“Justice must be done”: the U.S. president’s response to Israel’s “brazen attacks” on Oct. 7

Normally, when a U.S. president visits Israel, there are weeks or months of planning and preparations. But President Biden’s trip this week, following the brazen Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, came at a time that was anything but normal.

“Justice must be done,” the president said in Israel. Don’t be consumed by the rage that you feel. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

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Biden is in a difficult and politically risky position and the risk crosses political lines. He’s not benefiting in the polls from his strong, pro-Israeli stance despite Americans saying they want that. Republicans are looking to pounce on any misstep. The longer Israel’s campaign on Gaza goes on and the more deaths occur, the more pressure Biden will face from many in the world to pull back.

President Biden got off Air Force One during his high-stakes trip to the Middle East Wednesday and greeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a big hug.

The message was clear — the United States stands with Israel. Biden is taking his message to the American people Thursday night in an Oval Office address.

Biden had planned to stop in Amman, Jordan, where he was scheduled for discussions with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Egypt’s El-Sissi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The meeting was called off after the hospital explosion.

Republicans failed to pick a speaker again. That leaves the U.S. unable to respond to, well, pretty much anything in a strong and substantive way.

It was an admission for the U.S. president. But it’s also the kind of subtle warning Biden can only deliver if he maintains influence — and part of that is keeping Netanyahu in a close embrace.

Invoking the Holocaust, Biden said, “The world watched then — it knew — and the world did nothing. We will never do nothing again; not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

For the first time this year, Gallup found that Democrats’ sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis. And that is driven by young voters.

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll shows that. Despite two-thirds of respondents in the survey saying they want a public show of support for Israel, those younger than 45, were 30 points less likely to say they wanted that than respondents 45 or older. whites were more likely than non-whites to say so.

Cracks started to show in the aftermath of the hospital bombing. The Democrats who were elected to Congress, the two Muslim women, joined a chorus blaming Israel before the US weighed in.

“Bombing a hospital is among the gravest of war crimes,” Omar tweeted. “The IDF reportedly blowing up one of the few places the injured and wounded can seek medical treatment and shelter during a war is horrific.”

“an independent investigation to determine who is responsible for this war crime was called for in the wake of the U.S. intelligence assessment,” he said.

The explosion was the result of a failed rocket launch, according to a bipartisan statement from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

But a lot of damage had already been done. In countries like Jordan, where Biden was to meet with Jordanian, Egyptian and Palestinian leaders, there were riots because people weren’t waiting for confirmations.

She said she is ashamed that she is a member of the United States Congress. “I am ashamed that they’re saying, ‘not yet. Maybe next week.’ … How many will have to die?

She said, to our president. I’m not going to forget, I’m a Palestinian American and I’m Muslim. A lot of people are not going to forget this.

It’s disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza. Who would accept the word of a group who killed innocent Israelis over our ally?

Now is not the time to talk about a truce. Hamas does not want peace and they want to destroy Israel. There is a chance for a ceasefire after Hamas is destroyed.

The president should respond to things of this magnitude and take a position to show leadership.

A president has to often balance his own world view with domestic politics. Initially, both appeared to be in line with each other.

Foreign policy isn’t a priority for voters, despite it being one of the areas that a president has more control over.

To Mr. Biden’s mind, this has been the moment he has trained for his entire political career, a point he often makes when challenged about his age. In the past eight months, he has visited two countries in the midst of active wars. He has married his public embraces with private cautions, and kept American troops out of both conflicts — so far. He seems to be determined to prove that the United States is the only nation that can ruin events in an unpredictable world.

Many in this country have taken a turn inward after two decades of war and become weary of U.S. involvement in international conflicts. Biden acknowledged that Americans relate to the pain Israel is facing. Still, he had some potential lessons from the U.S. response to 9/11 Wednesday.

That lesson is wrong when you discover the minute you travel from the left to the right. Some groups are taking the silhouette of a Hamas assassin in paragliding into Israel as an inspiring symbol of resistance to their oppressors. You find a similarly simplistic narrative: The powerful have been exploiting the powerless, who courageously rose up 12 days ago and valiantly fought back. No, never mind that they killed babies. They don’t mind that they kidnapped grandmothers. The Marginalized peoples of the world are able to unite. Paraglide to justice!

I don’t want to live in a universe where I am political and morally stark as other Americans are. How clarifying that must be. The way in which the deadly tribalism of the Middle East has been met with the dreary tribalism of American politics is something that I don’t like at all.

“Pure, unadulterated evil” — that’s what President Biden rightly called the Hamas assailants’ massacre of hundreds upon hundreds of people in Israel that bloody weekend and such gaudy tortures as the parading of a half-naked female hostage though the streets of Gaza, where she was spat on. The loss of Jewish life on Oct. 7 was such a travesty, and so reprehensible, that it should not have been allowed by politicians or activist to amplify their own grievances.

In the wake of a visit by President Biden, Israelis on Thursday praised his courage in coming at a time of war and for his full-throated support, as he pledged “we will not let you ever be alone” after attacks from Hamas killed at least 1,400 Israelis.

This degree of consultation is rare, if not unprecedented, even in a relationship this close, Israeli analysts said. If it can benefit Mr Netanyahu, then that’s a good thing. It may give him political cover for an extended war, but it may also constrain how he conducts it.

Satellite images showed that Israel had already deployed hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles north of Gaza as it prepared to send tens of thousands of soldiers into the enclave.

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“The late Ariel Sharon was in the habit of saying, ‘We will defend ourselves, by ourselves,’” wrote Nadav Eyal, an Israeli analyst, in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Netanyahu has been projecting these values in the last few days. He seems to yearn to be the United States’ 51st state. This is symbolic as well as practical.

This criticism was even more sharply expressed by more right-wing analysts who have supported the government in the past. Nechama Duek, writing in Israel Hayom, said that Mr. Biden has spoken softly and empathically, “but with his words, he has bound and shackled Netanyahu and his government.”

President Biden could very well go down in history as the last American president born during World War II and shaped by a view of American power nurtured in the Cold War. One of the most important moments for a leader on the world stage is when they sat in the Israeli prime minister’s office and discussed removing nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union.

The author of a book on the history of the presidents said that he has seen and heard it in the past few weeks.

Whether Mr. Biden can bring the American population along, however, is a more unsettled question than at any moment in his presidency, and the backdrop of his rare Oval Office address on Thursday night. The past 18 months have shown him that the United States deserves to support democracy over autocracy, that there is no higher cause than protecting free people from invasion and terrorism and that restoring a global order that is quickly unraveling is a top priority.

It is a far harder case to make now than in February 2022, when President Vladimir V. Putin tried a lightning-strike attack to overthrow an imperfect democracy in Ukraine and restore the Russian empire of Peter the Great. The initial overwhelming support for Ukraine — one of the few issues that seemed to unify Democrats and Republicans — is clearly shattering, with a growing part of the Republican Party arguing that this is not America’s fight. The slog across the Donbas, and the prospect of a long conflict in which Mr. Putin is waiting to see if America will elect former President Donald J. Trump or someone of similar antipathy to the war effort, only complicates the picture.

The trips to American disaster areas are almost the same as this one, says Thomas Schwartz. It was symbolic, he says, and was meant to show “how tightly Israel and concerns about Israel” are embedded in the American political system.

Analysts say that it also links the administration to everything that could happen, including more deadly Israeli airstrikes in the densely populated Gaza Strip, targeting Hamas, and the possibility of a bloody ground campaign, which could cause even more civilian deaths in Israel’s Arab neighbors. So far, more than 3,400 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

The visit almost didn’t happen. Biden said his team weighed whether it should even take place. Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid the groundwork in a whirlwind visit to the Middle East last week that that included seven hours of talks with Netanyahu and his war cabinet.

The trip served to reassure Israel that Biden “prioritizes the need for the U.S. to actually engage in this question, rather than step back from it,” says Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute.

That message of engagement wasn’t only directed at Israel, but the rest of the Middle East, as well as Iran and Hezbollah.

The visit reinforced his warnings that the deployment of carrier task groups in the east Mediterranean is a serious threat to US security.

“The main threat right now is the prospect of Iran and their proxy in Lebanon joining in,” says Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

He says Biden and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “were very clear in warning Iran and Hezbollah, and this was a major contribution by the Biden administration to consolidating the status quo.”

But a planned meeting between Biden and regional leaders fell apart after a catastrophic explosion at a hospital in Gaza killed hundreds of Palestinians just hours before the president landed in Israel.

“I think the door is open between the key Arab countries and the Biden administration, even if the Amman meeting isn’t happening now,” he says.

Katulis says “there’s genuine concern” among U.S. officials about civilian casualties and “how that can negatively impact the mission itself and achieving the desired goals that Israel has stated.”

Among the 200 hostages held by Hamas, as many as 13 are believed to be U.S. citizens. A White House readout of discussions between Biden and Netanyahu said the two “discussed ongoing efforts to secure the release of hostages taken by Hamas – including Americans.”

“I believe that there’s hope in the fact that President Biden prioritized this and talked to some of the families of the hostages.” But he calls the fate of those American captives “a big open question.”