Biden’s timid Gaza intervention won’t count for much 

During the Israeli bombardment of Beirut in August 1982, President Ronald Reagan phoned

 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to express his “shock” and “outrage” at Israeli 

airstrikes and artillery fire on the Lebanese capital, demanding that they be stopped 

immediately. He said that Israeli actions were causing “needless destruction and bloodshed” 

and had halted US-led negotiations to bring about an end to the crisis.

Reagan made his call from the Oval Office with his senior cabinet members nearby and reportedly shouted at Begin when he at first failed to promise to bring an end to the bombing and shelling. In the prime minister’s office in Israel, Begin is said to have quailed at Reagan’s fury and agreed that the attacks would cease immediately.

Compare Reagan’s anger and demand for immediate action with President Biden’s timid request for an Israel-Gaza ceasefire during the latest of his three telephone conversations with Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu. He did not even ask for an immediate halt to the eight days of Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket barrages that have left 200 dead, the great majority Palestinians.

At the same time, the US for the third time in a week blocked the adoption of a joint UN Security Council statement calling for an end to the violence between Israel and the Palestinians. Biden has refused to say that Israel is overreacting.

Biden and his Secretary of State Tony Blinken are doing very little compared to the proactive role of Washington in 1982 in bringing an end to the fighting. This reflects the degree to which the political balance of power has changed in favour of Israel over the past four decades.

During that period, it became hardwired into the minds of American politicians that automatic support for Israel would do them no harm and even tentative support for the Palestinian security and rights would do them no good.

Yet this calculation is not quite as true today, during the present crisis over Gaza, as it was in 2014 when some 2,000 Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed in a ‘war’ over 67 days. Today there is significantly more criticism of Israeli actions from within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and from powerful liberal-inclined media organisations like the New York Times and CNN.

The criticism is of two types. One takes the shape of a generalised revulsion against the violence and a feeling that the US should do more to stop it. More than 25 Democratic senators, led by newly elected Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, has released a joint statement calling for an immediate ceasefire agreement in Israel and the Palestinian territories to "prevent further loss of life and further escalation of violence."

These are more in the nature of a collective punishment of the population under attack. Usually, graphic pictures of civilians killed far from any military objective creates a wave of international revulsion. In southern Lebanon, this happened twice in Qana within the space of ten years with 116 Lebanese civilians killed at a UN base in 1996 and 28 killed, including 16 children, in 2006.