You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media, nor from the sentiments of Congress, but polling suggests a majority of Americans - and a strong majority of Democrats in particular, want to see the U.S. call for a ceasefire in Gaza. This is especially strong among young voters.
This puts Biden in a tricky position politically - given that he is seeking $14 billion to help Israel escalate the war - but it is one he should have been able to foresee. Young voters, including Jewish voters, are less likely to be automatically pro-Israel than previous generations. And there are a few reasons for that.
But I think an important one to stress is that Israel stands in stark contradiction to the liberal values that President Biden claims to stand for. I don’t mean liberal in the U.S. political sense; I mean liberal values like prioritizing human rights, equal treatment under the law and democracy. It also stands in contrast to the Democratic Party values that Biden openly and loudly adopted at the beginning of his Administration, values steeped in language on racial equity and fighting white supremacy.
If one embraces those value systems, it is very difficult to support Israel, even before the current war. One can see it before their very eyes, but its worth looking at the simple facts:
Israel is an ethno-state run by, in Thomas Friedman’s words, Jewish supremacists. It prioritizes the rights of one group over others, creating a kind of racial/ethnic supremacy.
On one side of proper Israel is the Gaza Strip, where 2 million people are locked behind a concrete wall that is monitored by remote control robot machine guns - what the former head of Mossad has called the world’s largest open air prison. They are periodically bombed by Israel and at the moment are being slaughtered in what may be an attempt to ethnically cleanse the strip of Arabs entirely, something openly advocated for in Israeli think tanks and government.
On the other side of Israel proper is the West Bank, where Palestinians are forced out of their homes and out of their villages so that Israel can build Jewish-only colonies connected by Jewish-only roads, slowly taking up all the most valuable land and leaving the Palestinians living in disconnected Bantustans. It is what every major human rights agency in the world, including the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, calls a clear apartheid system.
And this is all before the current war, where Israel is unabashedly committing war crimes, like bombing refugee camps filled with civilians, because they know they can get away with it so long as the United States stands by them.
And the United States is standing by them at the directive of Joe Biden, the man who said racism and ethno-supremacy displayed by protesters in the U.S. was abhorrent and against everything “we” stood for. If people bought that, if they believed in the racial equity agenda he preached, if they shared the notion that everyone is deserving of equal rights and fair treatment in a democracy - how in the world can they support Israel?
The U.S. was one of the last countries to stand by apartheid South Africa. Despite the U.S.’s professed belief in liberal, democratic values, it propped up a white supremacy state on the African continent because they were an ally of the United States.
But that could not hold forever. There was enough activism around the world, within South Africa and importantly, within the United States, that eventually the game was over. I don’t have any expectation that will soon happen with Israel. But it is clear that the hypocrisy of supporting Israel on the one hand while professing to care about human rights and racial justice on the other hand is being laid bare.
I doubt these voters - whether youth voters or minority voters (or both) will turn to Trump as their savior. But for many, voting again for Biden might be too much to stomach - and enough could stay home that Biden goes down next year. I don’t know if that has sunk in with him yet. Perhaps he doesn’t care. We’ll see what happens.