From The Times:
Just weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Mr. Biden had invited a small group of prominent Muslim Americans to the White House to discuss Islamophobia in America. The participants were blunt with him.
They told him that his embrace of Israel after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks was seen by many as permission for Israel’s bombing in Gaza. They said the president’s statement casting doubt on the death toll among Palestinians was insulting. And they said the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Muslim boy outside Chicago was just one devastating result of the dehumanization of their community....
Some younger [WH] staff members, particularly those with Arab or Muslim backgrounds, have said they feel disenchanted with the president they serve....
"There’s this sense that the trauma of one people counts more than the trauma of another," said James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, which has been polling the community for 27 years. "It’s like there are two intolerables, and they’ve decided which one they’re going to accept."
Peter Beinart, the incisive Jewish-American commentator I quoted two days ago, is also displeased with the White House:
"I will vote for Joe Biden... but I’m not going to lie about what he did.... And the truth is that Joe Biden bears a lot of blame for this continuing pattern of defeating ethical Palestinian resistance and making it easier for Hamas to make the argument that the Palestinians get better results when they kill Israelis. And Biden did this by never using America’s leverage with its $3.8 billion in military aid or its protection of Israel in international forums; never using that to stop settlement growth even as it ramped up under this radical government...; and sticking with this kind of corrupt, discredited Mahmoud Abbas by moving towards a Saudi normalization deal that essentially was going to sideline Palestinians except maybe with the barest of fig leaves."
Again, The Times:
Dr. [James] Zogby, who has advised several Democratic campaigns on their Palestinian platforms, including Mr. Biden’s in 2020, said he believed the repercussions of the war would span generations.
Just as the Hamas attacks evoked the vulnerability and trauma of the Holocaust, Dr. Zogby said, Israel’s response evoked what Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe," the 1948 displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the war surrounding the creation of Israel 75 years ago.
"It’s not as if, from the earliest days, that we didn’t know how this was going to end," he said of the war in Gaza [bold added]. "When the dust settles, and the tears dry, what we’re going to have is more dead bodies, more anger and more extremism."
Which is why, to repeat the history of this conflict — its genesis, now inexorably haunting Biden — Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary Robert Lovett intensely opposed President Truman's actions in 1948, instead strongly advocating that the U.S. not choose sides. Let the United Nations handle the Palestinian-Jewish question, they insisted, just as the organization was in the process of doing. It's that, said Marshall and Lovett, or face the wrath of the Arab world — and all that comes with it — for generations to come.
The two presidential advisers were not playing 900-number psychics; they were simply addressing the conflict from a logical, national security point of view. But Truman, as he was wont to do, went with impetuosity.