Over the course of six terms spanning more than three decades, Biden was frequently one of the Senate’s most reliable supporters of Israel. In 1975, Biden signed a joint letter organized in part by Jackson urging President Gerald Ford to provide Israel with the military aid it was requesting. In 1981, he took to the New York Times op-ed page to oppose Ronald Reagan’s sale of high-tech enhancements to Saudi Arabia’s military on the grounds that “Israel’s military superiority and military-technology edge would be dangerously eroded.” Biden and his ally Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York (who maintained close ties with neoconservative intellectuals and was another of the Senate’s leading champions of the Jewish state) both told the Times that they were being subjected to antisemitic vitriol for their opposition to the Saudi arms deal. “I have a feeling that American Jews are being made a scapegoat,” Biden said. The following year, Biden was the only senator who defended Israel’s conduct in its invasion of Lebanon in a closed meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in terms that apparently shocked Begin himself; three months later, Christian militias backed by Israel carried out the massacre of hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

On the other hand, in 1980, Biden defended the Carter administration’s decision not to veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements, situating himself to the left of many of his Senate colleagues. At the time he said the Carter administration should declare publicly, “We’re mad as hell with Begin over settlements,” and added that Begin “seriously underestimates the anger of the American people over settlements.” Two years later, under the Reagan administration and amid the Lebanese invasion, Biden reportedly threatened Begin with aid cuts in response to settlement expansion, to the point where Begin responded, “Sir, do not threaten us with cutting aid. First of all, you should know that this is not a one-way street. You help us, and we are very grateful for your help, but this is a two-way street. We do a lot for you.”

Biden certainly agreed that Israel was a strategic asset to the United States. In 1984, he took the lead on getting Congress to establish that Israel would always receive enough economic assistance from the US to cover the cost of its weapons purchases, a privilege that was not extended to neighboring Egypt. In 1986, Biden told the Israeli ambassador to the US that aid for Israel was “the biggest bang for our buck” and that he felt the US should refrain from criticizing Israel publicly. At the time, the Israeli embassy regarded Biden as a minor player in Middle East policy and classified him as neither especially for nor especially against Israel. That ambivalent impression is understandable; even today, it is hard to reconcile Biden’s privately championing Israel’s brutality in Lebanon with his publicly criticizing Israel for settlement expansion, only to turn around a few years later and say Israel should only ever be criticized in private.

The Reagan era coincided with the emergence of a well-funded Israel lobby, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that would come to dominate American Jewish political life and to pressure politicians in both parties to stand with Israel. One politician in particular was an eager recipient: Over the course of his Senate career, Biden took $4.2 million from pro-Israel groups, more than any other senator in history. The youth director for his failed 1988 presidential campaign, Jonathan Kessler, was hired directly from AIPAC, and AIPAC lobbyists favored Biden’s campaign “because he has long been vocal in support of Israel,” as the Times reported that cycle. In 1991, when George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, insisted on conditioning aid to Israel on the restriction of settlement expansion, AIPAC lobbied Congress to override the Bush policy, and Biden cosponsored a bill to that effect, which failed to pass. AIPAC had not quite achieved bipartisan hegemony: “Fuck ’em, they didn’t vote for us,” Baker allegedly said in 1992 of Jewish supporters of Israel.

AIPAC money might seem to account for how Biden went from a critic of Israeli settlements to a defender over the course of about a decade. But a few years after his attempt to override Bush and Baker, in 1998, Biden took the more dovish side of an intra-Democratic debate over Bill Clinton’s attempt at a peace initiative. The hawks were represented by Senator Joe Lieberman, who coauthored an AIPAC-backed, Netanyahu-aligned letter urging Clinton not to publicly confront Israel, while Biden signed a response letter authored by Senator Carl Levin praising the administration’s efforts at diplomacy. Biden supported Clinton’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to secure a two-state solution at Camp David, and into the George W. Bush administration, he continued to call for a regional peace plan, including in a New York Times op-ed in which he wrote, “Israelis will have to understand, as most already do, that a Palestinian state will require dismantling most settlements.” He even blocked a 2002 effort by Netanyahu, then between prime ministerships, to address the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling it “totally inappropriate” for the opposition leader to use that forum to undermine then–Secretary of State Colin Powell’s efforts to negotiate a ceasefire.

Biden’s relative dovishness during the Clinton and George W. Bush years makes for an odd and inexplicable contrast with his relative hawkishness during Barack Obama’s administration. When Biden became vice president in 2009, he developed a reputation as the “good cop” who could personally get along with Netanyahu, unlike Obama, whose relationship with his Israeli counterpart was rocky from the start. Months into Obama’s first term, which coincided with Netanyahu’s return to power, the new president gave an address to the Arab world in Cairo in which he affirmed US support for a two-state solution, which Netanyahu reluctantly endorsed under Obama’s pressure (in January of this year, Netanyahu declared his blanket opposition to a Palestinian state). In 2010, Netanyahu insultingly timed the announcement of new settlement construction to line up with a Biden visit to Israel, prompting a furious reaction from Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who contemplated punishing Netanyahu for his intransigence. But then Biden called Netanyahu to reassure him it would all blow over, thereby undercutting the credibility of his own administration’s threat, to Obama and Clinton’s further consternation. As reported by The New York Times, that same year Biden told Uzi Arad, one of Netanyahu’s top advisers, “Just remember that I am your best fucking friend here.”

In short, it isn’t quite right to say that Biden has always taken the most hawkish possible stance on Israel. As a senator and as vice president, he was consistently a staunch Zionist, a leading beneficiary of AIPAC funds, and a champion of Israel’s right to defend itself. But there have been times when he voiced opposition to settlements and tried to support peace negotiations while other Senate Democrats took a harder line, and there have also been times when he undermined efforts by presidents in both parties to put meaningful pressure on Israel. It’s a maddening record, and it foreshadowed a maddening presidency.

From the start of his term, Biden has been deferential to Israel. The Trump administration’s significant rightward Middle East policy shifts have all been maintained by Biden, despite some half-hearted efforts to resuscitate the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal. For Biden’s first few years in office, there were no significant efforts to revive the long-moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority; a short Israel-Hamas war in May 2021 caught the administration off-guard and was resolved inconclusively with little impact on US policy. In an article drafted for Foreign Affairs just before the October 7 attacks, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, wrote that the Middle East “is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.” That unfortunately timed passage made it to print, though it was wiped from online publication, but it reflected the administration’s basic attitude before the attacks. The Palestinian issue was seen as contained, manageable, and unlikely to derail Biden’s agenda. A year out from reelection, Biden was blindsided by Hamas and unprepared for the political consequences of embracing Israel’s war on Gaza.

Just over a week after the attacks, Biden traveled to Israel to meet with Netanyahu and to express solidarity with a traumatized ally. “The fact that the most powerful person on Earth—the president of the United States—is standing behind us is a big deal,” a Netanyahu adviser told NBC News at the time. The Biden administration chose to unequivocally back Israel, including with a $15 billion military assistance package that Congress passed in April and that includes no conditions on how Israel uses US-made armaments, despite knowing that Netanyahu’s reigning far-right coalition was likely to employ indiscriminate tactics against the Palestinians in Gaza. Netanyahu—who has weathered protests against his personal corruption and his attempted dismantling of Israel’s independent judiciary since well before October 7—has been strongly incentivized to extend the war as a means of staying in power and avoiding accountability for his failures in allowing the attacks to happen. The White House had every reason to understand that neither Israel’s interests nor Netanyahu’s are aligned with Biden’s—and yet it decided to stake Biden’s legacy on Netanyahu’s prosecution of this war.

Maintaining this posture has compelled Biden to do things like repeat unsubstantiated claims that Hamas beheaded Israeli civilians and publicly question the accuracy of Palestinian casualty counts, as he did in late October. A day later, he apologized in private and pledged to work harder at humanizing Palestinians in his rhetoric to a small group that included several Muslim advocates, in a meeting which wasn’t reported on for another month. Biden’s quiet, perfunctory gestures of empathy have been drowned out by administration decisions like bypassing Congress to expedite a weapons sale to Israel, or vetoing a near-unanimous UN resolution condemning Israel’s war conduct in December and another supporting full UN membership for Palestine in April.

Biden’s Israel strategy since the attacks has been described by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot as a “bear hug.” In other words, by publicly demonstrating unequivocal support and affection for Israel, the US could privately curb Israel’s worst excesses—or so the theory went. For a few months, defenders of the administration could argue that the bear hug was working insofar as it prevented a wider regional war; by January, however, that seemed harder to maintain, as the war expanded to encompass US air strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, as well as ongoing exchanges between the US and Israel on the one hand and Iranian proxies on the other in multiple countries.

In late January, following the deaths of three US troops in a drone strike on Jordan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that “we have not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that.” And in April, tensions between Israel and Iran reached a boiling point after Israel assassinated an Iranian general in Syria and Iran responded with drone strikes on Israeli territory; Biden ultimately held the line against further escalation. But even if the war were contained entirely within Gaza, it’s hard to describe a policy that directly implicates the White House in tens of thousands of civilian deaths as a success.

The White House has sidelined considerable dissent within the State Department, relying instead on a tight circle of hawks led by Brett McGurk, a holdover from previous administrations, including Trump’s. Since the start of the Biden presidency, McGurk’s singular priority has been normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia; he regarded Palestinians as irrelevant before October 7 and since then has seen them as expendable. In January, Akbar Shahid Ahmed, a diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, exposed McGurk’s secret plan to expedite Saudi-Israeli normalization and to offer a Saudi-funded reconstruction of Gaza as leverage to impose a new Israel-friendly government over the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The White House was so embarrassed that it accused Ahmed of making up quotes by senior US officials—a serious and unsubstantiated charge.

Still, as the casualties in Gaza mounted, the administration seemingly attempted to distance itself from Netanyahu through a steady series of anonymous leaks and occasional half-hearted public statements indicating that Biden and various senior officials had repeatedly attempted to rein in Israel. A December 28 Axios scoop, for instance, describes a “frustrating” phone call between Biden and Netanyahu; per one unnamed US official, “The feeling was that the president is going out on a limb for Bibi every day and when Bibi needs to give something back and take some political risk he is unwilling to do it.” The same basic narrative was playing out almost six months later; a New York Times report in May documents a seemingly never-ending series of White House “frustrations.” The administration clearly wants the public to be aware of Biden’s annoyance with Netanyahu, but for months it failed to hold Netanyahu meaningfully accountable, even as it made some criminally insufficient gestures toward alleviating what the US Agency for International Development warned could be a famine “unprecedented in modern history” and what Cindy McCain, whom Biden appointed as head of the World Food Program, called “a full-blown famine” in northern Gaza in early May.

After seven months of this dance, Biden finally took what seemed to be a significant public step toward holding Netanyahu accountable. He paused a shipment of bombs to Israel in protest of Netanyahu’s decision to proceed with an invasion of Rafah, the enclave in southern Gaza on the Egyptian border where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled from the devastated north. Neither the United States nor its allies in Cairo want to see a Palestinian refugee crisis spill over the heavily fortified border with Egypt, and Netanyahu’s repeated intransigence seemingly pushed Biden over the edge. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” Biden told CNN on May 8, marking his first public acknowledgment of US culpability in Palestinian civilian deaths. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah—they haven’t gone in Rafah yet—if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities—that deal with that problem,” the president added.

But in fact Israel had begun firing on Rafah, and a week later the assault showed no signs of slowing down, as Biden announced another $1 billion arms sale to the Jewish state, confounding many of his supporters. Israel already has sufficient arms to carry out its invasion; Biden’s weapons pause was a warning shot, but he undercut it almost immediately. As long as Palestinians are still being killed, it’s unlikely that he’ll bank any goodwill with the left, but he has managed to alienate centrist and center-right voices that support Israel, as columns by Mark Penn, Bret Stephens, and others show. “We are deeply alarmed by indications of US delays and possible curtailment of weapons for Israel,” tweeted the Anti-Defamation League in the wake of the pause. “This move undermines our ally Israel, fails to put pressure on Hamas and emboldens terror while energizing Hezbollah and Iran, who specialize in toxic antisemitism and rabid anti-Zionism.”

On May 31, Biden declared in his strongest language to date that it was “time for this war to end,” claiming that Israel had fully degraded Hamas’s capacity to carry out future attacks and that Israel itself had advanced an actionable cease-fire plan. The president urged Israel to follow through on that plan and suggested that he would not back an indefinite Israeli occupation of Gaza. Three weeks later, however, the war was still ongoing amid denials from Israeli officials that Israel had in fact proposed the cease-fire deal Biden described; in a daytime raid that successfully rescued four Israeli hostages, Israel killed a reported 274 Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Meanwhile, as Israeli politicians maneuver ahead of possible new elections, the leaders of both parties in Washington are preparing to reward Netanyahu next month with an appearance before a joint session of Congress, where the Israeli prime minister will have the opportunity to pose as a triumphant statesman who defeated Hamas while preserving American military and diplomatic support. In early June, Blinken met with Netanyahu and reportedly pledged to roll back the previous month’s limitations on arms shipments, which Netanyahu argued had strengthened Iran’s strategic position. Just yesterday, on the same day The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration strong-armed Democratic lawmakers into voting for a major arms sale to Israel, despite reservations from some that the weapons would be used against civilians, Netanyahu brazenly attacked Biden and Blinken for supposedly withholding weapons and ammunition.

Clearly, Netanyahu feels free to ignore the White House’s warnings and keep doing what he’s doing, confident that the only consequence he’ll face is negative press. To Democratic voters opposed to the war, Biden not only looks complicit; he looks weak—and no doubt that suits Netanyahu just fine. In backing Israel for months before belatedly and inadequately pressuring it, Biden has managed to please no one. It’s a policy in keeping with his long history of supporting the Jewish state while occasionally criticizing it—and during the more than 50 years Biden has maintained that posture, Israel’s political center has drifted steadily further to the right, settlements have expanded, and the prospect of peace has become ever more elusive.

If Biden were merely a committed hawk, he might have managed this crisis with a discernible strategy—though not necessarily one that would have pleased left-wing critics of Israel. He might, for instance, have provided even more full-throated support to Netanyahu’s government, without the constant professions of “frustration”; alternatively, he might have thrown US support fully behind Israel’s centrist opposition, which is no less committed than Netanyahu to total war with Hamas, and attempted to box Netanyahu out. Or he might have even modeled himself after a traditional realist like James Baker—who was no peacenik but rather a champion of cold-blooded realpolitik on behalf of what he saw as the American national interest—and taken a much tougher line on military aid to Israel, asserting US prerogatives as a global superpower.

But Biden has done none of these things. Since October 7, he has drawn red lines he has no intention of enforcing and allowed Netanyahu to repeatedly humiliate him and get away with it, strengthening the Israeli prime minister both with his domestic constituency and with the American right, which may very well regain control of US foreign policy as a result. Morally, strategically, politically—from any perspective, Biden’s Middle East policy has been a dismal mess. It’s as if he has taken half a century of incoherence on Israel and compressed it into what may turn out to be a single presidential term.