The problem is what Biden remembers, not what he forgets
Reviews of President Joe Biden’s much-anticipated July 11 NATO press conference were mixed.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during the opening session of the NATO Summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2024. Credit: Chuck Kennedy/U.S. State Department
His disastrous debate performance last month has set off a rebellion among Democratic officeholders, donors and liberal pundits, who realize that evidence of the president’s physical and cognitive decline may be dooming their party to inevitable defeat at the hands of former President Donald Trump and the Republicans. So, Biden’s decision to hold his first press conference in eight months—a gap that highlights the fact that he has been shielded from the press and voters except in highly scripted staged appearances—was seen as key to his determination to maintain his grip on the Democratic presidential nomination.
Biden’s gaffes, such as when he referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Trump” (earlier in the day, he had called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “Putin”) did not go unnoticed. And he only took questions from usually friendly publications and networks. By not calling on anyone from a conservative outlet, there was none of the jousting with hostile journalists that was the hallmark of Trump’s frequent pressers. Though the bar was set low, he made it through a full hour of questions without replicating any of the horrors from the debate. And his answers on foreign policy were praised by liberal commentators as demonstrating his continued mastery of the subject.
Biden learned nothing
While as The New Yorker pointed out, this “less than awful press conference does not mean everything is now OK” for his faltering campaign, it did mean that he lived to fight another day. As much as the commentary about the event understandably focused on Biden’s mental acuity, the foreign-policy questions—particularly, those about Israel and the Mideast he supposedly aced—deserve more attention.
Despite the fawning praise of Biden’s presidency, especially on the part of Democrats who want him to step aside, his numerous policy disasters at home, on the southern border and abroad were the main reasons why he was already trailing Trump before he imploded at the June 27 debate in Atlanta. Indeed, the most troubling parts of his press conference performance were not the silly verbal stumbles but the sections where it was clear that his memory was very much intact. When it comes to Israel, the Palestinians, and threats from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, Biden showed that not only was he prepared to recycle the same conventional wisdom about the region that he has been spouting for decades, but that he has learned nothing about the subject in nine months of the war on Hamas or during his 50 years in public service.
When asked by Asma Khalid—the headscarf-wearing NPR White House correspondent—whether he would have done anything differently during the course of the Israel-Hamas war, Biden’s answers showed that at least on this topic, he’s still very much the man that he’s always been. Unfortunately, that man is utterly clueless about the real causes of the latest war and the obstacles to any hopes for peace.
In discussing the war launched by Hamas’s barbarous terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, Biden never discussed the Islamist group’s terrorism. He also failed to mention the more than 100 living Israeli hostages who still remain in their hands (another 20 are considered dead) or mention the fact that eight of them are also Americans, and therefore, people whose fate should be a priority.
Instead, Biden focused almost entirely on his ongoing obsessions about the situation.
One was his calumnies about the Israeli government, which he described as the “most right-wing” in its history. From Biden’s point of view, if there were any second thoughts about his policies (and he admits no mistakes), it was that he wasn’t tough enough on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues.
This was not just classic Biden on the Middle East. It’s the sort of biased analysis that the foreign-policy establishment has always pretended was wisdom on the subject. Biden has been blaming Israel since he was lectured by Menachem Begin in the 1980s about not threatening the Jewish state because Israelis were “not Jews with trembling knees.”
Stuck on failed policies
Biden’s impatience with Israelis who didn’t think a senator from Delaware was a better judge of their security needs than themselves has always been foolish. It’s been particularly obtuse since Oct. 7. After all, that “right-wing” government in Jerusalem didn’t start the current war. And it has done everything it could—short of surrendering to Hamas—to accommodate Washington’s advice that effectively amounted to a demand that it defeat the terrorists without actually killing anyone.
His initial response to the Oct. 7 atrocities was correct, but ever since then, he and the rest of his team have been talking out of both sides of their mouths. They have long stopped caring about eliminating Hamas and are obsessed with just ending the war. While the administration and its media echo chamber keep accusing Netanyahu of caring more about politics than anything else, that is pure projection. Biden wants the problem to go away—and to prevent Israel from acting to stop the relocation of its population along the country’s northern border with Lebanon because of incessant Hezbollah rocket fire—because of the criticism he has received from the left wing of the Democratic Party for what they perceive as his pro-Israel policies. As a piece published in The New York Times the morning after the press conference mentioned, Democrats fear they will lose Michigan in November because Muslim Americans who hate Israel won’t vote for them.
That’s why the Biden administration continues to mimic Hamas propaganda when it comes to the fraudulent and vastly inflated Palestinian civilian casualty numbers they use. That was reflected in the press conference since the only victims that Biden spoke of were the Palestinians who started and supported the war that was initiated with the largest mass slaughter of Jews since World War II and the Holocaust.
Biden’s push for a ceasefire, regardless of whether it brings freedom for the hostages or security for Israel, is called statesmanship by his supporters. So, too, is his continued push for a Palestinian state. He wants the ceasefire to begin a process leading to a “two-state solution” he described as the “only ultimate answer.” But as Oct. 7 demonstrated, Palestinians don’t want two states. They only seek to destroy Israel and kill Jews. Even left-wing Israelis who despise Netanyahu acknowledge this truth, but Biden is still stuck on the patent nostrums that he has been dishing out to prove his supposedly impressive foreign-policy acumen since he entered the Senate during the administration of Richard Nixon.
Still lying about the Palestinians
More evidence of Biden’s ability to recall the talking points about the war that he has been using since October was his willingness to lie about Palestinian support for Hamas.
He has continually insisted that Hamas had nothing to do with most Palestinians, even though the terror group has widespread support from their own people with polls showing that huge majorities backed the Oct. 7 massacre. Yet Biden, without evidence, claimed that the terror group is losing support while falsely asserting that he is more popular in Israel than he is at home (polls show that Israelis overwhelmingly prefer Trump). This is supposed to be an incentive for Israel to abandon Gaza after the war—another Biden demand—although that will mean Hamas will continue its control and step up its ability to take over Judea and Samaria, based on the victory that Washington is intent on handing them.
There are real questions to be asked about who is in charge at the White House with a president whose staff claims he is only at his best from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and seems clearly out of it during some of his public appearances. The press conference, however, showed anew that the real problem with America’s Middle East policy is not so much Biden’s decline but his tenacious clinging to the failed policies of the past. It is his willingness to continue appeasing Iran, the false belief that Israelis are the obstacle to peace and his refusal to accept that the Palestinians don’t want peace on any terms that led to Oct. 7. Under his lead, Washington is also encouraging Iran and Hezbollah to continue to provoke Israel—something that could lead to a war no one should want.
The only things the public can be sure that Biden remembers are ideas rooted in myths about Israel, the Palestinians and Iran that repeatedly have been debunked. The president’s personal decline is a huge issue for Democrats, which—given his stubborn refusal to leave the race—may have no solution. But America’s problems in the Mideast and the main challenges to Israel’s security stem from Biden’s terrible policies, aspects of his memory that are sharp, as well as an inability to learn from history or current events that long preceded his physical decline.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
