[What a letter from Biden’s field staff and organizers says
about how Democrats see the Israel-Hamas war. ]
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MORE THAN 500 BIDEN CAMPAIGN ALUMNI WANT A GAZA CEASEFIRE  
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Jonathan Guyer
November 9, 2023
Vox
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_ What a letter from Biden’s field staff and organizers says about
how Democrats see the Israel-Hamas war. _

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For decades, American public opinion and policy on Israel
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been near-monolithic. But as Israel’s bombardment and ground
incursion of Gaza continues, arguments over Israel policy from inside
the Democratic Party and throughout the State Department are spilling
out into the open.

That, in and of itself, shows that some Americans within the
establishment are processing the current war differently — and may
feel more empowered than before to shape the contours of US policy.

President Joe Biden and congressional leaders have defended Israel’s
military campaign to eliminate Hamas after the militant group’s
October 7 attacks
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killed 1,400 people and kidnapped over 200. As the death toll
and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza
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the president and his team have incrementally adjusted their public
messaging, moving from a maximalist embrace of Israel after the
attacks to discussing the need for a pause to allow humanitarian aid
in, and hostages out. But the Biden administration, unlike the United
Nations, World Health Organization, and humanitarian groups, has not
advocated for an immediate ceasefire
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That has led to internal dissent and activism within the diplomatic
corps and the Democratic Party apparatus, pushing for Biden to
urgently adjust his approach.

On Thursday, over 500 alumni of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign
banded together to urge a ceasefire. The signatories include staffers
from Biden’s 2020 campaign headquarters, the Democratic National
Committee, and state staff and leadership; 21 states are represented,
including key battlegrounds like Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Pennsylvania. “As President of the United States, you have
significant influence in this perilous moment,” the group, named
Biden Alumni for Peace and Justice, writes in an open letter shared
first exclusively with Vox
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“[Y]ou must call for a ceasefire, hostage exchange, and
de-escalation, and take concrete steps to address the conditions of
occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing at the root of the
horrific violence we are witnessing now.”

“This is a rupture that’s happening,” Matan Arad-Neeman, an
Israeli American activist who worked as a field organizer in Arizona
and signed the letter, told me. The letter notes that 66 percent of
voters think the US should call for a ceasefire, according to a
recent Data for Progress
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While polls mostly find that a plurality
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Americans think the US’s support for Israel is just about right,
that hides a stark generational divide. Less than a quarter
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young American likely voters approve of Biden’s Israel policies so
far, according to a Quinnipiac survey
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26-30. Given his reliance on young voters in 2020, that — and those
voters’ general cooling on Biden
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could pose a problem for a 2024 rematch
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Donald Trump.

Pressure is also being put on progressive senators. More than 400
former campaign staffers
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Sen. Bernie Sanders and more than 400
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s orbit have each sent open letters calling
for a ceasefire now. Sanders has rejected
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calls, and Warren has shifted
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recent days to calling for a humanitarian pause.

Within government, there are also cracks emerging. Career diplomats
and political appointees at the State Department are using
the dissent channel
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a special mechanism to submit critical memos of policy directly to top
officials, to voice their calls for a ceasefire. (Diplomats have used
the dissent channel in the leadup to the US withdrawal from
Afghanistan
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to warn against Trump’s refugee ban
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More than 630 employees
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the international development agency USAID
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the Biden administration to advocate for “an immediate ceasefire and
cessation of hostilities.” And a letter signed anonymously by more
than 400 congressional staffers
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a similar call.

It’s becoming a truism that this Israel-Hamas war is different: the
scale of Hamas’s destruction was unprecedented and has fundamentally
altered Israel’s security thinking. Israel’s military campaign in
the last month has caused more deaths than 15 years of
conflict combined
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But the response in the US differs from previous phases of the
long-running conflict as well: there is a growing sense, at least
among young people, that the US mainstream consensus on Israel policy
has failed and has enabled the hellish conditions that could lead to
more deaths in the region, and potentially a broader war in the Middle
East.

“As the President of the United States, you have power to change the
course of history, and the responsibility to save lives right now,”
the Biden Alumni for Peace and Justice write. “We are counting on
you to take that power and responsibility seriously and to meet this
moment with the urgency it demands. If you fail to act swiftly, your
legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”

What Biden campaigners want from the president

This isn’t the first time that Biden Alumni for Peace and Justice
has mobilized. Amid the Israel-Hamas war of May 2021
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a group of more than 500 former staffers
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Biden “to hold Israel accountable for its actions and lay the
groundwork for justice and lasting peace.” They urged Biden to
demand that the Israeli government lift the blockade on Gaza, end home
demolitions in East Jerusalem, and halt settlement expansion in the
West Bank.

Arad-Neeman organized the May 2021 letter (after which, he says, the
White House reached out to him, but never set up a meeting). He hopes
Biden will read the one currently being circulated. “I’m feeling a
deep frustration that not only is he not meeting the moment, but
he’s also actively enabling Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza,” he
told me. “Hopefully, he’ll take this moment to actually reassess
his policy and push towards equality, justice and a thriving future
for all Israelis and Palestinians.”

The White House maintains that a ceasefire would benefit Hamas
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State Department spokesperson Matt Miller says
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welcomes dissent cables and “finds it useful to get conflicting
voices that may differ from his opinion.”

Today’s letter
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the Biden Alumni for Peace and Justice urges the president to not only
call for a ceasefire but also “use financial and diplomatic leverage
to bring about” one, push Hamas to release hostages, put conditions
on US military aid to Israel, and investigate whether Israeli
operations in Gaza violate US law. The letter goes on to urge Biden to
“take concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation,
and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this devastation.”

That language — and those calls — echo what diplomats have written
in various
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memos
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken since the war began. (At least one
more is currently circulating, that Vox has seen.) Those internal
protests have led administration leaders to hold listening sessions
at the White House
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at the State Department. And Biden’s team appears to be continually
tweaking its rhetoric in part to address these internal criticisms,
though the policy writ large remains constant.

A senior official overseeing arms sales at the State Department, Josh
Paul, resigned in protest last month. He told Democracy Now
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“there has been an overwhelming response that I have heard from
folks or from colleagues inside not only in the State Department, but
across the U.S. government, actually, on the Hill, in the Defense
Department, in the uniformed military services, including in combatant
commands around the world.”

What this letter represents

Right now, these channels of dissent are mostly within the working
level of these organizations. Speaking out publicly can be risky and
detrimental to one’s career in politics. And among the upper
echelons of the administration, traditional views about the
preeminence of the American-Israeli partnership tend to dominate.

But internal feedback can change policy, as it has since the Black
Lives Matter protests in 2020. Young progressives have wielded sway in
lawmakers’ offices, nonprofits, and even Biden’s own campaign.
“Campaign staffers see that a lot of our struggles are connected,”
Heba Mohammad, a Palestinian American who worked as Biden’s digital
organizing director in Wisconsin for 2020, told me. “We’re working
based on our values, and we’re going to hold our candidates to
account for representing those values that they themselves have
espoused.”

The signatories to today’s letter worked in critical states that
helped Biden carry the presidency, and implicitly suggest they won’t
be doing that if there isn’t a shift in Biden’s policy on Israel.
“I hope that he recognizes that those of us who put so much time
into his campaign are feeling ashamed of his administration’s
position right now,” Arad-Neeman, who also works as communications
director for IfNotNow, told me.

Though there are warning signs for Biden in some polls (a recent New
York Times-Siena survey
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him trailing in five of six battleground states), it is hard to make
reliable predictions about voters a year out from the presidential
election. What is clear is that members of the organizing community
and campaign machinery, who will have to get to work much sooner
(like, now), could step back absent a change in Biden’s policy
toward Israel.

“There is outrage among people who work in Democratic politics about
this,” Juliana Amin, who held senior roles in Iowa for Warren’s
presidential primary campaign and the Iowa Democratic Party’s
general election campaign, told me. “And we are the people who do
the work that campaigns need, that wins elections, that uplift people
and their platforms, and I know a lot of people who aren’t willing
to do that work anymore if Democrats continue to enable genocide.”

It’s worth keeping in mind that a Trump presidency would also enable
Israel, but there are indications that the situation would likely be
worse. As ever, his comments with respect to this war are all over the
place. He promised
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October 7 victims would be avenged “even beyond what you’re
thinking about,” criticized Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu on seemingly false grounds
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and said he would have helped Israel make peace with Iran
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he been reelected in 2020. Most alarmingly, he said
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would restore and expand his Muslim migration ban to restrict
Palestinian refugees from Gaza from entering the US.

But as President Biden begins to fundraise for his reelection
campaign, the voices of those who organized for him before are growing
louder.

_Jonathan Guyer [[link removed]]
covers FOREIGN POLICY
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SECURITY
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and GLOBAL AFFAIRS
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Vox. From 2019 to 2021, he worked at THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
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editor he reported on Biden’s and Trump's foreign policy teams. His
accountability stories have won top prizes from the SOCIETY OF
AMERICAN BUSINESS EDITORS AND WRITERS
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OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS
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REPORTERS AND EDITORS ASSOCIATION
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* Joe Biden
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* Gaza
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* Israel
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* Ceasefire
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