Youth’s concerns about America’s approach to the Muslim world

In the column on the growing generational divide published in this space last week, I promised to follow up on some of the points I then made. This is what I have done this week. A long article was published on November 27 by The Washington Post that took up some of the issues I had focused on in my contribution last week. The article was written by Yasmeen Abutaleb and John Hudson and carried the title: “In White House, refit deepens on conflict. Biden’s handling of Israel-Gaza battle has divided his staffers.”

The name of the first author of this piece of writing is clearly a person of Arab origin. She and her co-author wrote about a meeting about 20 staffers requested with Presidents Biden’s top advisers. They were distressed by the way America — in particular the country’s president — had reacted to the October 7 attack by Hamas militants. The attack left 1,200 Israelis dead and a couple of hundreds dozens were brought back to Gaza by those who had managed to breach what were believed to be impenetrable defences the Israelis had built to prevent precisely this kind of attack. Some of those who penetrated Israel used hand gliders to fly over the fortified border between Israel and Gaza.

This group of staffers had three issues they wanted to bring to the attention of President Biden’s senior advisers. They wanted to know the administration’s strategy for curbing the number of civilian deaths, the message it planned to send about the conflict and its post-war vision for the region. The Biden advisers listened carefully and respectfully but fell back on familiar talking points. The staffers were told that the president and senior members of his administration had to be careful not to criticise Israel and its prime minister in public so it could influence Benjamin Netanyahu in private conversations.

The staffers, mostly young and some Muslims and of Arab origin, were told that Washington was trying hard to minimise civilian casualties. And the president and his advisers were advocating for the two-state solution once the conflict was over. According to the Abutaleb-Hudson story, the Israeli-Hamas conflict was the biggest foreign policy crisis of Biden’s presidency and was dividing “a White House that has prided itself on running a disciplined and united operation. The Israeli-Gaza war has roiled the administration more than any other issue in Biden’s first three years in office. Adding to the sensitivity, the unwavering support of Israel that many staffers find upsetting stems in large part from Biden’s personal lifelong attachment to the Jewish state, aides said. Biden often cites his 1973 meeting with Prime Minister Gold Meir as a seminal event that crystalized his view of Israel as critical for Jewish survival.”

Biden’s attachment to Israel was formed when the Jewish state was young, only 25 years’ old, left-leaning as was then the young senator, and a military underdog, struggling to work for its existence as a sanctuary for Jews after the Holocaust. That is no longer the case. It is now a military powerhouse led by rightist extremists who are working to bring more land in the West Bank of the Jordan River under Jewish control.

“I think the administration has realized from quite early on that it was in a bind,” said Ivo Daalder, chief executive of the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs who served as NATO ambassador under President Barack Obama. “And it was in a bind not only because of Biden’s own predilection, which is real and strong and important but also because of the perceived political costs of breaking with Israel.” Although the number of Jews living in the United States is about the same as the numbered Muslims, they are much richer and far better organized to influence the political system.

Biden has received praise from several Jewish groups for his open and sometimes emotional support of Israel after the attack on October 7 by Hamas militants. They say that the president has shown sensitivity to antisemitism and the Jewish people’s long history of facing persecution. “It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people,” Biden said during a whirlwind trip to Tel Aviv on October 18. A week after the visit to Israel, the president met with five Muslim Americans, who protested what they saw as his insensitivity to the Gaza civilians who were dying because of the heavy bombardment of the territory by the Israeli Airforce. All five who met him spoke of people they knew who had been affected by the suffering in Gaza, including a woman who had lost 100 members of her family. According to the people Abutaleb and Hudson interviewed for their story, Biden appeared to be affected by what he heard from the five-member Muslim group. “I’m sorry. I’m disappointed in myself,” he told the group. “I will do better,” he promised.

Biden’s foreign policy advisers, many belonging to the Jewish community in the United States, nevertheless are mindful of the changing demographics of key swing states such as Michigan, home to a growing Arab American community, and question the conventional political wisdom of embracing Israel. Some experts who influence the thinking of White House say that they recognise that the management of the conflict by Israel has hurt America’s global standing. “We’re taking a lot of water on Israel’s behalf but they point out that his public statements have become increasingly direct on the responsibility Israel has to minimize civilian casualties and to allow aid into Gaza, even as he continued to decline to call for a ceasefire that would have undoubtedly saved thousands of Muslim lives in Gaza.”

Biden and his Muslim supporters would no doubt find troubling his position. Biden officials are in an increasingly vexing predicament. Having more or less totally destroyed the northern part of the Strip, the Israelis will take their operation to southern part of the territory which is now home to more than 2 million people. The Israelis don’t have a strategy for doing what they want to do that does not harm and kill a lot of Palestinians. Going that way will not only turn off a lot of Muslim electoral support for Biden that could cost him victory in the 2024 elections, but it would also turn the Muslim world against America.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2023.

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