Photo: Mattie Neretin/Getty Images
From the beginning, something has been off about President Joe Biden’s approach to the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s genocidal invasion of Gaza.
Even by the low standards of America’s steadfast support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Biden’s own long-standing Zionism, he’s been careless: endorsing baseless Israeli propaganda, bear-hugging the notoriously unreliable Benjamin Netanyahu, and slandering his own supporters as antisemites.
The disastrous presidential debate, and Biden’s decision to bow out of the race, has given us a new way to understand what’s been happening. Maybe Biden’s approach has been thoughtless because the president is having trouble thinking.
In retrospect, Biden’s incapacity has been on display since the first days following the October 7 raid. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” the president said, repeating a gruesome but uncorroborated rumor.
The press raced to clarify: Had Biden seen evidence that the Israelis were keeping secret? White House staff explained that the president was merely referring to Israeli media reports. We could chalk it up to a gaffe at a highly charged moment, except that Biden kept repeating the charge, leading Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler to accuse the president of exaggerating under the headline “Biden yet again says Hamas beheaded babies. Has new evidence emerged?” The answer was “No.”
The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill called Biden’s constant invocation of the fantastical beheaded babies story “inexplicable,” but now we know better. As two Harvard researchers wrote in a 2020 peer-reviewed study titled “Aging in an Era of Fake News,” those in late adulthood tend to have “difficulty detecting lies,” and they place “less emphasis on accuracy when communicating.” Obviously this does not apply to all older adults — Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, has remained notably sharp into his 80s — but after what we saw on the debate stage and in subsequent interviews, I find it hard to argue that it doesn’t fit Biden. At very least, it’s an explanation that fits the facts.
If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then how to describe Biden’s plan to break Yemen’s hold on Red Sea shipping lanes? When asked if U.S. airstrikes were working, Biden told the press, “When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” It’d be easier to call this another gaffe if that weren’t exactly what happened. Operation Prosperity Guardian airstrikes have killed dozens of Yemenis, and two Navy SEALs were lost at sea, but there has never been any hint of success for the Western alliance.
Over six months after the beginning of Prosperity Guardian, U.S. forces remain locked in what personnel have called “the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II.” America has been losing that battle every step of the way, something the troops aren’t used to. “I’ll be honest,” one recently returned Navy pilot told the AP about the novelty of getting shot at off Yemen, “it was a little traumatizing for the group.”
This drawn-out defeat is more or less what Biden said was going to happen; it’s not the statement that was the mistake, it was the mission itself. Starting a deadly international fight you can’t even plan to win is professional incompetence, but not being able to stop yourself from saying so out loud to the press suggests a different, more personal kind of incompetence.
Though Biden is unlikely to jump to the alternate explanations — corruption or racism — in his own defense, there’s evidence for both.
As a senator, Biden topped the Open Secrets list of recipients for pro-Israel money, receiving more than twice as much since 1990 as second-place Bob Menendez of New Jersey. (Menendez is corrupt: He was recently convicted at trial of acting as an overseas agent for Egypt.)
Whatever combination of earnest and bought, Biden’s support for Israel has never been tempered by concern for Palestinians. When the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner suggested to former State Department official Aaron David Miller that American policymakers don’t value Israeli and Palestinian lives equally, he didn’t get much pushback. “Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis?” said Miller. “No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.” I have similarly little doubt that Biden’s bigotry has made it easier for him to support the genocide in Gaza, but it’s not sufficient to explain his conduct.
But incompetence explains Biden’s actions in a way that unconditional support for the Israeli project can’t. It would have been easy enough to try and muddy the waters and obscure Israel Defense Forces responsibility for the massacre at Gaza’s largest hospital, for example, but there was no strategic reason for Biden to claim, as he did in November, that it was a “fact” that Hamas was hiding its military headquarters under al-Shifa.
When pressed by reporters to present some, or any, evidence that this was the case, Biden said with a strange, crooked smile, “No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.” He doesn’t even allow a reporter to get through the follow-up: “Do you feel absolutely confident based on what you know, that—?” “Yes,” he says, holding his bizarre expression. Hamas did not, in fact, have its military headquarters in tunnels under al-Shifa Hospital, and the president has never revealed any basis for his false but absolute confidence.
George W. Bush is not famous for having been one of America’s brighter presidents, but even he knew that you’re not supposed to get fooled twice. Biden, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to realize Netanyahu and his administration are running up the score on him: expanding the scope of the war to Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran; demanding the defunding of UNRWA under false pretenses, assassinating Western aid workers, and blocking aid trucks; and sabotaging peace negotiations. Israeli media has even reported that Netanyahu’s right-wing allies are opposing a hostage deal because it would be a victory for Biden and a “slap in the face” to their ally Donald Trump. None of this has upset Biden’s “bear hug” approach to the Israeli leadership, by which he preemptively ceded any leverage America might have over the country’s actions. Just look to Rafah, Biden’s “red line,” where the IDF has called his bluff and turned Gaza’s final “safe zone” into a killing field with impunity.
And yet, Biden seems to earnestly believe he is doing a good, fair job. “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody,” he told Speedy Morman of Complex. “I mean, I’ve been very supportive of the Palestinians.” When asked why an Arab or Muslim voter would support him, Biden says his leadership represents the best path to peace and a two-state solution.
Meanwhile, under Biden’s watch, Israel has not only been seizing land in the West Bank at an unprecedented clip, but the Knesset also overwhelmingly voted against the idea of a two-state solution, right before Biden is set to reward Netanyahu with another bear hug during his visit to address Congress in D.C. this week.
Let’s not even get started with the disastrous temporary pier except to say that managing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without helping any of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people in direct proximity to the project surely represents an ironic achievement in American international aid. If still-President Biden thinks he has brought Palestinians anything but the kind of unfathomable tragedy and grief that resonates for centuries, it is the single strongest piece of evidence that he lacks the mental capacity to govern.
Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election, thankfully. He is not withdrawing because he’s being held responsible for enabling war crimes against the Palestinian people (though a recent poll does have nearly 40 percent of Americans saying they’re less likely to vote for him thanks to his handling of the war). Yet it’s impossible to extricate the collapse in public faith in the Biden campaign from the “uncommitted” movement for Gaza. They were the first people to refuse him their votes, and defections from within the president’s base hollowed out his support well in advance of the debate.
Ditching Biden won’t automatically change anything, and the president is not solely responsible for Gaza, even within the White House. Anyone who is held personally responsible for a broad social crime such as genocide is, to some degree, a scapegoat — but that is not a reason to hold no one responsible. And Biden’s public incapacity opens a door to a better way forward for American policy. It’s time to take the keys; millions of Palestinians can’t wait for next January.
The Democrats and their presumptive nominee Kamala Harris are faced with a choice: On the one hand, they can continue Biden’s monstrous support for Netanyahu, the brutal IDF, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That would help allow the party to cover for Biden and put a positive spin on a smooth handoff, even though we all know this would mainly benefit the embittered president himself and his small coterie of loyalists. Such a choice would confirm that the institutional rot that allowed the current situation to develop still characterizes the party.
The alternative is to force a change in policy. Harris must assure voters that, as the party’s leader, she won’t assume Biden’s biggest mistake, effective immediately. That starts with staying out of town during Netanyahu’s visit, and it has to grow from there, with public pressure from her office on the Israelis to sign a permanent ceasefire. This would in effect concede that the president’s incompetence has not been harmless at all: that on the contrary, it paved the road to hundreds of thousands of awful deaths.
Biden may well go down in history as Genocide Joe, a disgrace even to the job of president of the United States, roped to Israel’s atrocities in the same way Lyndon Johnson is tied to the Vietnam War. The upside for the rest of us is the possibility of an end to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.
If the Democrats and Kamala Harris can’t decide between protecting Biden’s legacy and thousands of Palestinian lives, they’re no more competent to lead than he is.