Biden Aides Fret That Support for Israel Will Hurt Re-Election Prospects

Some of President Biden’s senior aides are becoming increasingly worried that his support for Israel’s war in Gaza risks damaging his re-election prospects amid cratering support from young voters.

Biden advisers are divided on the seriousness of the political threat. Some see a real risk that disillusioned young voters will stay home because of the Israel issue and other concerns about the president. Other aides are confident that most of those voters will end up giving priority to other issues above Israel and that they will vote for Biden rather than risk another Trump administration.

Biden is urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take more concerted measures to reduce the rate of civilian casualties in a number of phone calls, officials said. In the two leaders’ most recent call on Jan. 19, their first in nearly a month, Biden pressed Netanyahu not to allow the conflict to drag indefinitely, several U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials have nonetheless emphasized that the president’s deep-rooted belief in standing by Israel remains unchanged, and he is likely to continue to do so even if it causes some political problems.

Pro-Palestinian protests aimed at the president are getting increasingly loud: Activists opposing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza interrupted Biden during a rally Wednesday with auto workers, a day after they heckled him at a campaign speech—back-to-back outbursts that represent the loudest protest movement Biden has faced since taking office.

Demonstrators also disrupted a speech he gave earlier this month in a South Carolina church, yelled as he addressed auto workers in Illinois and confronted him at fundraisers in Washington and Minnesota. They also are stationing themselves outside nearly all of his public events when he travels around the country.

The messages are part of an international pro-Palestinian movement that has included marches through Washington and foreign capitals as Israel has responded to the Oct. 7 attacks in which Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 people as hostages. Hamas still holds about 130 of them, including Americans.

More than 25,000 people, the majority women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the start of Israel’s bombardment and invasion, according to Palestinian authorities. That figure doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. A majority of Gazans are now internally displaced and facing food shortages.

As Biden ramps up his re-election campaign and seeks to project a unified party ready to take on likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, the demonstrations instead spotlight a fissure between the president and a portion of his own party’s liberal base.

“I don’t think that there’s going to be anywhere that Biden goes during this campaign where he won’t be disrupted or where there won’t be dissent,” said Sandra Tamari, the executive director of the Adalah Justice Project, a U.S.-based organization that advocates for Palestinian rights and has participated in some of the protests.

A resigned White House

The president seems resigned to that reality. “This is going to go on for a while,” Biden said Wednesday after being heckled during a United Auto Workers meeting. “They’ve got this planned.”

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said of the protests: “As long as they do so peacefully, all Americans have the constitutional right to express their views.” He added that thousands of Americans  “demonstrated on the National Mall in agreement with President Biden’s support of Israel’s obligation to defend itself, and the groups that have protested at White House events.”

Pro-Palestinian organizers say the Biden administration’s refusal to more explicitly condemn Israel’s broad-based bombings and its practice of arming Israeli forces with weapons and military assistance have triggered sufficient backlash to prompt organic protests. Many groups said they haven’t needed to actively recruit protest participants.

Disrupting a presidential event is a key goal because of the media attention it attracts, organizers said, but doing so can be difficult because Biden tends to keep his schedule private until just days before an event.

“We need to be creating pressure from within the broader Democratic Party that squeezes Biden, that isolates Biden, that makes it clear that he actually does not have the support of his party on this issue,” said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, the political arm of the group that disrupted Biden’s event in Minneapolis.

The Biden administration has sought to quell criticism by meeting with Muslim and Arab-American leaders behind closed doors. But pro-Palestinian advocates have often left those discussions disappointed by the administration’s refusal to embrace a cease-fire or put conditions on aid to Israel.

Arab, Muslim meetings lead to frustration

Since the war began, top Biden administration officials have held meetings with Arab and Muslim-American leaders. Biden met once with a handful of Muslim leaders who confronted him over his handling of the conflict. Arab-American leaders voiced frustration that only one Palestinian-American was present for the meeting, and his work centered on social justice issues in Chicago—not the situation in Gaza.

Arab-American leaders also bristled at recent comments in which Biden, when asked about losing the support of Arab-American voters over Gaza, responded by citing former President Trump’s travel ban on several majority-Muslim nations. “The former president wants to put a ban on Arabs coming into the country,” Biden said when asked about eroding support from Arab-American voters. “We’ll make sure he—we understand who cares about the Arab population.”

Biden added that there was “a long way to go in terms of settling the situation in Gaza.”

On Friday, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez is expected to meet with local Arab-American leaders while in Michigan, according to people familiar with the plans.

Biden advisers point to national polling that shows the conflict isn’t top of mind for most Americans. A small percentage of voters ranked foreign policy as a priority, but not the Israel-Hamas war specifically, according to a Wall Street Journal poll in December. That survey found some 42% of U.S. voters said they sympathized more with the Israeli people, compared with 12% who said the same of the Palestinian people.

Democratic divide on Israel’s war

The poll also showed that nearly half of Democrats think Israel’s actions are disproportionate and 37% of voters approved of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza crisis. Among young voters—those between the ages of 18 and 34—roughly 61% disapprove of Biden’s handling of the conflict while under a third approve.

Former presidential aides say that interrupting events and heckling tends to backfire.

“People view heckling as kind of rude,” said Eric Lesser, a former Obama aide and former Massachusetts state senator. “People show up to speeches to hear the speech. I think people inherently understand that there’s a time and place. They have a right to protest, they don’t have a right to interrupt.”

An effort in the New Hampshire primary to have voters register their discontent by writing in “cease-fire” in the Democratic contest fell flat. About 1,500 voters wrote “cease-fire” on their ballots, compared with 77,000 who wrote in Biden, according to results posted on the New Hampshire secretary of state’s website.

Earlier this month, protesters also faced backlash when—with yells of “Cease-fire now”—they disrupted a speech that Biden gave at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. The church was the site of a mass shooting by a White supremacist who killed nine churchgoers at a Bible study, and some local leaders said the space should be off-limits to uninvited protests.

Symone Sanders Townsend, a former Biden senior adviser, who sympathizes with some of the aims of the protesters, called the church “hallowed ground” in a post on X. “The shock of people in the crowd at protesters yelling out while President Biden was speaking from the pulpit cannot be overstated. I too couldn’t believe it,” she said.

Marcus McDonald, a lead activist with Charleston Black Lives Matter who helped organize the protest, said Emanuel has been his family’s church for generations and has a legacy of rebellion against slavery and protesting injustice.

“There’s a lot of history at Mother Emanuel that we honored by standing up and making our voices heard and holding the president accountable,” he said.

Write to Sabrina Siddiqui at [email protected], Annie Linskey at [email protected] and Vivian Salama at [email protected]