have ended the war with a single phone call.