No, Israel Is Not Ukraine
Biden has framed US support for Israel and Ukraine as part of a singular doctrine — but the wars they are waging are radically different, and must be addressed separately
Selling American investment in overseas conflicts has gotten harder with each year since the Iraq War. There have been the occasional upswings, but in each case the public’s attention span has gradually waned, swinging back to the domestic issues that ultimately decide elections.
This has especially been the case for Congressional Republicans, who have increasingly grown weary of the Biden administration’s aid packages for Ukraine since last year. With the advent of an unprecedented and horrific attack on Israel by Hamas and the start of a new, bloody Israeli assault on Gaza this month, the Biden administration saw an opportunity to shore up support for its Ukraine policy by tying it to longtime American support for Israel.
“The assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine,” Joe Biden said in a televised statement last week.
Crucially, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed with him, saying he saw the two conflicts as “interconnected” and that he supported the president’s efforts to tie military aid to Ukraine and Israel together as Republicans would be unlikely to support additional assistance for Kyiv otherwise.
The White House announced its new aid package for Ukraine this week regardless of Republican concerns. Yet this bundling effort by the Biden administration plays into a deeper attempt by the president to craft a united Biden doctrine — which so far seems to revolve around a vague commitment to strengthening democracies in the face of growing authoritarian aggression worldwide. Biden has used the idea that Israel is a democracy facing threats from an extremist group, Hamas, to draw a through-line connecting Israel’s war in Gaza to Ukraine’s defense in the face of Russia’s brutal invasion.
But other than as a rhetorical device, this doesn’t make any practical sense, and dangerously oversimplifies both conflicts without taking into account the power dynamics at play that make them distinct. The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Israel-Hamas War require radically different considerations, and grouping them under the same umbrella will doom both to tired, catch-all Beltway solutions that lack critical nuance. Without decisive, tailor-made policy actions that treat the two conflicts as highly specific regional problems, the US risks letting powerful, locally-informed resolutions slip away in the pursuit of a ready-made and marketable policy agenda.
At present, America’s role in the conflict has largely consisted of saber-rattling in the Mediterranean, half-heartedly tempering the Israeli government’s impulses, and defending its own military infrastructure in Iraq and Syria by engaging in tit-for-tat strikes against IRGC bases in eastern Syria. The administration has offered near-unequivocal support for Israel’s counter-attack regardless of its civilian toll, and threatened that the US would get involved directly in the case of a wider regional confrontation. Such a posture is arguably in keeping with Biden’s doctrine — but by bolstering Israel’s campaign as a struggle akin to Ukraine’s and by failing to engage with regional leaders (besides finger wagging at Qatar), the administration has, unsurprisingly, failed to play any kind of constructive role in lowering the temperature in the region at such a critical and volatile moment.
Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th, which resulted in over 1,000 Israeli civilian casualties and included widespread torture and mutilation of victims, matched the worst Russian atrocities in Ukraine — at least in nature if not in scope. Yet to reduce either conflict to a mere battle between “civilization and barbarism,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed Israel’s war against Hamas, is reductive and unhelpful, and fails to get at the highly divergent roots of these conflicts which necessarily must be understood to reach an eventual conclusion to the violence.
Using indiscriminate brutality in Israel and Ukraine as the basis for a unified policy also fails to account for the fact that while the Russo-Ukrainian War is a more traditional state-against-state conflict, the Israel-Hamas War looks a lot more like the type of asymmetrical conflict that has become the norm throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. America’s wars against the Taliban and against insurgents in Iraq and Syria come to mind, in which a traditional military is not only fighting against an irregular non-state actor, but must also contend with political realities on the ground that cannot be resolved by merely bombing enemy combatants out of existence at enormous human cost.
For Ukraine, victory requires pushing occupying Russian forces out of internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, which requires significant western, and especially American, support. This goal does carry with it the risk of the war escalating into a great power conflict — but while tactically quite difficult, strategically, Ukraine and the west’s war aims are quite simple. While Israel’s stated objective in Gaza is to wipe out Hamas militarily, not only is this much easier said than done, but carries with it immense hazards for both Palestinian civilians and the security of the region at large, as the world has so viscerally witnessed over the last two weeks. All this makes Israel’s goal far from a simple endeavor, and is made all the more difficult given the complex nature of asymmetrical wars in general.
Although Ukraine is far from a perfect democracy, its defense effort is truly an existential one, and by supporting it militarily the US understands that it is helping to preserve a state — and an ethno-cultural identity — from eradication. Despite Hamas’s genocidal intent and the astounding level of violence that it inflicted upon regular Israelis, at present the group does not represent a credible threat to Israel’s existence that would require the US to save it from destruction. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is one of the most advanced and capable militaries on earth, and the holes that Hamas revealed within Israel’s defense framework are at worst partial ones, and are not outside the IDF’s ability to repair. In addition, most glaringly, Israel has itself been an occupying state for decades, upholding a military regime in the West Bank since 1967 and a blockade in Gaza since 2007, making comparisons between its military position and Ukraine’s even more nonsensical. The IDF has been accused of war crimes by the international community not only in its wars with the Palestinians, but also during its decades-long occupation of southern Lebanon, and its current attack on Gaza has already produced thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties.
Of course, unfortunately for Israelis, Palestinians, the US, and much of the Middle East, Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response to it have dramatically altered the calculus of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The two-state solution has been truly dead and buried, old rules have been tossed out the window, and the future of Gaza and perhaps much of the Levant remains frighteningly unknown.
Biden’s rhetorical push on aid to Israel and Ukraine demonstrates why an open-ended foreign policy doctrine is doomed to fail, especially within a multi-polar world where a litany of issues across the globe are driving conflict. In such a state of affairs, the Biden administration must get creative and leave its Ukraine policy in Europe where it belongs, instead of dragging it into the Middle East in the absence of more original ideas.