For the Biden Campaign, Gaza Is a PR Annoyance to Manage, Not a Genocide to End

Israeli propaganda is full-blown alternate reality. Biden White House propaganda is something much more sinister.

If you will indulge me, allow me a simple syllogism: US diplomatic and military support is essential for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and US liberal support is essential for this US support, doubly so because the President is currently a Democrat. Therefore, US liberal support is essential to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Assuming both of these premises to be true, it follows that the broad sentiment of American liberals isn’t just important, but potentially dispositive.

With this simple syllogism in mind, let’s examine how this dynamic has played out over the past five months.

The Biden Administration is, by all available metrics, all in on Israel’s “war” on Gaza. This much is clear. They may have process critiques, and may put up some barriers to Israel expressly driving the population of Gaza into Egypt, but they’re 95 percent committed and there’s no evidence this will change. Top US government officials have repeated over and over again that they share Israel’s nominal goal of “eliminating Hamas,” despite Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a closed door meeting acknowledging this is impossible. But never mind, because this goal, as I said, is nominal. The real objective—as has been clear for months—is, at best, to “thin out” the population of Gaza and administer Bronze-age collective punishment, and, at worst, to carry out full-blown genocide marked by a clear-as-day ethnic cleansing campaign. By holding on to the fantasy of “removing Hamas from power,” either of these scenarios remains in play. And the Biden administration has made it clear they will hold onto this fictitious objective indefinitely, with White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby recently telling The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, “We still don’t support a general ceasefire that would leave Hamas in charge.”

The White House also recognizes, however, that support among liberals is eroding more and more every day, and that it’s clear Biden’s quadrupling down on Israel’s genocide is a massive political liability among demographics key to Biden’s 2020 victory: namely black voters, young voters, and Arab and Muslim voters. Thus, Team Biden has a pretty standard P.R. problem on their hands: They’re not going to change their support for genocide, but they need to chip away at the growing discontent and cynicism among their base. Thus, at least in the United States, the US-Israeli destruction of Gaza is fundamentally a P.R. war. 

As a professional media critic I am, of course, incentivized to say everything is a P.R. war. But this conflict is different from others in that virtually every conspicuous public action and public use of language the US engages in is motivated entirely by duping conflicted liberals. It’s not that the White House and partisan media is simply focusing on P.R. as a subset of larger policy aims or messaging narrative—the P.R. has become the policy aim. The P.R. is everything. The hollowed out men and women milling about the corridors of the White House and State Department no longer even maintain the pretense of a broader moral narrative, or a greater good. Perception has become the North Star, indeed the only star left in the sky. Nihilism reigns as never before. From the White House press room to USAID statements to partisan media organs to bought-and-paid-for TikTok influencers,  every decision over the past few months—and, indeed, likely the next few months—is entirely about thinking of the headline, or the CNN chyron, and reverse-engineering messaging around that. 

The most recent and nakedly cynical example, as I detailed in The Nation yesterday, is the White House’s rhetorical shift in nominally supporting a “ceasefire” over the past couple of weeks. The Biden administration assumed, correctly it turns out, that most people will be confused and see this as a concession or a “step in the right direction,” rather than what it: a co-option of the term. So the White House went from banning low-level staff  from using the c-word to embracing it, hoping no one would notice that their definition of a “ceasefire” was just a temporary pause for hostage exchanges followed by an explicit endorsement of Israel continuing to bomb and siege Gaza indefinitely. This, as I laid out, was a largely successful gambit—in that many otherwise smart people fell for it, and it generated dozens of favorable headlines. 

The White House has previously been open about the P.R. value of a pause (d/b/a “ceasefire”), framing it as something that will get Western liberals off Israel’s back for a while, cool down tempers, and permit the IDF to go about its business at a later date. When Blinken was pushing Israel to agree to the first pause back in November, he framed it in these terms, according to Axios. “Blinken tells Israelis humanitarian pause will buy Israel time for Gaza operation,” read the headline. The article would go on to explain, “Because of the pressure the US is facing, a humanitarian pause will help Israel buy more time for its ground operation, the US and Israeli officials said.” The piece continued, “Blinken's message, according to one US and two Israeli officials, was: ’We don't want to stop you, but help us help you get more time.’”

The same dynamic exists with the latest push for a pause. It is only understood in terms of P.R. It is not, as some have implied, a short-term ceasefire so the White House can work toward a longer-term ceasefire. As Kirby and other administration officials have made crystal clear, it is only for hostage exchanges and some aid, then it’s back to the ethnic cleansing campaign, the completion of which they support under the thin pretext of “eliminating Hamas.”

Another recent example, and one so half-assed and craven it seemed to genuinely anger otherwise sober humanitarian experts, was the Biden White House boldly announcing it would air drop food into Gaza to circumvent a siege and blockade that it, itself, was supporting and arming. And, once again, the Biden campaign got the favorable headlines it sought from a loyal media. “US military planes have dropped about 38,000 meals into Gaza in the first round of emergency humanitarian aid authorized by President Biden,” the AP breathlessly announced. “Biden announces US plan to airdrop aid to Gaza,” the BBC echoed without any context or caveats. “Biden is expected to announce that the US will airdrop humanitarian aid and supplies into Gaza,” CNN proclaimed. 

Again, the headlines and chyrons are the point. 

That the plan was inadequate to the point of insulting was besides the point. That the US was doing nothing to compel Israel to allow in backed-up aid trucks at the Egypt border is beside the point. That the move was roundly criticized as a trivial P.R. stunt by former USAID director to the West Bank Dave Harden, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and OxFam is beside the point. The point is to make half-paying-attention, low-information liberals think, “Golly, maybe Biden is trying to help Palestinians.” When Russia announced weeks after their invasion of Ukraine they were providing “nearly 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Ukraine,” this was not something reported by any Western media outlets because they, correctly, would have viewed it as a shoddy P.R. move. No such skepticism is afforded the US with respect to Gaza: The White House and Pentagon are instead treated as third-party human rights organizations without any role in creating the suffering they claim to be relieving. 

Just the same, for months, the public has been fed a non-stop torrent of stories about alleged “increased frustration” or “flaring tensions” between Biden and Netanyahu. As I, and others, have documented, this a White House-curated narrative for which we have no evidence. It’s simply a vibe, a “break” in rhetoric and leaks only. There have been no material changes in US support of Israel’s Gaza campaign, yet we are told the White House has expressed “concerns” over Gaza civilian deaths being “too high” on October 11, October 15, October 29, October 31, November 3, November 10, November 29, December 7, December 11, December 12, December 18, December 23, December 31, January 7, January 9, January 11, January 19, January 26, February 4, February 7, February 29, and March 4. Again, the point is the headlines, which, as always, the media dutifully provides.

Another headline-grabbing P.R. move is the fantastical “Day After” reporting, where Serious Reporters act as if high-ranking US diplomats are wheeling and dealing with “Arab leaders” over what a “post-war” Gaza would look like, typically dressed up with boilerplate Two State Solution pablum. The primary problem with this narrative, aside from the fact that Israel repeatedly and explicitly rejects a Palestinian state and has insisted it will militarily occupy Gaza indefinitely, is that it simply asserts the nominal aim of the war, “defeating Hamas,” as not only possible—but somehow just around the corner. Again, behind closed doors Blinken is saying something entirely different. But “Day After” reporting is useful P.R. because it not only reinforces the myth that a hybrid guerrilla-conventional force like Hamas is about to be easily defeated any day now, but that the US is using said defeat as a springboard to a major humanitarian win of a Palestinian state. After all, our diplomats can’t just look like they’re strong-arming and extorting Arab leaders to stay on the sidelines while Palestinian genocide is unfolding. They have to look busy doing something that’s ostensibly not evil. One problem with this narrative is, again, Israel is run by full-blown fascists uninterested in liberal Western P.R., so they reject all of these liberal goals out of hand. But since “Day After” cosplay is mostly for Western media consumption and positive headlines and chyrons, it remains a staple of the “confusing American liberals” genre or P.R.   

Israel, for its part, plays the Bad Cop to perfection—a role essential to the P.R. war. It’s not enough to simply fake like the US is actually a passive observer humanitarian organization—Israel has to smear Palestinians as a people. It has to be extremely racist and play to lizard brain War on Terror tropes. The Biden administration can’t play this unseemly role, but it can help boost it and legitimize it when Israel does. From the al-Ahli Hospital bombing to the “Hamas command and control center” under al-Shifa Hospital to UNRWA working with Hamas to Hamas stealing humanitarian aid, the Israeli regime spouts off lie after lie after lie, knowing that by the time they’re debunked in Western media—as they always are—it will be too late ,and the damage to public perception will be done. Sometimes the Biden administration expressly goes along with the outrageous lie, sometimes they seem skeptical and don’t want to completely piss away whatever is left of their credibility. But, as they are still shipping the munitions ripping apart children, they endorse in deed, if not words. One can set their watch to the tedious Good Cop/Bad Cop routine. Israel says and does the most outrageously violent thing imaginable, then the US looks sad about it, continues to ship them weapons and props up some part of the lie, walks back another part and remains silent on the most absurd narrative threads. Ultimately, though, they work to promote the same anti-Palestinian conspiracy theories—because, again, feigning Deep Humanitarian Concern isn’t enough to win over fence-sitting liberals. One must remind them that “hey, these are all a bunch of lying terrorists” as well.  

And this is how the game is played. The Biden camp is betting big that they don’t need to meaningfully change course, only come up with more clever messaging and simply hope Israel keeps its genocide at a lower media temperature, relying on less photogenic and viscerally revolting means of death like bombings, and on more subtle means like such malnutrition and disease. They assume, as well, that as the election grows nearer, outraged liberals, haunted by the specter of a second Trump term, will eventually fall in line. Throw in months of misleading headlines generated by cheap P.R. stunts, and they believe that it will be just enough to maintain their lockstep support for the destruction of Gaza without losing too many voters over it. The grim reality is that, given how compliant the media has acted thus far, this gambit very well may work.