An Urgent Message to President Biden from a Concerned Jew

When the President made his first speech about Israel after the October 7th massacres, he spoke with moral clarity and courage about the “pure unadulterated evil” of Hamas, Israel’s right to wage a war of self-defense, and the imperative to ensure Israel’s safety and bring its hostages home. It was reminiscent of his denunciation of Charlottesville extremists “chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the 30s” and his forceful rejection of attempts to assert “moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the moral courage to stand against it.”

The vast majority of the voting public understands that everything the President said about the Charlottesville right is also true of the pro-Hamas left. But we are not nearly as vocal as the small minority who try to obscure that truth. Perhaps our assumption that we could rely on the President’s moral compass rather than our own self-advocacy was a mistake. Now it appears that the Administration is pandering to a small segment of Michigan Democrats at our expense.

It began when Secretary Blinken warned Israel not to use October 7 and the hostage crisis as a “license to dehumanize others” — a libelous accusation he apparently still believes, given his most recent abhorrent statement implying that events in Gaza put even Jews in the United States at imminent risk of losing “what distinguishes us from terrorists like Hamas,” and “If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.” (So much for the Administration rejecting arguments of “moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the moral courage to stand against it.”)

Let’s pretend for a moment that Blinken’s statement was not an instance of defamatory disinformation (which it is), and that the IDF had in fact lost their reverence for human life (which they have not). It is an antisemitic assumption that the moral failures of the IDF can be blamed on Jews everywhere — even if he pretends to include himself. There is a reason that every time Israel has responded militarily to Hamas there has been a spike in antisemitic hate crimes in the United States.

Then there was Senator Schumer’s highly inappropriate speech calling for the democratically elected government of Israel to be undemocratically overturned — which only put Netanyahu’s opposition in the position of publicly defending him. More recently, it was revealed that, in contrast to the President’s assertion that “we have stood by your side ever since [1948], and we’re going to stand by your side now,” Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer sees America’s support for Israel after the worst atrocity since the Holocaust as a “misstep.”

This Administration appears to be surrounded by what we call “as a Jew” Jews: those who claim their Jewishness while dehumanizing Jews and defaming and undermining Israel.

One must assume that is how the President ended up with a State of the Union address that sensitively and appropriately devoted paragraphs of empathy for Palestinians, while insensitively and inappropriately dedicating fewer than 200 words of empathy and support for the people of Israel.

In that same speech, the President parroted Hamas casualty propaganda without even acknowledging that the number came from a U.S. designated terrorist organization — let alone that the number is almost certainly inflated and includes those killed by Hamas.

And despite an unprecedented increase in violence against Jews in the U.S., there was not one word of condemnation in that address for violent demonstrators who harass and attack Jews, or for those who regularly call for the annihilation of Jews and Israel. At a time when American Jews are now hiding the symbols of our Jewish identity for the first time in over 50 years, remarkably, there was no mention of antisemitism at all.

Why has the President not condemned these rabid antisemitic demonstrators the way he condemned those in Charlottesville and on January 6th? “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means precisely the same thing as “Jews will not replace us.” The only differences are the identities of the people chanting and where they want Jews to “go back” to.

The next betrayal of the Jewish people came with the failure to veto a UN ceasefire resolution that failed to condition the ceasefire on the return of the 134 hostages, including Americans. But it was the President’s outrageous statement regarding the deaths of World Central Kitchen workers that finally made it nearly impossible to believe that the White House is staffed by anyone with a functioning moral compass.

This Administration cannot possibly be unaware of the IDF’s unparalleled, extremely low estimated civilian to combatant casualty ratio. Or that Israel does more than any army in the history of war to protect civilians and facilitate the distribution of aid. Or that the death of innocent Palestinians is a devastating tragedy to almost every Jew and Israeli — but not to Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic “resistance,” for whom every Palestinian civilian death is a PR victory. This Administration cannot possibly be unaware that Hamas not only puts Palestinian civilians in harm’s way by operating from mosques, schools, offices, and residences, but steals, hoards, and sells truckloads of humanitarian aid, while doing everything they can to prevent civilians from accessing it.

The slanderous accusation that Israel has not only “not done enough” to protect aid workers and civilians, but has been impeding humanitarian efforts, is an affront to every mother — including American — whose child in uniform puts his or her own life at risk, or is even killed, in an effort to protect Palestinian civilians while attempting to rescue hostages — including Americans — and eliminate Hamas.

Mistakes happen in the fog of war. It is utter hypocrisy to use this one as a reason to call for an unconditional ceasefire and withdraw support for Israel’s just war against a genocidal enemy. The U.S. missile accident in Kabul killed as many children as the number of adults killed in Israel’s recent accident. The Kunduz hospital airstrike killed six times more and injured 30. Instead of giving Israel the same benefit of the doubt the U.S. expected after those mistakes, this Administration is holding Israel to a standard both higher than that of the U.S. military and impossible to achieve under the circumstances.

And astonishingly, the sole mention of Hamas in that statement was the surreal claim that Israel should “deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations” rather than a strenuous condemnation of Hamas for making it impossible to do so. (What happened to “If Hamas diverts or steals the assistance, they will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people” and “it will stop the international community from being able to provide this aid”?)

Such expressions of hostility toward Israel coming from the White House are not merely insensitive to Jews experiencing anti-Zionist antisemitism in the U.S., they serve to increase it, making Jews everywhere less safe.

There are hostages who need this Administration to forcefully condemn Hamas and reject any ceasefire that does not require their release. Instead, we’ve seen statements of condemnation that are directed solely at Israel. And in the State of the Union address and elsewhere, the President even declared that Israel’s first priority should be neither the return of the hostages nor the elimination of the threat of Hamas, but should instead be humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians.

What happened to “there is no higher priority than the release and safe return of all these hostages”? What happened to “Israel must again be a safe place for the Jewish people” and “I promise you: We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that it will be”?

No other country in history has been expected to prioritize a neighboring civilian population over its own. Yet, this is the only way the Administration could possibly support the obscene and outrageous call for Israel to institute an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. The message from this Administration is that Jewish and Israeli lives — whether held hostage in Gaza or attacked in the United States — not only matter less than Palestinian lives, but should also matter less even to Jews and Israelis.

This is not merely unreasonable and morally unacceptable, it empowers terrorist groups like Hamas; it paves the way for Hamas tactics to become the basis on which to prevent Israel and any other country faced with an enemy willing to sacrifice its own civilians from ever winning a war.

Failing to provide Israel with both material and rhetorical support not only weakens Israel’s ability to defend itself against its murderous neighbors, it exacerbates exactly the internal Israeli political situation that this Administration is trying to prevent. And it drives sane, moral liberals in the U.S. away from the Democratic party, as we watch its members ignore — and even support — evil rather than demonstrating the moral courage to stand against it.

At the beginning of this war, President Biden led America and the world with moral clarity when he said, “As long as the United States stands — and we will stand forever — we will not let [Israel] ever be alone.” Those were the finest moments of his career and should be the foundation of his legacy.

Where is that President now? Both Israel and America need him.

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Dr. Paresky serves as Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute and Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at New York University. In addition to The Jewish Journal, her work appears in Psychology Today, The Guardian, Politico, Sapir, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She has taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the United States Air Force Academy, and writes the Habits of a Free Mind newsletter. Follow her on Twitter at @PamelaParesky