How much is Biden willing to sacrifice to enable Israel's genocide in Gaza?

Although US President Joe Biden’s attachment to Zionism is well-known, it has nevertheless been remarkable in the last six months to witness just how much he is willing to hurt himself in order to enable Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Despite his occasionally tough words for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has continuously provided Netanyahu's government with the armaments it is using to kill and maim Palestinians by the tens of thousands and destroy entire neighbourhoods and critical infrastructure.

"I'm a Zionist," the president has said repeatedly since last October. This does not entirely come as a surprise, as Biden has been a staunch supporter of Israel throughout his long political career.

In 1982, for example, then-Senator Biden praised Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon, which had killed thousands of civilians.

Speaking to Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, Biden said at the time, "You annihilated what you annihilated. It was great! It had to be done!" Four years after that, Biden declared on the Senate floor that "were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region."

In exchange for his loyalty, pro-Israel groups have donated a total of $4.2 million to Biden during his 36 years as a senator.

Election test

But now, by backing Israel’s ghastly killing spree, the president is alienating huge numbers of voters from his own party during an election year where his victory is far from assured.

According to a recent Gallup poll, a whopping 75 percent of Democrats oppose Israel's assault on Gaza, even as Biden continues sending US-made weapons to the Israeli military.

In several states, some 530,000 Democratic Party voters have recently protested Biden's unchecked support for Israel by choosing the "uncommitted" or "uninstructed" option on their primary ballots rather than vote to re-nominate the president as the party's candidate in the upcoming November election.

By potentially not showing up to the polls on election day, even a relatively small number of uncommitted voters can impede Biden's reelection chances in swing states where he only narrowly beat his opponent, Donald Trump, in 2020.

For example, in Wisconsin—which Biden won four years ago by only 20,682 votes—over 47,800 Democrats voted "uninstructed" in last week's primary.

Meanwhile, a poll from November showed that only 17 percent of Arab Americans say they plan to vote for Biden in this year's election, compared to the 59 percent who voted for him in 2020.

This could be especially disastrous for the president in the swing state of Michigan, where Arab-American voters were crucial to his 2020 victory.

And among US voters aged 18 to 29 years old, who are more sympathetic to Palestinians than their elders, the president had a disapproval rating of 68 percent as of December.

Voters in this age group had a higher-than-usual turnout four years ago and overwhelmingly voted for Biden.

Tarnished international standing

Besides risking his own political future, Biden's encouragement of the Gaza genocide has destroyed his professed goal of "restoring" US leadership in the world.

The vast majority of United Nations member states have been calling for an immediate end to the bloodshed, and many US allies have broken diplomatic relations with Israel in the past few months over its egregious violations of international law.

But rather than adhere to this broad international consensus and listen to the Global South, the Biden administration vetoed three separate ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council (finally only abstaining on March 25).

It also mischaracterized the International Court of Justice's preliminary order on preventing genocide, and cut off funds to the main humanitarian agency in Gaza—UNRWA—at the precise moment experts began warning of mass starvation in the besieged enclave.

The president has thus positioned the United States as a global pariah and made a mockery of the so-called "rules-based international order" he and his administration have often preached to US rivals like Russia and China.

Biden has also noticeably ignored the people of Ireland—79 percent of whom say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—despite being a proud Irish American who often speaks wistfully of his ancestral homeland.

His popularity in Ireland has consequently plummeted since last fall. In November, a mural of the US president in the hometown of his great-great-great grandfather was splattered with red paint along with the words "Genocide Joe."

Standing next to Biden at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, Ireland's leader Leo Varadkar called for "the bombs to stop" telling the US president that "the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that's unfolding…in Gaza" because "we see our history in (the Palestinian people's) eyes—a story of displacement, of dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger."

Biden's support for the Gaza genocide has not only challenged his Irish identity, but also his long-held reputation for being a man of deep empathy due to personal tragedies he has endured.

Often called the "comforter-in-chief," the president reportedly displayed indifference last week after being shown "photos of malnourished children and women in Gaza" by a Muslim American physician who visited the Oval Office.

As NBC News reported, the doctor "was taken aback" when Biden responded to the images simply by saying he had seen them before, which was impossible because the doctor "had printed the photos from her own iPhone" after recently visiting Gaza.

The president's disregard for Palestinian suffering was especially evident in late October when he cast doubt on the rising Gaza death toll, telling reporters, "I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed"—even though his own State Department was internally citing the casualty numbers put out by the Gaza Health Ministry.

As former State Department official David Miller said in a recent interview with the New Yorker: "Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis? No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don't think there’s any doubt about that."

For six months, the president’s advisors have kept him informed of the daily atrocities and indignities Palestinians are experiencing because of his policies, with some even resigning in protest.

But he has continued to unconditionally provide Israel with the military means and diplomatic cover to implement genocide, all while mouthing concern over the "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza that he himself has caused.

This is not simply because Biden has an affinity for the State of Israel, but because he refuses to see Palestinians as human beings.

Indeed, despite over 33,000 Palestinians slaughtered, it was only after Israel killed a group of Western aid workers last week that Biden reportedly warned Netanyahu that the US may condition military aid.

In response, Netanyahu quickly opened three previously blocked humanitarian aid routes into Gaza, demonstrating the power Biden could have exerted all along, but chose not to.

Biden's blatant disregard for Palestinian life represents the gravest and most permanent way he has harmed himself by supporting the Gaza genocide—because those who would dehumanise others must sacrifice their own humanity in the process.