US president looking for political support amidst Israel-Palestine war
Biden’s Middle East dilemma

ANALYTICS  22 March 2024 - 13:30

The Palestinian-Israeli war is about to turn six months old. Israel is attacking the Gaza Strip to destroy Hamas, has already taken most of the Strip. Some buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Recently, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, announced a figure of 25,000 Palestinian deaths since the beginning of the Israeli operation.

Almost 1.5 million Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, 3/4 of the population of the sector, have crowded into the city of Rafah - the border town with Egypt, fleeing from bombings and shootings between the Israeli army and Hamas militants. Their situation, according to international organizations, is dire, lacking food and medicine. Some Hamas militias have been withdrawn to Rafah. Israel says that if no agreement can be reached on their withdrawal to another country, it will storm the city.

US President Joe Biden is taking an ambivalent stance. He supplies arms to Israel, which is America's strategic ally. But at the same time Biden demands that Israel refuse to storm Rafah. The Washington administration fears that the storming of the city, where 1.5 million people have congregated (before the war there were only 250,000 residents), could lead to heavy losses. Biden has already stated several times that Israel should not enter Rafah.

The fact is that the continuation of the war and Palestinian civilian casualties in the storming of Rafah threaten Biden's re-election chances. In the US, Israel's actions, and the fact that Israel has received military aid from the Washington administration, have caused great irritation among some social groups that usually vote for Democrats. There are three of those groups.

First, the American leftists, many of whom sympathize with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Their bastions are the universities. There are millions of students and tens of thousands of faculty members in the US, many of whom are dissatisfied with Israel's actions.

It's pretty hard to explain who the modern American leftist is. In the past, this was sometimes (but by no means always) the name given to supporters of socialism and enemies of capitalism. Today, most American leftists favor alleviating the traditional problems of capitalism (inequality and unemployment). But that is not their main interest. The leftists in the US are much more concerned with national, sexual and gender minorities and the struggle for their rights and even their special privileges.

This means that for the leftists, along with the rights of ethnic minorities, specific issues of a slightly different nature, such as the right of transgender people to use public restrooms, are of enormous importance. The sexual and gender preferences of these people may look strange from the point of view of the majority of our planet's inhabitants, but somehow there are many of them in the US, especially in universities, and they are active. And since this milieu is predominantly pro-Palestinian, its representatives come out to protest against Israel's policies and Biden's actions in supplying arms to Israel.

Another social group, many of whose representatives are outraged by the actions of Israel and Biden, are American Muslims. According to the PEW Research Center, in 2015 there were 3.3 million Muslims in the US, which was more than 1 per cent of the US population, but their numbers are growing rapidly. Data on this faith group is inconsistent, but it is known that a significant portion of it is made up of African Americans who converted to Islam, while others are migrants or descendants of migrants from around the world, including the Indo-Pacific region and the Middle East. Since most Palestinians in Gaza are Sunni Muslims, like most American Muslims, what is happening is drawing their attention and protests.

Finally, there are about 2 million Arabs living in the United States. Some of this social group overlaps with the other, as many of them are Muslims, but not all of them. Many American Arabs are understandably not thrilled with what is happening in Gaza either.

All three groups - Arabs, Muslims and leftists - may be quite far apart, but events in Gaza have united them to some extent. And since a large, perhaps predominant portion of these communities traditionally vote for Democrats, this has become a headache for Joe Biden. Various initiatives have emerged that appeal to members of all three communities not to vote for Biden in the upcoming US election in November. That doesn't mean they will vote for Trump, just that many of them probably won't show up to the polls.

We are talking about 1-2 per cent of the electorate, or maybe even a much smaller number. It wouldn't seem like much. But Biden is already losing to Trump in swing states, which usually decide the outcome of the vote. Experts predict that a shift away from the Democrats and a boycott of the election by the aforementioned groups of Americans could deprive Biden of any chance of re-election.

Another circumstance should be taken into account. In the last election in 2020, Biden defeated Trump, in particular, thanks to the successful strategy of his team. It managed to gather an electoral coalition of minorities, uniting them against Trump, whom they accused of white racism. The majority of ethno-religious minorities who voted at the time opposed Trump. But what happens today?

The administration in Washington has other reasons of concern over Israeli operation and put the brakes on the Rafah assault. The US-Israeli coalition in the Middle East is now confronting Iran and its allies, one of which is Hamas, and an escalation of the conflict could lead to a major war between the US and Iran, which Biden would like to avoid during the election year - the risks are too great. In addition, according to economists' calculations, such a war could lead to a sharp rise in oil prices, and a jump in oil prices could slow down the global and US economy, ruining Biden's re-election chances. Finally, Israel's neighbor Egypt is unstable because of the economic crisis, which is compounded by protests in support of Palestinians; an assault on Rafah, if it results in heavy casualties, could trigger a new Arab Spring in Egypt, where a US-loyal administration is in power.

These considerations influence Biden, but the emergence of a coalition of minorities and leftists is coming to the fore as the election approaches. So Biden is maneuvering. He is giving Israel military aid because the country is a US ally, while at the same time saying he wants to slow the Israeli offensive and help the Palestinians in Rafah by dropping humanitarian aid to them from airplanes. But this does not save him from the resentment of a part of the democratic electorate, whose support he is losing.

True, it is worth noting that there is no logic in the actions of the anti-Biden coalition of leftists, Arabs and Sunni Muslims. In fact, their actions are helping Trump. If Donald Trump, whose positions are absolutely pro-Israel and who does not hide the fact that he hates leftists and does not sympathize with some ethno-confessional minorities, wins the election, all three groups may get serious problems inside the US, but the Israeli government will be just fine.

Caliber.Az