Matt Duss on the Failure of Biden's Israel Policy

A deeply insightful interview in The New Yorker

Matt Duss is one of the most principled and knowledgeable national security analysts in Washington. Plus, he is just an all-around great guy. I have had the pleasure of knowing Matt since 2008, when I served as vice-president at the Center for American Progress and he was a young policy analyst there. Every year, he seems to just get better. After years as the national security advisor for Sen. Bernie Sanders, he was recently appointed the vice-president of the newly revitalized Center for International Policy.

Last week, one of the best interviewers in the country, Isaac Chotiner, spoke with Matt about President Biden’s proposed Gaza ceasefire deal and the limitations of his Israel policy.

He clearly explains, for example, why Biden’s ceasefire plan went nowhere. Why Palestinians in Gaza continue to die in horrible ways twenty days after the President of the United States called for an immediate ceasefire. Matt says:

“The White House thought of this as a kind of a bold Hail Mary to get a ceasefire by trying to box in Netanyahu via making the deal public. Unfortunately, there was no ‘or else’ in the President’s speech. And that’s something that’s been missing. They think they’re presenting Netanyahu with a tough political choice. Clearly, a majority of Israelis want this deal. The majority of the security establishment wants this deal…But, unless you’re going to threaten Netanyahu with something real, he has shown repeatedly over many years that he can just delay and eventually wriggle his way out of the situation.”

Since Matt’s views closely mirror mine, I am happy to reproduce much of that interview for you, below. It is a fascinating read.

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Is Biden’s Israel Policy Cynical or Naive?

Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviewed Executive Vice President Matt Duss about the Biden Administration’s Israel policy, and what other options are available.

To talk about Biden’s approach to Israel, I recently spoke by phone with Matt Duss, the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, and the former chief foreign-policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what’s really driving the Administration’s Israel policy, what a different Democratic Administration might be doing instead, and why Democrats in the House and Senate have invited Netanyahu to address Congress on July 24th.

How would you describe the Biden Administration’s policy toward Israel right now, and does it remind you of anything else historically?

I bet we could find some parallels, but I also think this is in some ways really unique. To put it simply: A lot of this comes back to President Biden’s own view on how the U.S.-Israel relationship should work. He’s had these ideas for a very long time, he’s talked about them a lot, and it basically comes down to the United States supporting Israel in what it wants to do, pretty much unconditionally. If there are differences in opinion or criticisms or tensions, those are best expressed in private.

Occasionally, they will show daylight publicly, but there’s really going to be no pressure brought to bear, or real leverage used to change any kind of Israeli policy. This is in some ways a reflection of Joe Biden’s approach as a politician. He’s an old-school “Let’s work it out in the back room and then in public we’ll be friends” type. But I do think there’s a very ideological tint to his approach here. He has repeatedly talked about himself as a Zionist, talked about his deep emotional attachment to the state of Israel. Even if he’s clear that he’s not a huge fan of Bibi personally, he’s also made clear that the relationship transcends any two people.

What’s striking to me about the past few months is that the Israeli government keeps making clear publicly, sometimes almost embarrassingly so, the daylight between it and the United States. And it seems to have no effect on the Biden Administration’s policy or its rhetoric. Right now, for instance, we’re in a very strange situation: the U.S. is putting forward a ceasefire proposal that it says is Israel’s, and is claiming that everyone is just waiting on Hamas to agree to it. But it also seems unlikely that Israel actually supports this proposal. I can’t really think of a past situation like that.

President Biden came out and presented this as an Israeli proposal, which is not entirely false. It’s clear that the terms of this deal were approved by the Israeli security cabinet. But Netanyahu almost immediately came out and started casting doubt on that, specifically the part of the deal that would lead to a permanent ceasefire, which has been Hamas’s key demand since the very beginning. The far-right members of his coalition came out very soon after saying, unequivocally, no permanent ceasefire here—we oppose this. Members of Netanyahu’s own Likud Party have said the same thing. And yet the Biden Administration continues to say that only Hamas stands in the way of a ceasefire deal. That is plainly false.

Do you view what the Administration is doing in its public messaging as a political strategy? Or do you think that the game here is to convince Netanyahu to go along with this by saying that he already has?

The reason this sounds incoherent is because it is incoherent. The White House thought of this as a kind of a bold Hail Mary to get a ceasefire by trying to box in Netanyahu via making the deal public. Unfortunately, there was no “or else” in the President’s speech. And that’s something that’s been missing. They think they’re presenting Netanyahu with a tough political choice. Clearly, a majority of Israelis want this deal. The majority of the security establishment wants this deal. They know that a deal like this is the only way to get back the rest of the hostages.

But, unless you’re going to threaten Netanyahu with something real, he has shown repeatedly over many years that he can just delay and eventually wriggle his way out of the situation. The Biden Administration thought they were presenting him with a tough choice. They were mistaken, because they didn’t present any real downside, at least from Netanyahu’s perspective, if he essentially says no—or, more to the point, if he casts doubt on the terms of the deal, casts doubt on the idea that Israel would commit to a permanent ceasefire, and thus elicits a rejection from the other side. This is a tactic Netanyahu has used over and over again.

It seems as if something similar is going on with the U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal. On Sunday,the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is pushing to come up with a security partnership with Saudi Arabia, and hoping that such an arrangement will advance some sort of Saudi-Israel normalization deal. Buried in the fine print is that such a deal would mean Israel agrees to a Palestinian state. But everyone knows that Netanyahu is not going to do that.

I think, as usual, the play here is to try to offer Israel something so good that they couldn’t possibly say no. How could Netanyahu possibly say no? And the U.S. thinks there’s an internal domestic Israeli political play here. But I’ll just say, once again, Netanyahu clearly understands his own politics much better than the U.S. does, than the Biden Administration does. He’ll have no problem stalling on this. The Biden Administration’s approach clearly seems to be to tee up the offer of this Saudi deal as a huge positive incentive for Israel to make commitments on the Palestinian track. And they are not even asking for serious commitments. That’s what’s so laughable about it.

I’ve lost track of what word salad the Biden Administration has been using about this lately: a tangible commitment to an eventual path, to a conceivable, maybe Palestinian state sometime in the future. It’s completely qualified and attenuated and totally uninspiring—because, yes, they understand there is no way that this Israeli government, or even an alternative Israeli government led by Netanyahu’s opposition, is really serious about making any of these commitments or taking any of these steps.

I would add—this is something that I think needs to be understood more—that there has been an offer on the table, not just from Saudi Arabia but from the entire Arab League, going back to 2002, for full peace and normalization with Israel if Israel follows U.N. Security Council Resolutions, follows international law, withdraws from the occupied territory, and enables the creation of a Palestinian state.

Last month, a piece in the Times reported that people in the Biden Administration, in December, thought the war would be basically wrapping up by the end of January. I’m reading this and thinking, Did they believe this, or is it spin? Because it seems as if we’ve been going back and forth with the same thing, where the Administration appears very naïve, at least publicly. And Netanyahu seems to be running circles around them. Do you think that that’s actually what’s happening? Or do you think that the people around the President, and Biden himself, know what’s going on, and they feel that, either because of their sincere Zionism or because of politics, they are going to keep doing the best they can with a bad hand?

I think it’s both of those things. To back up, you are right. For months now, the Administration has not only signalled publicly but has also briefed privately that they expect the Israeli war to downshift into a different phase. And the war has shifted into different phases, but it has, of course, continued to be enormously destructive and deadly.

And this goes back to the problem with Biden’s ceasefire proposal: Whatever pressure they think they’re bringing to bear on all sides, however they’re trying to maneuver with Netanyahu, Biden himself has constrained the United States by refusing to countenance any real pressure. He will not say, “We won’t continue to supply you with weapons. We will not continue to protect you at the U.N. We will not continue to run interference with you at the International Criminal Court.” The President’s view has been and continues to be, essentially, that the U.S. will support Israel doing what it feels that it needs to do. That’s the bottom line.

Maybe the way to ask my last question again is: Do you think the sense within the Administration is that Israeli behavior would actually change if the United States started imposing consequences? Because you can come up with examples through history of people saying, “Well, there’s nothing we can really do to change the course of events, so we’re just going to stick by and do the best we can.”

I think there is and has been a genuine debate within the Administration about the efficacy of some of these tools for leverage. My own view is that we should find out, because even if you are not effective in changing Israeli behavior, the upside is that the United States would no longer be arming a mass atrocity. I think that’s a pretty big upside. I also think the serious analysis is that Israel simply could not sustain this war for a long time if the United States withdrew its military support.

There’s also just a basic sense that—and I say this as a former staffer myself—once the boss has laid down where he or she will not go, what approaches he or she is or is not willing to consider, then you try and find solutions within those bounds. And I think that’s what we’ve been seeing here.

What can you imagine a different Democratic Administration doing? What steps could it take to make a difference?

Well, I think a different Democratic Administration could have taken this issue more seriously before October 7th. That’s not to say we needed another round of the usual peace process. But there have been alarms sounded about Gaza for many, many years by international N.G.O.s; certainly by Palestinians, constantly; by Israeli security officials; by members of Congress, including my former boss. The idea that we could just kind of kick the Palestinians into the corner and manage the problem without any real consequences—that was revealed as a fantasy on October 7th.

After October 7th, I hope and think any Democratic Administration would’ve done immediately what President Biden did: show full support, full solidarity, and really spend time with what occurred on October 7th in all its horror, and stand by Israel as it defended its people.

At some point though, and fairly quickly, it became clear that what was going to be carried out in Gaza was not just self-defense. It became clear very quickly that this was a war of revenge. We have countless statements from Israeli government officials, many of which have been collected in South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice, which includes accusations of genocide. And we can see with our own eyes the kind of tactics that are being used on densely populated civilian areas in Gaza. A different Democratic Administration might’ve taken that much more seriously and acted with much more urgency much sooner.

To do things differently regarding P.R. for Israel at the U.N. and the International Court of Justice, and sending weapons and so on?

Yeah, not just P.R. at the U.N. but P.R. in general. I’m sorry, but I watch [the national-security spokesman] John Kirby’s briefings and it’s mind-boggling. I mean, who is he speaking for? It’s just these denials of what we can all see with our own eyes. And to continue to claim that they haven’t really seen evidence that Israel is committing war crimes. It’s such obvious bullshit.

So, answer your own question: Who is he speaking for? Who does he think his audience is? Is his audience the President?

I think it is clear that he is speaking for the President, as he should—and that is what should concern us, because if this is the messaging that Joe Biden continues to want and to require . . .

I was trying to think about the American-Israeli relationship and what makes it unique, but then I look at our relationship with Saudi Arabia. Even 9/11 didn’t cause a large shift in that relationship. I look at our relationship with Pakistan, which, after a decade of really bad relations during the war on terror, culminated with Osama bin Laden being found very close to a Pakistani military base. The relationship eventually changed in certain ways, but broadly it stayed the same. And I think there is a real inertial aspect of American foreign policy. How do you see it?

I think there is a kind of common security logic behind the U.S.-Saudi relationship, behind the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, and behind the U.S.-Israel relationship going back originally to the Cold War, then carrying through into the post-Cold War era and the war on terror, especially. And now we see it in our strategic competition with China, which is the new threat that we must guard against by shoring up these relationships with very problematic governments. There’s always going to be an excuse to do that. I think we should be very aware of this logic’s costs, which we see repeatedly.

But there is also, I think, an important kind of political and cultural affinity between the U.S. and Israel which has a real political impact. And in that way the situation is different. It’s not just all the arms industry; it’s not just all the Israel lobby.

I grew up in the evangelical Church. There was an identification with Israel that was just kind of baked into my understanding of the history of the region, the history of my own religion. And that’s true, I think, for a lot of Americans, even a lot of Americans who aren’t super political or don’t follow these issues very closely. President Biden has made very clear that it is very much a part of his understanding and his identity. And so there’s a political and cultural underpinning to the U.S.-Israel relationship which I don’t think exists or hasn’t existed as much with some of the other countries we mentioned.

Although I would say that is changing, right? We have more and more people here who have roots in the Middle East and other countries in the region, and elsewhere in the world, with a very different view of how this relationship should work and the double standard that is often applied. And so that is going to contribute to a different debate as we go forward.

The past eight months makes me think that maybe it’s changed less than I thought. Although I guess one response to that would be, No, actually the politics have changed a little bit. Things are changing. The Biden Administration has just chosen not to take advantage of the ways in which the politics have changed.

Well, I think what we’ve seen is that when the President has a particular view, he can determine the policy to an enormous degree. It’s no secret that the President has enormous authority to determine the direction of U.S. foreign policy. But I don’t think anyone can look at the past eight months [and not see changes]—whether it’s the protests in the street, the encampments, or the speech from Senator Chuck Schumer, which I think was enormously significant. I couldn’t have imagined Senator Schumer giving such a speech even just a few years ago. But it’s not just Schumer. There’s a whole other crew of members of Congress who are talking about this issue in a much more critical way. And I think that’s a reflection of the change in politics.

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To read the entire interview, please go here.