Opinions #45/23

We must have the courage to “face the whole truth” about what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians. Barack Obama tells Americans this after a month of war. The former president, who during his eight years in the White House has persistently sought to find a solution to a problem that has been going on since 1948, has broken his silence in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the Gaza Strip.

“What Hamas did was terrible, and there is no justification for it,” the former president said in a conversation with his former employees in Chicago. But reasoning doesn’t end there. “It is also true that the occupation and what is happening to the Palestinians are intolerable things.”

These words are similar to those uttered by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres a few days ago, which sparked a furious reaction from the Israeli government that went so far as to demand his resignation after calling him “immoral” for saying that “no party is above international law.”

Obama’s words also echo those spoken last week by Pope Francis on Italian television Tg1-Rai: “Two peoples who must live together, with this wise decision: two peoples, two states, and Jerusalem with a special status.”

Obama cannot offer any solution today. He played his cards to recognize the legitimate Israeli desire for security and the Palestinian desire for their own state when he was in full power. But Benjamin Netanyahu then “blew up the table.”

No agreement. And because of this conflict, relations between the two politicians became glacial. Joe Biden witnessed the failure. He was Obama’s two-term vice president at the time. Biden has always been considered sensitive to the Israeli cause. To such an extent that a senator friend of his called him “the only Jewish Catholic.”

As a senator, then vice president, and then finally president, Biden made ten state visits to Israel, often interacting with Netanyahu, who almost always served as prime minister. Some minor disagreements, but nothing compared to the tension that existed between Obama and “Bibi.”

Two weeks ago, Peter Baker, who accompanied Biden to Tel Aviv after the Hamas attack on October 7, quoted his often-repeated phrase in the New York Times: “No need to be Jewish to be a Zionist.”

The events of the concentration camps and the Holocaust, which Biden learned about from his father in dinner conversations when he was a teenager, have deeply shaped the current president’s beliefs. Less interested and less sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people.

Antony Blinken, who as secretary of state shuttles with Tel Aviv to limit as much as possible Netanyahu’s desire for revenge, was already with Biden as a young man in his role as an aide to the then-Delaware senator. And Dennis Ross, a former US negotiator for Bush and Clinton at the Israeli-Palestinian table, recalls meeting the two at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem during the second intifada in 2002 and finding Biden “very emotionally involved.” Blinken himself recently admitted in an interview that “for other presidents, there is a political-intellectual elaboration” of this issue, while for Biden “it seems like something intuitive.”

There is widespread hope that the White House occupant will now be able to use his credentials of a friend of Israel to succeed in curbing its military activities. Not only among the few Palestinians, who want to believe it, but also among the many Israelis, who want to hope so. Fed up with Netanyahu’s firebug and his government’s increasingly radical drift, which has included ministers like Amihai Eliyahu capable of mentioning the possible use an atomic bomb in the Gaza Strip to destroy Hamas. Revealing in one fell swoop the extent of extremism of the religious right in power in Tel Aviv, and the existence, never before acknowledged, of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Israeli army.