How The Israel-Gaza War Could Haunt Biden’s Human Rights Legacy

Visiting the State Department 10 days after his inauguration, President Joe Biden said his foreign policy would prioritize an approach to diplomacy defined by: “defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.”

Nearly three years later, Biden’s handling of the biggest international crisis of his presidency — a shock Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and a devastating U.S.-backed Israeli campaign of retaliation since — has shattered any credibility he had in claiming those guiding lights.

Biden’s narrative of championing human rights globally crumbled in striking ways throughout his presidency. But foreign affairs watchers say his actions over the last three months have dealt a knockout blow to that image — and to Biden’s pledge to represent America in the world in a meaningfully more humane way than his predecessor and likely 2024 presidential election rival Donald Trump.

“Biden and his administration told us in their own words … how all this stuff is important, so this is the standard that they created for themselves,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center think tank. “The scale of destruction of Palestinian life, the mass killing, the cruelty that we’re seeing the United States support and stand by is unlike anything we have ever seen, and not like anything we saw during the Trump administration.”

Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, where Hamas is based, has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority women and children, local health officials say, and displaced nearly 2 million people. The Biden administration has rejected nearly all global calls to force Israeli restraint. Officials say they are encouraging Israel to avoid hurting civilians, but repeatedly note Biden is establishing no red lines in support for the U.S. ally that the president has long defended, even despite concerns from other Israel supporters who see its war strategy as self-defeating.

The U.S.’s reluctance to rein in Israel drove United Nations Secretary General António Guterres to invoke a rarely used emergency article of the U.N. charter for the first time in his seven-year tenure, and has sparked huge anxiety among American partner nations and U.S. officials.

The internal effect of Biden’s hardline views on Israel-Palestine was clear to Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official who resigned over the Gaza policy in a development first reported by HuffPost. “I have had my fair share of debates and discussions,” he told HuffPost in his first interview after quitting. “It was clear that there’s no arguing with this one.”

Widespread frustration among rights proponents and international relations experts extends to the rest of the Biden administration, notably controversial advisers like White House Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk.

Yet the president’s specific influence over foreign policy makes the Biden administration’s rights record even more disturbing for many observers.

“No principal in this administration is an equivalent heavyweight when it comes to experience or foreign policy to the president himself,” Munayyer noted. He anticipates political headwinds for Biden in 2024 given his prominence on global affairs and his limited ability to sell himself as different.

“I don’t find it a very convincing argument to tell people your only chance of saving democracy is voting for this one candidate because the alternative is you’re going to get deported,” Munayyer said, referring to the Biden reelection’s campaign’s recent focus on emphasizing Trump’s hardline immigration policies. “That’s not exactly how democracy works, and the fact that it’s come to that speaks volumes about how much things have deteriorated already.”

In his first months in office, rights advocates celebrated as Biden took steps to address a policy that began with President Barack Obama and expanded under Trump, ultimately creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis: U.S. support for one side in the civil war in Yemen.

Biden barred American offensive weapons for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, close U.S. partners in the Middle East that had been bombing Yemen since 2015 and arming fighters there to battle an Iran-backed militia called the Houthis. He appointed a special envoy to try to end the Yemen war. And he moved to make good on his campaign promise of a less pro-Saudi policy than Trump by declassifying a U.S. intelligence determination that de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Yet it soon became clear the old-school president would not truly break with the old U.S. foreign policy habit of treating human rights as a secondary concern. In April 2021, HuffPost broke the news that Biden greenlit the biggest arms deal of the Trump era, a $23 billion package for the UAE that many lawmakers and national security experts saw as destabilizing, given the Emirates’ pattern of fueling conflicts across the Middle East.

Critics of the Saudis soured on Biden by fall 2021, saying his initial response seeking greater Saudi appreciation for universal values was undercut by moves guided by McGurk, his Trump-era adviser, to grow closer to the repressive kingdom. By summer 2022, Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia and met with bin Salman in a move widely interpreted as signaling impunity for the prince’s past and future abuses.

In the interim, Biden sparked worldwide horror by fulfilling his promise to withdraw from Afghanistan through a chaotic August 2021 pull-out that abandoned thousands of Afghans who worked with the U.S. and ushered in mass rights violations, particularly against women and religious minorities, by Taliban militants.

The trauma remains deep years later, current and former officials told HuffPost this spring, as well as the impression that Biden botched it: “There were challenges that were inherited, but I do not believe they couldn’t have been overcome,” noted civilian protection expert Marla Keenan.

The administration continued to try to bolster its pro-human rights credentials. It restored U.S. membership to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which Trump had ended, and launched a new program of Summits for Democracy which, while controversial, spurred some hope among analysts of resisting the trend of resurgent global authoritarianism.

Biden’s team also rolled out new regulations U.S. officials and outside experts described as valuable tools to prevent and seek justice for rights violations internationally. Those include a new Pentagon plan to reduce the civilian toll of American military operations; a new policy governing arms deals that bars weapons transfers if U.S. officials determine it is “more likely than not” those arms will be used to violate international law; and a new system for tracking whether American partners use U.S. equipment to injure or kill civilians. They additionally wound down America’s drone program to some degree.

But Biden continued to be selective in treating concerns about universal values as his priority.

Earlier this year, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a high-level White House visit without securing any serious commitment by India — the world’s largest country — to address its worsening repression of its minority communities, primarily Muslims, and of anti-Modi voices. “Modi’s red-carpet treatment was a significant endorsement of his governance, and one few world leaders have received,” wrote Knox Thames, a senior State Department official under both Biden and Trump. “Modi’s damaging policies should not lead to self-censorship.”

And since the Israel-Hamas war began, the administration’s refusal to challenge Israeli actions widely seen as war crimes — from collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population to attacks on civilians — has made it impossible for most observers to take Biden seriously on human rights.

Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director for the rights group CIVIC, reflected on the contrast in a Dec. 21 statement reacting to the Defense Department’s announcement of a policy to shield civilians.

“For this policy to be meaningful, it must be applied consistently. The department’s response to catastrophic civilian harm and destruction in Gaza, caused by Israeli operations directly supported by U.S. assistance, has failed to live up to and actively undermined U.S. civilian protection efforts like this policy,” Shiel said. “A true commitment to protecting civilians must go beyond rhetoric and be backed by action and leverage — including the political will to suspend military aid that is directly contributing to the deaths of thousands of civilians.”

The same day, The New York Times reported that Biden was lifting his ban on offensive weapons for the Saudis — a shift HuffPost first reported as under consideration despite deep wariness about it among U.S. national security officials.

Israel’s U.S.-backed operation in Gaza has created a crisis that United Nations officials and humanitarian experts call unprecedented and horrifying.

Amid Biden’s refusal to seriously limit American support for the campaign and attempts to shield the U.S. ally from global accountability for actions from killing journalists and destroying tens of thousands of homes to repeatedly striking medical facilities, the Israeli offensive has continued to expand.

U.S. officials and outside analysts say the upshot is deep unnecessary civilian suffering and an erosion of any American ability to promote human rights globally, from Europe to Asia.

Tobita Chow, the founding director of the advocacy group Justice Is Global, noted the hollowness of American condemnations of China’s deepening crackdown in Hong Kong.

“Gestures like this might be more effective coming from a government that was not busy sacrificing its international legitimacy along with the lives of the people of Gaza,” Chow wrote on X in response to a recent statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Antonio De Loera-Brust, a former aide to Blinken, has warned against the administration’s approach to seeking a new aid package for Israel and Ukraine, which involves accepting reduced U.S. protections for migrants. “U.S. support for Ukraine must be attentive to the perspectives and interests of the Global South, especially given the wedge the conflict in Gaza is already creating between the United States and nations in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The negative optics of U.S. aid to Ukraine (and Israel) coming at the expense of Latin America would be unavoidable,” he wrote in The Washington Post.

And within the administration, officials say the president’s treatment of Israel policy conflicts with his claims of improving American foreign policy by boosting diversity among national security personnel.

“One reason to want a diverse staff is to have a variety of inputs into your decision-making, not just to check a box on a little quota sheet,” a person in the administration told HuffPost in October. “The inner, inner circle on [Gaza] is not at all diverse. Does that completely explain the monstrous disregard for innocent Palestinian lives? No, but it’s hard to think these things are entirely disconnected.”

A sliver of faith in Biden persists among human rights advocates going into 2024, but it could quickly dissipate.

“From India, to Ethiopia, to Saudi Arabia, and beyond, the administration has appeared to put partnerships over human rights,” said Amanda Klasing, the national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA. “It is also hard to imagine the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza will not define [Biden’s] legacy, without a significant shift in policy.”

“In 2024, we hope to see actions that match the administration’s rhetorical commitment to human rights,” Klasing told HuffPost.