Why Joe Biden’s Gaza dilemma may lose him the US election

Brewing in the background, meanwhile, was the war in Vietnam, and anti-war protesters incensed by US involvement were making their presence felt on the streets, university campuses and at the Democratic Convention itself in Chicago.

Fast-forward to 2024 and the current presidential election year and it’s easy to see certain stark parallels today with that time back in 1968.

This year too, in August, the Democratic National Convention will once again gather in Chicago, against the backdrop of an increasingly divided America and anti-war protests, raising the spectre of the notoriously chaotic events of 56 years ago in the Windy City.

For over six months now the Israel Hamas war in Gaza and the humanitarian catastrophe it has created has become a consistent presence in US political discourse, adding another acrimonious layer to an already bitter election battle likely between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

So, just what impact on November’s ballot is the war in Gaza having and to what extent might it prove a determining factor in its outcome?

Normally, US presidential elections tend to be determined by domestic issues but, this time, foreign policy and especially the war in Gaza is playing an increasingly significant role with every day that passes.

Currently, the Biden administration wants to be seen as putting a brake on the Israeli military onslaught and policies pursued by the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but this to date doesn’t wash with many Americans.

The perception among substantial sections of the population, especially the young, is that this is all window dressing, leaving many disillusioned with Biden’s indulgence of Israel while neglecting the plight of the Palestinians.

This disillusionment, too, is not solely restricted to the electorate but has also leached into the ranks of Biden’s own Democratic Party, catching his campaign off guard.

Police push back on demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza as they work to remove a non-sanctioned encampment on the campus of UW-Madison in Madison, Wis., on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal via AP)

Democratic unrest

The White House had expected Democratic unrest over Gaza to fade as Biden picked up his campaigning against presumptive Republican nominee Trump, but this has simply not happened.

Just last week, 57 of the 212 Democrats in the House of Representatives asked Biden in a letter to withhold aid to Israel in an attempt to stop a planned Israeli assault on the city of Rafah, where almost half of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people have taken refuge. “We urge you to invoke existing law and policy to immediately withhold certain offensive military aid to the Israeli government, including aid sourced from legislation already signed into law, in order to pre-empt a full-scale assault on Rafah,” said the letter, dated last Wednesday.

By Friday, yet more pressure was piling on Biden when another letter, signed by 86 House of Representatives Democrats, told him that they believe there is sufficient evidence to show that Israel has violated US law by restricting humanitarian aid flows into Gaza. The signatories said Israel’s aid restrictions “call into question” its assurances that it was complying with a US Foreign Assistance Act provision requiring recipients of US-funded arms to uphold international humanitarian law and allow free flows of US assistance.

Such written assurances were mandated by a national security memorandum that Biden issued in February after Democratic politicians began questioning if Israel was upholding international law in its Gaza operations.

In a further nod to the growing pro-Palestinian protest movement in the US and abroad, the Democrat signatories concluded: “Allowing famine to take hold in Gaza is already severely damaging the Israeli government’s international standing and harming prospects for peace.”

Troubling as these pressures from within the Democratic Party are for Biden, they are nothing compared to the wider response from those Americans in important Democratic Party constituencies in key election battleground states.

Across the wider country, Biden’s administration has also extensive protests on US university campuses against the Israel-Gaza war to contend with.

While polling on Americans’ attitudes towards the conflict and its domestic fallout has been patchy and difficult to gauge, evidence does indicate that US public opinion has slowly shifted from strongly pro-Israel positioning immediately after the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, to one of increasing hostility to Israel’s conduct of the war ever since.

By November, for example, Gallup found significant deterioration in Americans’ support for Israel’s war in Gaza, with 50% approving and 45% disapproving of Israeli military operations.

However, by March of this year, the approval-disapproval ratio had dropped to 36% approval to 55% disapproval, according to figures in an assessment published by the New York magazine’s Intelligencer section.

New York delegates holding 'stop the war' banners in protest at the USA's continued involvement in the Vietnam War, on the third day of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, 28th August

Opposing aid

AS the magazine’s analysis also cited, nearly every survey on the subject has identified a significant generational divide on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, with those under the age of 30 sympathising more with Palestinians and less with Israelis; opposing Israel’s military operations in Gaza by strong margins; and also opposing unconditional US military aid to Israel.

The fractured views on the conflict, especially among traditionally Democratic voter groups, show the continued difficulty Biden faces of holding together the coalition he built in 2020. It’s a challenge likely to persist even as economic indicators grow more positive.

On that front at least Biden can take heart. Unemployment is now at an all-time low, the US economy is growing by about 3%, wages are up, and the stock market is going through the roof.

Meanwhile, interest rates, which have been at an all-time high for two years, are finally predicted to come down. Add to this the fact that substantial legal troubles continue to bedevil his expected presidential rival Trump, and things could be said to be rosy for the incumbent were it not for Gaza and its potential to depress support in November’s election.

For the moment, though, senior Biden aides are reported to privately dismiss the idea that the anti-Israel protests or their supporters could cost Biden the White House, pointing to the relatively small number of participants, compared to some 41 million eligible gen Z voters in 2024.

For his part, the president has been cautious in what he has said about the campus protests.

“I condemn the anti-Semitic protests,” he said on April 22. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Biden has been forced to walk a careful line of denouncing anti-Semitism while supporting young Americans’ right to protest and trying to limit longer-term political damage.

Student relief

IN an effort to take the sting out of the protests and their potential impact on the Democrats’ election fortunes, the White House has rolled out a series of young voter-friendly policies in recent days, issuing fresh student relief announcements, long-planned steps to lower criminal penalties on marijuana, and condemning a new six-week abortion ban that took effect on Wednesday in Florida.

But it’s not just the younger vote that Biden has to keep an eye on. As Gregory Aftandilian a non-resident Fellow at the think tank Arab Centre Washington DC recently highlighted, Biden’s policies on Gaza have particularly upset the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities who overwhelmingly supported Biden in the 2020 election.

They did so not only because they objected to Trump’s harsh anti-Muslim rhetoric, but because they believed Biden would be more even-handed on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

“In the important battleground state of Michigan which went for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020 by small margins, the Arab-American vote, or lack thereof, could be decisive this November,” wrote Aftandilian in a recent article on how the Gaza war could still decide the outcome of this year’s election.

“Already, activists in the community have shown their clout by running a successful “uncommitted” campaign in the February 2024 Democratic primary (which garnered over 100,000 of such responses on the ballot), a warning to Biden that he needs to change his policies,” Aftandilian added.

The frustration of many Arab -Americans with Biden’s positioning on Gaza is growing and was also recently summed up by Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American who was the first member of the Biden administration to resign over Gaza because of the president’s perceived unwillingness to bring more pressure to bear on Israel.

“They have not been listening for the past four-and-a half-months” to Arab-Americans, Habash warned in a recent interview with the political magazine The American Prospect. “If you’re not willing to take tiny steps to exert any kind of pressure, why would you expect Arabs to come out and vote for you?”

Unsurprisingly, Biden’s Republican rivals have used the pressure over Gaza to exploit what they see as the president’s vulnerabilities, using the campus protests especially to brand some Democrats as chaos merchants and anti-Semites.

Last Wednesday, Trump praised New York police officers who raided a Columbia University building occupied by pro-Palestinian students and called the demonstrators “raging lunatics”. Biden, Trump added, “is nowhere to be found”.

Republican campaigns, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats of supporting “anti-Semitism” and “pro-terror protesters” while promoting vulnerable incumbents such as Representatives Mike Lawler and Anthony D’Esposito, who both represent New York swing districts with large numbers of Jewish voters.

Trump’s election campaign is also likely to make the most of help from the handful of powerful pro-Israel groups including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that plan to spend tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats – though also some Republicans – whom it deems insufficiently supportive of Israel.

AIPAC’s biggest targets are members of the so-called “Squad” of progressive House Democrats who have been openly pressuring the Biden administration to call for a ceasefire.

For the moment, however, it is the campus protests that the Republicans are seeking to use as a means to exploit Biden’s political vulnerability.

For them, the turmoil is ideal leverage with which to depict Biden as weak and unwilling to confront his own left-wing critics or deliver more forceful public comments on the subject.

“When will the president himself, not his mouthpieces, condemn these hate-filled little Gazas?” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, told reporters last week.

“President Biden needs to denounce Hamas’s campus sympathisers without equivocating about Israelis fighting a righteous war of survival,” Cotton added.

Conviction hopes

Just how much damage will be done by these Republican attacks on Biden and his re-election hopes remains to be seen. For the moment, the president and the Democrats must be hoping for an end to the war in Gaza, a continued slowdown in the inflation rate, and a criminal conviction in Trump’s legal troubles to help deflect and ease the pressure over Gaza.

With less than four months before the Democratic National Convention, Biden remains boxed in between denouncing protests that are unacceptable and not alienating the young, progressive voters he needs to turn out.

Many analysts still maintain that, at the end of the day, the Gaza issue will not be the rock on which his re-election hopes perish.

Other issues like the economy and, in some cases, fear of a Trump re-run, they say, will be enough to rally voters and see him through.

That said, while the role of the US in the Middle East today is vastly different from that of its role in Vietnam back in 1968, the domestic parallels in terms of political fallout remain striking.

It’s worth remembering that it was the chaotic and damaging backdrop of the 1968 Democratic Convention that helped pave the way for Republican Richard Nixon’s victory against Hubert Humphrey in the race for the White House later that year.

As the unrest and unease across America continues to amplify tensions within Biden’s Democratic Party, the president will be hoping dearly that history is not about to repeat itself,

and that Gaza does not become his Vietnam.