U.S. President Biden vs. Israel: Why the Israeli War is Going Along With Israel, and Why Israel Should Stay Afloat

In both instances, the influence of Mr. Biden over how his allies prosecute those wars seems much less than expected due to his central role as the supplier of arms and intelligence. But because the United States is so tied to both struggles, as Israel’s most powerful ally and Ukraine’s best hope of remaining a free and independent nation, the president’s legacy is tied to how those countries act, and how the wars end.

The Biden administration has been lobbying Netanyahu to allow humanitarian pauses in the bombing of Gaza in order to get more American security assistance to Israel.

It has not. In a phone call on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu rejected Mr. Biden’s push for more efforts to avoid civilian casualties. And he has pushed ahead with what he has called “mighty vengeance” for the Oct. 7 attacks, using huge bombs to collapse Hamas’s network of tunnels, even if they also collapse whole neighborhoods in Gaza.

After a long period of avoiding the word stalemate, the most senior military commander in the country said it last week. A number of Mr. Biden’s aides agree that the battle between Russia and Ukrainians is not moving in a significant way.

They fear that General Zaluzhny will make it harder to get Republicans to vote for aggressive funding for the war because of his candor.

“There is a long history of U.S. presidents realizing they don’t have as much leverage over Israel as they thought,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat and former Marine who served four tours in Iraq. And he said the same applies to Ukraine, “where this is first and foremost their fight, even if we have huge stakes in the outcome.”

History, geography and American national interests separate these two radically different conflicts, though it was Mr. Biden himself who joined them in a speech to the nation two weeks ago after returning from a visit to Israel, where he mourned the loss of 1,400 people in the Oct. 7 attacks and vowed to join in the dismantling of Hamas.

He said that both Hamas and Putin wanted to destroy a neighboring democracy.

For 20 months, I have been churning out essays on why the world should stay focused on Ukraine. I have written them in a bomb shelter in Lviv, in a train packed with refugees in Poland, in a bathroom during an air raid in Kyiv and on the back seat of a car returning from near-frontline towns. Now, from the comfort of a London library, I try once again to persuade readers that they should not look away from my homeland’s struggle for survival, even as another part of the world is erupting in unspeakable violence.