Why disastrous Gaza war will eclipse decades of Joe Biden's political legacy

During his 2020 presidential campaign, US President Joe Biden pledged to restore what he described as America’s diminished standing on the global stage. He sought to reverse the unconventional practices of the US government under Donald Trump. After all, Biden is a politician who has positioned himself as an authority on global affairs for decades, especially during his time as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early 21st century.

However, in his first year in office, the chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of US military operations was viewed by his own bureaucracy as a failure in execution. Subsequently, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Biden was widely praised for uniting the Western alliance, cutting off Moscow's funding, and arming Kyiv. As a self-proclaimed Zionist, he has consistently met Israel’s military needs with little oversight.

In October, a year after Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip began, Israeli forces killed Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. Biden quickly framed this as a victory and considered himself to have achieved a key Israeli-American objective. Although at that time at least 42,000 Palestinians had died in Gaza, almost half of whom were children, experts believe the actual death toll could be higher considering disease and starvation.

Protesters continued to march across the country demanding an end to what the UN called Israel’s “genocidal acts.” Biden’s public appearances were disrupted by anti-war interruptions, and his Secretary of State’s vehicle was splattered with red paint. Resignations from his administration indicated that the situation had become untenable. In November, his own White House staff sent him a dissenting letter, pleading with him to take action to end the slaughter. Given that Biden had already taken a back seat in July, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the 2024 Democratic campaign, he knew he had limited time to shape his political legacy, but he ultimately did not change his Middle East policy.

In the final months of President Biden’s term, Middle East Eye interviewed several American scholars, historians, and political analysts, as well as former government officials. They held differing views on the president’s actions regarding Israel, which may be due to ideological and political factors rather than practical ones. But most agreed that Biden was unlikely to make a serious effort to achieve a ceasefire before leaving office. This led to Israel increasing the Palestinian death toll to nearly 48,000, the majority of whom were women and children.

In his last televised interview as president, Biden revealed that during his visit to Israel just ten days after the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he could not “indiscriminately bomb civilian areas.” “I told them we would help, and I said, ‘Bibi, you can’t carpet bomb these communities.’ He said to me, ‘Well, you did… you carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped the nuclear weapon. You had to kill thousands of innocent people to win the war.’”

Yet, as bodies piled up in Gaza, Biden committed nearly $30 billion in aid to Israel in a separate bill authorized by Congress. No other country supporting Israel came close to matching that. The Biden administration refused to leverage the billions of dollars it spent on Israel to secure a ceasefire. Ultimately, in the words of Biden's own team, it was Donald Trump's Middle East envoy who personally pressured Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal that was already on the table—a deal that, according to Qatari mediators, had been in place for over a year.

Shadi Hamid, a columnist for The Washington Post and political scientist, told Middle East Eye that Biden’s admission, after more than 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza, that he knew Israel was indiscriminately eliminating civilians and intended to continue this strategy was “embarrassing and deeply lacking in self-awareness, which is perhaps a microcosm of this administration’s Gaza policy.” Shortly after his visit to Israel, Biden, speaking outside the White House in October 2023, disputed data shared by a reporter and suggested that the death toll in Gaza was exaggerated. “What was most shocking was that Biden seemed to have some sympathy for the idea of bombing civilians if there are ‘bad guys’ nearby,” Hamid said.

Biden's most ardent critics of his Gaza policy have called him "Genocide Joe" for over a year. On the one-year anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, many believe it is too late to pursue meaningful change that could alter Biden’s reputation. Will Todman, deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Middle East Eye in October, “Biden’s legacy is already set.” He said Netanyahu had already bet on Trump winning the November election and acted accordingly. “I don’t think Netanyahu is likely to want to give President Biden a diplomatic victory… I don’t think it’s in his interest,” Todman told Middle East Eye at the time. “He’d rather wait until Trump is back in office, at which point he might get a better deal, or he can at least give Trump a victory early to solidify his place with Trump.” Todman was ultimately correct.

The war in Gaza also had a ripple effect that resulted in Biden not having any major foreign policy victories. Todman told Middle East Eye, “[Biden] had high hopes for a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal, and I think he really wanted, and maybe even expected, that to be his legacy.” But as the war dragged on, this deal became increasingly out of reach for the Biden administration, and it is now foreseeable that the Trump administration will claim this achievement at some point, leaving Biden with no real victories in the Arab world. James Jeffrey, former Trump administration special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and former ambassador to Turkey, told Middle East Eye that, at the very least, Biden should have laid the groundwork for a Saudi-Israeli deal by further weakening Iran.

Jeffrey argued that after Sinwar's death, Biden's role should have been to "finish the job" by launching military strikes against Iran's third proxy in the region (after Hamas and Hezbollah)—the Houthis in Yemen. Then, Jeffrey added, the Trump administration could "pivot to a diplomatic offensive, which would focus on the Abraham Accords" and expand them to include diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv. “What was most shocking was that Biden seemed to have some sympathy for the idea of bombing civilians,” said Shadi Hamid, a columnist for The Washington Post.

There is also the question of whether movements like Hamas can truly be eradicated—something Biden has said he unconditionally supports Israel in doing. This is an unrealistic goal that cannot be achieved. In fact, as images from Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire on January 19 showed, Hamas's armed forces, the Qassam Brigades, seemed more defiant, appearing in groups in the center of Gaza City, cheered on by Palestinians. Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Middle East Eye last year, “I don’t think that those two things can be achieved at the same time if [his] administration’s position is that Hamas must be completely removed from power and it wants to release Israeli hostages [in order] to achieve an agreement to end the war in Gaza.”

Wertheim pointed out that Biden has repeatedly tried to use his influence with Netanyahu by privately offering advice to the Israeli Prime Minister, in an attempt to de-escalate the military attacks on Gaza. But Netanyahu has consistently refused to take this advice. “Could [Biden] have done more on that front? Absolutely,” Wertheim said. While no other G7 leader has embraced Netanyahu as enthusiastically as Biden, some argue that Biden's influence is inherently limited. Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government at American University, told Middle East Eye, “Israel is a sovereign country. It is not a vassal state of the US. It is not controlled by the US or by Biden or anyone else, and ultimately, Netanyahu can make his own decisions independently.” However, many would point out that Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, was able to force Netanyahu into a ceasefire before taking office, which contradicts the above view.

Hala Rharrit, who held multiple positions at the US State Department and resigned in the spring over the handling of the Gaza war, strongly disagrees with the notion that the US president does not have the necessary influence to significantly deter Israel's attacks on Gaza. She is one of at least a dozen people who resigned due to insufficient willingness to control Israel. She told Middle East Eye, “The idea that the Biden administration is powerless… is complete and utter nonsense. We have laws to make sure that this doesn’t happen.” The tools that any US administration can use include the Leahy Law, which prohibits the US from providing military aid to units that violate human rights laws; the Export Control Act, which prohibits the transfer of weapons overseas that could ultimately threaten US national security; and Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which stipulates that the US government cannot provide weapons to governments that impede humanitarian aid. The Export Control Act, in particular, stipulates that countries can only receive US weapons if they are for defense, not offense. Rharrit said this is why her former bosses would repeatedly say “Israel has the right to defend itself.” She said, referring to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “the words that come out of his mouth are never an accident.”

“From my perspective, as an insider, as a diplomat, what they’ve been doing is deliberately violating the law, or they are trying to figure out how to circumvent the law,” Rharrit said, speaking of the US government. “We’ve never enforced our own laws when it comes to Israel,” she said. Khaled Elgindy, director of the Middle East Institute's program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian affairs and a former advisor to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, told Middle East Eye that it all boils down to what Biden wants to sacrifice as he leaves office. Elgindy said Biden lacks the political will, “doesn’t want to pay the political price,” referring to the pro-Israel lobbyists who can make or break public figures. “He [wants] a cheap ceasefire.”

“He wants to be remembered forever as the US president who stood by Israel when it needed help the most. He's not going to give up that narrative in his final weeks and months in office,” Elgindy added. “Just to save Palestinian lives?” The president may also be counting on his political legacy to take on a new life after he leaves the White House, especially considering he has expressed interest in writing a book on the matter. “I don’t think any of us know the whole truth,” said Edelson, a professor at American University, regarding Biden’s strategy on Israel. “I’m not saying that’s good or bad for Biden… it may take historians to unravel what actually happened.”

But whatever happened, it did not work. That is why, in the weeks leading up to the November election, Tariq Habash, the first Palestinian-American to resign from the Department of Education in 2024, announced that he was forming a new political action committee with Josh Paul, the first person to resign from the State Department over Gaza. He told Middle East Eye that the president was “absolutely” not constrained on Israel, thus launching a lobbying effort focused on the US Congress (the legislative body). The group, called New Policy, is founded on the principle of advancing a more equitable US Middle East policy, upholding US law, and ensuring the implementation of US values. Habash told Middle East Eye that he has to look to the future, and lobbying Congress is the best option to help shift policy. “What we’re trying to achieve is to work with the existing ecosystem of people who are already doing this work and add another perspective,” he said.

Habash agrees that the US is at a turning point, and the US political system needs a new path forward. “But I also want to be clear: nothing is going to change overnight,” Habash said. He explained that even under a new Trump administration, “there may be a shift in policy, but I don’t think it will be a substantive shift.” Rharrit, who worked in the Middle East and was responsible for writing reports at the State Department on how Arab media was covering Gaza and how audiences in the region were responding, said that Biden, by condoning Israel’s war on Gaza, had actually done the opposite of public service: he had turned people against the US. “I’m even seeing this from [Arabs], for example, who are attending US universities in the region and have always loved the US and always dreamed of going to the US. They’re telling me now, ‘I will never step foot in that country because I don’t want to spend a single dollar in the US.’ And it’s heartbreaking.”

Rharrit said that despite the so-called “War on Terror,” Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and countless other scandals, many Arabs still believed in the American dream and wanted their children to go there. “Now, as I’m being told, ‘you are the country that kills children.’”