The Real Reason Biden Is Finally Tying U.S. Policy to Israel’s Behavior in the War

Some find it telling—and disturbing—that it took the killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers, including one American citizen, for President Joe Biden to declare that further U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza will depend on how carefully Israel protects Palestinian civilians caught up in the crossfire.

Biden has urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties ever since the war began six months ago and has continued to do so as estimated deaths in Gaza climbed to more than 30,000, with hunger and sickness among refugees nearing catastrophic levels.

But the WCK incident prodded Biden, for the first time, to tie U.S. policy to Israel’s behavior. As White House spokesman John Kirby put it at a news conference Thursday, speaking about Israel, “If we don’t see changes from their side, there’ll have to be changes from our side.” This is new. Until now, Biden, Kirby, and other officials have said U.S. policy would not change, regardless of Israeli excesses.

Kirby was summarizing a half-hour phone conversation that Biden held with Netanyahu, in which the president also told the prime minister to push for an “immediate cease-fire,” though aides later emphasized his point that the cease-fire still needed to be tied to the release of some 135 hostages held by Hamas.

It is important to note that this shift did not come entirely as a result of the WCK attack. Biden and his top advisers have felt a growing frustration with Netanyahu’s lax attitude toward civilian casualties. Even more, they have increasingly realized that Israel has no real strategy for winning the war—in which case it is all the more urgent to wrap it up, especially given the growing misery and chaos in Gaza, as well as the looming signs that the conflict may soon widen to inflame the entire region.

WCK’s founder and CEO have charged that the bombing of their convoy was a “targeted attack,” a deliberate attempt to starve Gazans and thus use “food as a weapon.” The Israel Defense Forces strongly deny this and on Friday released video footage purporting to prove its case that the attack was a mistake. The WCK convoy had informed military commanders of its route and schedule, as it always does, following a process called “deconfliction.” But the notice wasn’t passed down to officers in the field. Also, the IDF spokesman said, air crews thought they saw a man entering one of the vehicles with a gun—when, in fact, he was carrying a backpack.

Whether or not you accept the IDF’s explanation (and I find it plausible), it does not excuse what happened—and the reason why is crucial to understanding Biden’s shift. In a written statement on Wednesday, condemning the attack, Biden said, “Even more tragically, this is not a stand-alone incident.” (Emphasis added.) A “major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult” is that “Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers.”

This is the point: The field officers failed to observe the deconfliction notice because they don’t put a high priority on doing so. They don’t put a high priority on doing so because their superiors haven’t punished them for not doing so.

In his statement on Wednesday, Biden said he had “repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations, in order to avoid civilian casualties.” But (though he didn’t say this) he had never punished Israel for failing to follow his directives either.

This is the significance of Thursday’s shift: Biden has now told Netanyahu that things must change—deconfliction has to be a top priority—or else. Biden didn’t spell out the precise consequences, or at least the official summary of his phone call didn’t spell them out. But the conversation has had some effect.

First, the IDF fired two top officers and reprimanded two more as a result of the mistake—a disciplinary act it has very rarely taken before. (The U.S. military has rarely done this either.) One can hope this sends a signal up and down the ranks that deconfliction notices are important.

More important, Netanyahu opened up three more corridors where aid can pass through the Israel-Gaza border. And, reversing an earlier decision, he sent David Barnea, the director of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, back to Cairo for another round of talks on a hostages-for-prisoners exchange with Hamas. (CIA Director William Burns and the intelligence chiefs of Egypt and Qatar, who have been heading up these talks for months, are also heading back.)

The broader context for this growing pressure is the worry, if not panic, about the future course of the war itself—on not only humanitarian but also strategic grounds.

This worry hit a new peak this past Monday, during a virtual meeting between senior U.S. and Israeli officials. The point of the meeting was to discuss ways that Israel could rout Hamas leaders from the southern Gazan town of Rafah. Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have said they support this aim but don’t see how Israel’s army could mount a major offensive on the town—which is what Netanyahu wants to do—without killing a lot more civilians. There are 1.4 million people crammed in and around Rafah, most of them people who were displaced from northern Gaza in the early part of the war, now living in dire conditions. Long before the WCK incident, Biden warned Netanyahu not to go into Rafah without a plan for protecting all those people.

At Monday’s meeting, according to a report by NBC News, the Israelis presented a plan to move these 1.4 million civilians into tents north of Rafah. The U.S. officials—who included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sullivan, and five others from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department—noted that the plan failed to indicate how to acquire and bring in so many tents or even to assess how much food, water, and sanitation equipment would be needed. In reaction, Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, “began yelling and waving his arms around as he defended the plan.”

NBC quoted an Israeli official who denied the drama, saying, “The meeting was constructive and respectful. … There was no yelling at any point.” But this denial skirted the main issue—which is that the Israeli plan is nonsense. There is no way to launch a major ground offensive into Rafah without killing a lot more civilians—which, Biden has told Netanyahu, would be unacceptable, not just on moral grounds but also for strategic reasons. Israel’s reputation—which is already reeling, even among Americans and among its Arab neighbors, who have wanted to “normalize” relations but can’t, for their own domestic reasons, as long as it continues killing Palestinian civilians—would sink to a catastrophic nadir.

For some time now, many analysts, here and in Israel, have doubted the realism of Netanyahu’s aim in the war—which he has called “total victory” over Hamas. It is worth noting that the prime minister is not alone in proclaiming this as the war’s aim. Even Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s emergency war Cabinet but also a political rival to Netanyahu, has said that failing to conquer Rafah would be like firefighters extinguishing just 80 percent of a blaze.

Biden’s shift is seen by some, in Israel and here, as a betrayal. But from these skeptics’ perspective, it is a necessary, long-overdue corrective—to spur Israel’s leaders to take steps that are in their country’s long-term interest.

Now the other powers in the region—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and especially Qatar, which has been the main supplier and mediator for Hamas—need to step up as well. Even at his most critical, Biden acknowledged that a cease-fire can work only if there is also a deal to exchange Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Israel has agreed to major elements of such a deal. Hamas has rejected it. Biden is doing his part to push Israel. Now the neighboring Arab states have to do their part too.