The Daily Escape:

First snowfall, Tanglewood, Berkshires, MA – November 1, 2023 photo via Tanglewood Music Festival

For Wrongo, there have been few events that seemed immediately to foreshadow a change in our lives. The first was the assassinations of JFK and MLK. Although they were five years apart, they each signaled turning points. Wrongo felt that way about Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. Both conveyed the thought that our government was helpless against forces it didn’t control or understand.

Then came the election of Donald Trump, and now, the Hamas/Israel war — threats that we couldn’t process with conventional thinking.

In all of these cases, it was clear that something truly catastrophic had occurred, and that we had no idea how America, or the world, would respond.

Now we face the Hamas/Israel war. We’re trying to sort out how to react to what is in front of us every night as the day’s reports from Gaza arrive. It’s hard to watch the discourse around what’s happening in Gaza. The messages from both sides are depressing, since they both look the death and destruction in the face and say it’s caused by the other guy. It’s difficult to see how this ends.

Israel remains under rocket attacks both from Hamas in Gaza and from Hezbollah in Lebanon. We know that Hamas is holding hundreds of hostages in tunnels that are below densely-populated neighborhoods.

The security systems that were designed to protect Israelis were proven wholly inadequate on Oct.7. Netanyahu and the coalition government have been discredited yet remain in power. The people demand justice and that security be provided somehow.

Israel doesn’t want a cease fire, yet that is what Hamas and a growing number of countries are pushing for.

OTOH, what Israel is attempting to do is nearly impossible. How do a million people get moved from the north of Gaza to the South? What makes sense about Israel’s plans to dismantle many of the homes and much of the infrastructure that the northern Gazans depend on, along with some 300 kilometers of tunnels? Why is it a moral war if Israel is willing and able to kill anyone who remains in the area? And when Israel is finished in the north, is there any assurance that they won’t turn to the south where they told the northern Gazans to go?

But as Simon Rosenberg says:

“It’s important to listen to the actual words of Hamas: – Israel must be eliminated, more attacks are coming – Killing of Jews/Americans in Israel is justified – Loss of life in Gaza is acceptable, as we are a “nation of martyrs”

Rosenberg shows this video by Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad in which he says:

“We Will Repeat the October 7 Attack Time and Again Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims – Everything We Do Is Justified”

And do you really think that Netanyahu will get some kind of deal for hostages done? We need to accept that most of them will be martyrs to the Israeli cause if the war continues. Does anyone believe that Hamas can be made to release the hostages and then surrender to Israel? Even though Hamas initiated this conflict and they could save their own people by taking responsibility, that’s not going to happen.

Where does this leave the US? Biden woke up on Oct. 7 to find himself thrust into the middle of the second major foreign-policy crisis of his term. He embraced Israel, along with what now look like two conflicting imperatives: Support Israel and prevent an escalation of the war.

There’s also a brewing political crisis at home. Polls show that most Americans side with Israel in the conflict and approve of both Israel’s retaliation against Hamas and US support for it. Republicans tend to be more supportive of Israel than Democrats, who have become more sympathetic toward Palestinians over the past several years. But majorities in both Parties are broadly supportive of Israel.

Yet Biden’s unconditional Israel support also brings the risk of regional escalation. Despite his efforts to convince the Israeli government to limit the scope and scale of its military response to Hamas’s attack and consider a “humanitarian pause,” Israel launched its ground invasion anyway.

The offensive will inevitably inflict large-scale Palestinian casualties (especially since Hamas will continue to put civilians between them and the Israelis). It will also lead to a marked escalation in attacks on Israel and US interests across the Middle East that could easily destabilize the region.

Unlike the war in Ukraine, where the US has worked hard to ensure that support of Kyiv doesn’t risk direct military confrontation between them and Russia, the US risks becoming directly involved in the Israel/Hamas war. For better or worse, Biden owns it, if it happens.

While most voters are aligned with Biden’s stance on the war, it poses two political challenges to Biden’s 2024 prospects from the Left and the Right.

From the Right, Biden will be accused of projecting weakness on the global stage. Trump is already making the false case that the two major wars of Biden’s term happened only because Biden’s weakness emboldened our adversaries. Trump will argue that the relative ME calm during his administration was due to his strategy of “peace through strength,” particularly with Russia and Iran. He’ll claim that neither would have dared test the US had he been in office.

Will this be compelling for Republican-leaning swing voters? Remember that Trump’s Abraham Accords – which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, ignored the Palestinians and helped sow the seeds for the Oct. 7 attack. Also that Trump’s constant threats to NATO were a gift to Putin.

Regardless of what happens next, Biden will always be the president on whose watch these two wars – both of which the US is funding, started.

From the Left, Biden will be accused of enabling Israel’s killing of innocent Palestinians. A CNN poll from earlier this month shows that just 27% of 18-to-34-year-olds view Israel’s military response to the Hamas attacks as “fully justified,” compared to 81% of those 65 or older. Then there’s Muslim and Arab-American voters, around two-thirds of whom backed Biden in 2020. Recent polls show that very few of them plan to vote for Biden again in 2024.

Faced with the Biden vs. Trump choice, these voters (who were an important part of the Democratic coalition in 2020 and 2022) would probably stick with Biden as the lesser evil (or stay home and thereby benefit Trump).

But third-party candidates like Cornel West, who is critical of Israel, could hurt Biden. A USA Today poll shows West already picking up between 4-7% of the vote nationally, primarily from Biden. It would only take 2-3 percentage points for West to be a spoiler in a swing state like Wisconsin, potentially tipping the balance to Trump in a close election.

At the same time, a Middle East crisis that Biden can’t fix could hurt him particularly if the war escalates. Biden will also bear the burden for any terrorist and antisemitic attacks in the US between now and the end of his term.

Can Biden broker a peace when neither side wants one?

For now, Biden is the narrow favorite to win reelection, largely because of Trump’s extraordinary criminality and his unique weaknesses. But if the ME is still dominating our headlines in November 2024, all bets are off.