It’s not easy to get foreign policy right. The world’s a very messy place, after all. And the Israel-Palestine quarrel’s among the most intractable disputes on the geopolitical Risk board. It’s also a religiopolitical dispute, which makes it all but impossible to adjudicate. Religious disputes are, by definition, irrational.

Joe Biden’s hardly the first person to mismanage Israel-Palestine tensions and he won’t be the last. This conflict vexed two generations of US diplomats, going on three. Biden’s been around for every attempt to resolve it and the war’s a testament to the abject failure of those efforts.

That’s not to suggest Biden’s somehow responsible for past failures. It’s just to say he knows the history. Experience — deep experience and intimate familiarity with the stakes — should count for something when it comes to crisis management. Here, it hasn’t.

The crux of the problem for Biden in an election year (to employ a very narrow lens) is the extent to which Benjamin Netanyahu’s belligerence is contributing to the perception of Biden as a doddering pushover. He’s not that. But in trying to balance competing priorities around the war, Biden’s pleasing no one by trying to appease everyone.

Republicans feign indignation at the prospect of limits and strings (any limits and strings) on weapons shipments to Israel. The circumstances make this the fattest of fat pitches, particularly when you’re preaching to the converted which Republicans almost always are: “Netanyahu’s at war with Iran-backed terrorists who systematically raped Israeli women while murdering 1,200 innocents in an attack worse than 9/11 on a per capita basis. And Biden wants to limit weapons shipments?!”

Moderate Democrats see a righteous cause gone awry, and the savvy among them understand the domestic political dynamics: Netanyahu’s exploiting the war to hold onto power. Israel’s democracy was backsliding (badly) prior to the October 7 attacks, and the Israeli electorate had seen enough. If you’re an autocrat whose grip on power’s becoming tenuous, an existential war can be a godsend. Young, progressive Democrats see a massacre: “Maybe we’re a little bereft in the context department, and no, we’re not old enough to understand all the complexities, but how much context do we really need here?!”

Again, Biden’s trying to appease everyone, and it isn’t possible. Particularly given that Republicans, and the lost souls inclined to vote for them, don’t actually want to be appeased.

Both sides insist Biden’s exhibiting weakness. Bowing to some kind of pressure. In reality, he’s an avowedly pro-Israel US president who (badly) wants to give the Israeli government the benefit of the doubt but can’t because for every inch he gives, Netanyahu takes a mile. Where that means the IDF kills another thousand Gazan civilians.

At this point, the US is almost completely isolated internationally in resisting calls for the imposition of a ceasefire in Gaza. As long as the US resists those calls, Israel has carte blanche. Up to and until Biden gives Netanyahu an ultimatum, the IDF can carry on killing in the name of fighting terror. That’s a problem. It’s undermining America’s pretensions to the moral high ground in Ukraine and it’s putting US allies in an awful spot: Be a party to a massacre or risk a rift with The White House.

Israel claims the October 7 attack should be viewed in a wider context. That it was another manifestation of a new Cold War. That Hamas is just an extension of Iran, and Iran’s part of an evil axis threatening to upend global stability and replace the democratic world order with a tyrannical network of autocrats.

That narrative’s not false. But it’s hopelessly self-serving coming as it does from a far-right Israeli government in which extremists who openly traffic in poisonous rhetoric are allowed to hold key posts because Netanyahu completely alienated everyone to his political left.

Ukraine’s (admittedly imperfect) democracy is facing an existential threat. Vladimir Putin wants to seize Kyiv, install (another) puppet government and call the country his. Taiwan’s (well-functioning) democracy is likewise staring down a credible threat to its right of self-governance. Neither Ukraine nor Taiwan has the capacity to successfully defend itself in an all-out, prolonged war with their would-be rulers in Moscow and Beijing.

With apologies (because this’ll rankle some readers), Hamas doesn’t represent an existential threat to Israel. Nor Iran. For all the missiles and bluster, the IRGC would be nearly defenseless in a real war with the IDF, to say nothing of a war with the US. Hamas doesn’t have an army. They have fighters. Had fighters. They had fighters. Past tense.

To be sure: There’s a credible threat to Israel’s security. But that’s hardly new. There’s no credible threat to Israel’s existence. Israel, unlike Ukraine and Taiwan, has the capacity not just to successfully defend itself, but to completely annihilate its adversaries, both with conventional weapons and, if necessary, with nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu — and, it really needs to be said, Israel in general — is exploiting the “new Cold War” narrative just as he’s exploiting the historical injustices foisted on the Jewish people to excuse and justify an extermination campaign in Gaza.”Wake up!” Israel exhorts its allies in Washington. “This is but one piece of a bigger puzzle!” “Never again!” Israel shouts, to the world. “You might’ve forgotten the Holocaust, but we surely didn’t. Never again will we go quietly to the slaughter. Never again will we die helpless, on our knees.”

There’s surely some truth to the narrative that says the October 7 Hamas attack was part and parcel of a broader effort to test the US by attacking the vulnerable fringes of its global influence sphere (Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel). And whenever the Jewish people are targeted as a tribe, references to pogroms are unavoidable. But make no mistake: Israel’s right-wing government sees an opportunity in this chaos. A generational chance to leverage a crisis in pursuit of their own ethnonational cause. That effort’s now manifesting as genocide in Gaza, plain and simple. History will remember it as such. And history will remember the US as complicit unless Biden pulls the plug. That’s more important than political expediency.

While speaking to reporters in the wake of what Netanyahu conceded was a “tragic mishap” in the Rafah neighborhood of Tal as Sultan, where 45 Gazan civilians were killed when an Israeli airstrike sparked a fire at a nearby tent encampment, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said he had “no policy changes to speak to as a result of [the] strike.” The Biden administration, Kirby said, hopes Israel will learn from the tragedy.

According to an analysis conducted by The New York Times, the bombs Israeli used in the strike were made in the US. “Munition debris… was remnants from a GBU-39,” the Times reported, adding that US officials “have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb” because it “can reduce civilian casualties.” Tell that to the dead.

Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesman the world hears from virtually every day, said the fire which raged through the tent encampment may prove there were weapons stored in the two sheds Israel targeted in the attack. Those sheds were located inside a camp for the internally displaced, and rows of adjacent tents were plainly visible. “Our munition alone could not have ignited a fire of this size,” Hagari insisted, adding that the IDF’s investigation was ongoing.

Kamala Harris was more direct than her boss when asked about the incident. “The word ‘tragic’ doesn’t even begin to describe” it, she said Tuesday.

Videos of the carnage continued to circulate mid-week, fueling protests around the world. The Times recounted the footage: “People scream as they pull charred bodies from rubble while flames rage behind them. One man holds up the body of a headless child.”