Alan Zendell, October 19, 2023

Joe Biden isn’t the first American president to travel to a war zone, but his October 18th trip to Israel was different. Visiting an active war zone is precarious for a U. S. president, because POTUS always wears a bulls-eye on their back, particularly when Islamic jihadists are involved. Under generally accepted rules of war, national leaders do not target each other, but when the enemy is a loosely controlled band of terrorists who believe in suicide attacks, the rules don’t apply.

Presidents Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all visited American troops in the field, and Richard Nixon traveled and met with the president of South Vietnam in Saigon. Those trips weren’t entirely without risk, but they were to highly secure areas and carefully coordinated with allies on the ground. While Bush never seemed daunted by his six trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, including his famous landing on an American aircraft carrier, the trips he, Nixon, and Obama made to those countries all took place in “safe” areas. And Trump’s two trips were holiday photo ops in the safest possible locations.

Some presidential trips required a higher level of courage. Johnson’s visits to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, were huge political risks, as they were made amid angry opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Abraham Lincoln visited the battlefield just outside Washington when it was attacked by Confederates in 1864, and actually came under fire, standing only a few feet from an army surgeon who was shot.

Biden’s trip to the Middle East wasn’t his first to an active war zone. Last February, he visited Ukraine on the anniverary of Russia’s invasion amid erriatic and unpredictable missile attacks. That trip and the one this week involved risks to his person, political future, and legacy. He did exactly what we expect an American president to do when the world is at risk of slipping into all-out war.

Biden had two principal goals – to assure Israel and the world that while everyone had looked away during the Nazis’ attempt at genocide of the Jewish people, America would never let that happen. At the same time, amid terrorist lies attempting to portray the Israeli military as indiscriminately killing civilians, he had to convince both allies and potential adversaries that he valued the lives of two million innocent Palestinians as highly as those of Israelis. No other world leader has either Biden’s stature or his ability to back up assurances and threats.

When an Islamic jihad rocket aimed at Israel accidentally killed hundreds of civilians at Gaza’s largest hospital, and Hamas blamed Israel, Arab leaders in Jordan, Egypt, and the West Bank whom Biden planned to visit canceled their meetings while he was already in the air on his way to Tel-Aviv to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu. Media pundits predicted his trip would be a humiliating failure that right-wing media would trumpet into the 2024 election. But Biden was undeterred as he landed in Tel-Aviv with terrorist rockets overhead and air raid sirens blasting.

Once on the ground, Biden showed why he is so well respected by foreign leaders. No one else could have pulled off what Biden did in Israel. In front of live television cameras, he embraced Netenyahu, who for the past seven years has been a cheerleader for Donald Trump, There wasn’t even a hairline crack in American-Israeli solidarity as Biden promised Israel whatever support it needed to eradicate Hamas and protect its people in sincere, heartfelt terms. Then, he masterfully segued into an unsubtle warning to Israel not to give in to the justified rage it feels after a thousand of its people were massacred by Hamas. He made it clear to Netenyahu and the world that the plight of innocent Palestinians ranked as high in importance as protecting Israel. He also endorsed a “two state solution” for Palestine – a clear signal that he would not let Hamas disrupt the normalization negotiations he had initiated between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Finally, with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on the ground in Cairo, Biden convinced Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to begin delivering humanitarian aid to a million Gazans who had fled leave Gaza City for Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. The importance of that accomplishment cannot be overstated. If Israel and the United States are viewed as uncaring of the plight of innocent Palestinians, Israel’s war on Hamas will end in disaster, for Israel, its neighbors, and the world.

If ever a president looked competent, in control, and presidential, Joe Biden was all of those things this week. It’s time his self-serving political enemies recognized that a strong Biden is vital for America at times like this and behave like the loyal opposition they purport to be. Beyond that, Biden’s success underlines the danger of the House of Representatives being led by a shameless Trump clone like Jim Jordan at a time when we need unity more than ever.