FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
NEW YORK – Evan Osnos wrote a biography of Joe Biden in 2020 after interviewing him several times. And he spoke to him in the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago for the New Yorkera magazine in which he also wrote about the president’s relationship with Israel and with chef José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen. Osnos believes Biden’s change in perspective on Israel in recent days is significant, which is responding to the tragedy of the humanitarian workers killed “in a personal way” (because he knows Andrés well) ‘what a politician’: «Because he also responded to current events in Israel, in which there is now extraordinary pressure on Netanyahu with calls for early elections, the protests in front of his house. One of the things Biden really believes is that you have to wait until the political season for political choices to be possible. I think this moment has somehow arrived now. And it is also a reflection of his political situation. I don’t want to say that he did it for purely political reasons, but I think he is aware, due to the more intense electoral campaign in recent months, of how all this is felt in America and of what Americans expect from him as a leader and as candidate”.
What do you think of Biden’s management of this war in the past months?
“I think for too long he has been tied to his pre-existing visions of the place and the people at the top. Like all of us, he has benefited but has also been limited by his experience. In October, his instinct was to be as close to the Israeli leadership as possible despite his intense personal frustrations with Netanyahu for fifty years now. But his political vision of him was: I’ll be more effective if I’m “in the room” rather than out criticizing, and maybe that was true but he stopped being so after a while; and he was slow to understand it because he has a rather idealistic vision of politics which can sometimes seem unrealistic. But the truth is that he ultimately changed his position on Israel, the events of the last few days have been significant. If we compare him with Ukraine, I think his experience there was more useful because of his vision of Europe and the possibilities of NATO. Unlike younger politicians, he did not want to give up the idea of NATO as a concrete response to Russian aggression. He deserves credit for organizing this response. But the limitations of his experience showed in his imagining that Republicans would continue to support Ukraine. He told me: “Could you imagine the Republican Party that stood up to Soviet authoritarianism bowing to Vladimir Putin? I think he often finds himself speechless, astonished and horrified by what American politics has become.”
Why (and to what extent) did the tragedy of World Central Kitchen bring about a turning point for him?
“We’ll have to see, that’s the question I ask myself too. But importantly, Biden not only believes that politics is always local but also that it is personal. It was important that he knew José Andrés, that he respected him and was personally touched. It’s my conjecture, I haven’t spoken to the president after these latest events, but I think he was touched by the World Central Kitchen catastrophe. And it is a problematic question because many ask: why didn’t the death of 32 thousand Palestinians change things? There’s no simple answer, I think it’s the cruelly fickle nature of empathy, which isn’t always what we want it to be.”
Could Biden lose the election over his handling of the war in Gaza?
“It’s possible. Not just for Michigan: it is part of it, but the issue goes beyond Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, it concerns the young people of the Democratic Party. Right now, his handling of the war in Gaza has alienated him from the young Democrats who will be unusually important in this election, particularly in cities in swing states. It is an extraordinarily influential group and has a lot of work to do to regain their trust.”
Could Biden come to impose conditions on US military aid to Israel?
“Yes, I think it could. Based on my sources there are three things that could lead the administration to place conditions on military aid: one is the invasion of Rafah, the second is probably a failure to protect aid workers, the third is the refusal of a reasonable agreement for hostages and ceasefire. If Netanyahu does one of those three things, I think it’s reasonable to imagine that the administration would stop or slow the transfer of weapons to some camps.”
