Why Are Presidential Statements About Jews So Weak?

President Biden has finally spoken out against the rising antisemitism on college campuses—but he coupled it with a complaint about “what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Meanwhile, eighteen countries whose citizens are being held hostage in Gaza finally issued a joint appeal to Hamas for their freedom—but smothered it in a statement about civilians in Gaza.

Why are our leaders’ statements about Jews often weak and equivocal? Why can’t they clearly condemn antisemites, without qualifiers or conditions?

“I condemn the antisemitic protests,” President Biden said on April 22. For some reason, he felt compelled to add: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

The president’s statement was an unfortunate example of moral equivalence. He lumped together the haters who are engaging in illegal and sometimes violent agitation and “those” who privately “don’t understand” something—which seems to mean somebody who simply disagrees with the administration on Gaza.

The Israeli hostages in Gaza include holders of joint citizenship with eighteen different countries. It took six months for those governments to finally issue a statement about the illegal imprisonment of their citizens. The statement that they finally crafted was woefully inadequate.

Their statement began by calling for “the immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.” Instead of leaving well enough alone, the 18 countries then immediately connected the hostages to “the fate of the civilian population in Gaza,” as if individuals who happen to be in the vicinity of battle zones are comparable to individuals held hostage by terrorists.

Most of the rest of the statement was about the Gazans, not the hostages. It emphasized the rewards the international community is offering Hamas—such as a ceasefire and a “surge of humanitarian assistance”—in exchange for freeing the prisoners.

These deeply flawed statements are painfully reminiscent of statements made during the Holocaust years by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His belated condemnation of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, for example, did not identify the victims as Jews, nor it did name the perpetrators as Nazis or Germans.

The U.S. invitation to 32 countries to take part in a conference in Evian, France, about the Jewish refugee problem in 1938 did not mention Jews; they were called“political refugees.” Even five years later, when the mass murder of Europe’s Jews was underway, Roosevelt’s announcement of another refugee conference—this time in Bermuda—emphasized that the discussion would not be “confined to persons of any particular race or faith.”

Again and again, presidential statements about war crimes omitted any reference to the most severe and systematic war crimes of all. At his August 21, 1942, press conference, for example, FDR referred generally to “barbaric crimes against civilian populations,” citing “the shooting of hostages, not only in France but very recently five or six very important citizens in The Netherlands, and a good many people in Norway.”

In an October 7, 1942, statement, the president promised the US would cooperate in establishing a war-crimes commission, but he offered no explanation as to which war crimes were being perpetrated, or against whom. Similarly, in a July 30, 1943 statement, Roosevelt said the Allies would “make use of information and evidence in respect to barbaric crimes in Europe and Asia and the instigators of those crimes would have to stand in courts of law to answer for their acts.” The president did not regard the plight of the Jews as deserving of special mention, much less special action.

Ironically, when the American Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise asked the president, in August 1943, to issue a public statement about the massacres of the Jews, FDR replied by citing those three statements as evidence that he had already spoken out.

Roosevelt’s omissions of the Jews served a specific political purpose. He and his aides feared that if there was too much focus on the slaughter of the Jews, then —as senior State Department official R. Borden Reams put it in 1943— “the way will then be open for further pressure from interested groups for action.” That is, “action” such as opening America’s doors to more Jewish refugees—something which President Roosevelt strongly opposed.

Not all presidential omissions of Jews are politically motivated, of course. President Barack Obama’s omission of Jews from his 2015 recounting of the story of Hanukkah, like President Donald Trump’s Holocaust commemoration statement in 2017 that failed to mention Jews, probably represented nothing more than a careless mistake by some junior speechwriter.

But political considerations often are the key factor. Roosevelt had his, and today’s leaders have theirs. The eighteen countries that signed the muddled message about the hostages likely are worried about Palestinian terrorists turning on them, if they seem too sympathetic to Israel. As for President Biden, he seems to have made a cynical election-year calculation to embrace the Palestinian Arab cause in the hope that its supporters will embrace him in November.