How the October 7 attacks became a turning point for US politics

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — After rushing to comfort Israel as it grieved the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, President Joe Biden last year pledged America would stand with the country in its dark days and the good ones he insisted would come.

At the time, no one knew the international and domestic political consequences of his promise. An ensuing war has proved the existential role the US plays in Israel’s survival but also severely strained the alliance. It has also exposed and widened some of America’s most profound political divides ahead of an already tumultuous election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump next month.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, which killed 1,200 people, did not just transform the Middle East’s strategic balance as Israel confronted Hamas, then Hezbollah, and traded fire with their sponsor, its archenemy, Iran. Like the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Hamas horror set off a chain of events that affected countless lives, unleashing political disturbances thousands of miles away.

Militarily, the United States and its allies have twice staged unprecedented operations to protect Israel from a barrage of missiles and drones from Iran. The US has also repeatedly bombed Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen who have launched attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea in the wake of October 7. Amid fears in Washington of a full-on Middle East war, the vulnerability of US troops in the region was tragically driven home in January when three US service personnel were killed in an attack on a base in Jordan.

At home, the fallout of the Hamas attacks has coincided with the toxic politics of a presidential election year. Campus protests underscored the splits in the Democratic Party, which soon saw unprecedented political upheaval with Biden abandoning his reelection bid and backing Harris just months before the election. In the new race between Harris and Trump, events in the Middle East continue to set off reverberations that could influence the outcome of the election. A horrifying wave of antisemitism, meanwhile, has left many Jews wondering whether they are safe in America.

A huge challenge to US foreign policy

Israel’s onslaught on Hamas in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians, may have finally shattered US hopes of a two-state solution. And it’s turned into the greatest foreign crisis of the Biden administration at a time when the US-led global system is splintering under challenges from Russia and rising China.

Israel’s escalation of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon threatens to embroil Washington and spark a direct clash with Iran, which has so far been avoided in a near half-century of antagonism since the Islamic revolution.

Biden has been a staunch supporter of Israel for decades, but his record did not prevent growing suspicion and disagreements with the most right-wing Israeli government in history. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly spurned the US president’s attempt to mitigate the civilian cost of the war in Gaza and has disregarded Washington’s priorities when US and Israeli interests diverged. As a result, the Biden administration has suffered a significant erosion of its authority on the international stage and its foreign policy priorities have been threatened.

Months of US shuttle diplomacy involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director William Burns and other senior officials has yielded only limited progress in freeing hostages in Gaza. And a deal that would forge a ceasefire with Hamas seems more distant than ever. Often, it’s appeared that the US wanted an agreement far more than Netanyahu or Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who embedded Hamas forces in civilian areas, adding to the war’s carnage.

Biden’s personal credibility has also been damaged by the defiance of Netanyahu, who has not hesitated to intervene in US domestic politics amid an apparent preference for Republicans lined up behind Trump.

Weeks after the October 7 attacks, it seemed Netanyahu was headed for political oblivion, with his image as Israel’s ultimate protector destroyed by the darkest day in the country’s history. But his tenacious endurance means it’s now almost certain he will outlast Biden, who leaves office in January. The widening war that the president will bequeath to either Trump or Harris will be a blot on the legacy of a statesman who regarded himself as a foreign policy expert.

Deep domestic political aftershocks

The Hamas terror attacks – and Israel’s response – have laid bare and widened splits in American society and domestic politics.

Washington has been involved in mediating Middle East peace for several generations. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never become such a treacherous domestic political issue as it did after October 7.

Footage of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas in Gaza and harrowing scenes of Palestinian children and civilians killed caused an anti-Israel backlash on the left that created perilous political pressure for Biden and then Harris.

Fury among progressives at Israel and the Biden administration’s failure to rein in Netanyahu divided the Democratic coalition. Thousands of Arab American voters and others refused to support Biden in the primaries, and the prospect of them sitting out next month’s election or voting third party, especially in a critical swing state like Michigan, could doom Harris’ White House hopes. While he was still running for president, Biden was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Palestinian protests and confronted by banners that read, “Genocide Joe,” referring to his failure to do more to spare Palestinian civilians.

Harris is now struggling to perform the same treacherous balancing act that long thwarted Biden. She must prioritize US foreign policy priorities, a political imperative to stand with Israel, and seek to temper the unrest inside the Democratic Party over the war. In a sign of still-deep concern over the political blowback, Harris last week traveled to Michigan to meet Arab American leaders.

But her struggle was evident in advance excerpts of an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” due to air Monday. “The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done, which would release the hostages and create a ceasefire,” Harris said.

“And we’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders,” she added.

She insisted that, contrary to appearances, Washington had significantly influenced Netanyahu’s strategy. “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” she said.

Trump and Netanyahu’s tacit alliance

Netanyahu has long been a consummate player in American politics, dating all the way back to the Clinton administration in the 1990s. But his canny interventions designed to keep himself in power have reached new levels in the last year. He has found common interest with Republicans who sought to use the war to damage Biden as the election loomed. In July, addressed the US Congress during a trip that was largely initiated by the GOP and that infuriated many Democrats.

Netanyahu appears to be banking on Trump’s return to office. The former president largely accommodated the Israeli leader’s hawkish policies during his first term, and he has used the war after October 7 to embroider his own narrative that the world is spinning toward World War III on Democrats’ watch.

The US political split over Israel’s intentions intensified over the weekend, after Biden said that Israel shouldn’t respond to Iranian ballistic missile attacks over the last week by striking at Iranian nuclear facilities. Many of Netanyahu’s supporters in the US believe that after decapitating top leaders of Hezbollah and apparently degrading the military capacities of the Lebanon-based Iranian-backed group, the time will never be better for Israel to try to interrupt Tehran’s nuclear program, which the US says may be only weeks short of being able to make a bomb.

But there are questions about how far Israel could set back the program given that the facilities are dispersed and deep underground. Many experts also fear that such an attack could unleash an apocalyptic war that drags in the United States.

Trump, seeking to portray Biden and Harris as weak, seems to be goading Netanyahu to go for it. “What do you think about Iran?” Trump asked an audience at a town hall in the battleground state of North Carolina on Friday. “Would you hit Iran? And (Biden) goes: ‘As long as they don’t hit the nuclear stuff.’ That’s the thing you want to hit, right? I said, I think he got that one wrong. Isn’t that the one you’re supposed to hit?”

Antisemitism traumatizes American Jews

Reverberations in the United States from the October 7 attacks cut far deeper than their impact on the presidential election. They also had a traumatic impact on American Jews.

The notion that Israel is a safe haven for the global Jewish diaspora was compromised by the attacks on kibbutzim and a music festival from Hamas terrorists who burst out of Gaza. Many American Jews have felt unsafe at home amid antisemitism provoked both by Hamas’ attacks and some of the protests over Israel’s response. A wave of pro-Palestinian protests at US colleges also occasionally crossed into antisemitism.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, warned on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that he’d never seen such a surge in hate and antisemitic conspiracy theories in the United States. “We are honoring, commemorating, this solemn anniversary of the murder of 1,200 people simply because they were Jewish, right?” Greenblatt told Dana Bash. “They were slaughtered, they were tortured, they were killed, they were kidnapped. And yet, here in the United States, that triggered a tsunami of anti-Jewish hate.”

According to the ADL, there have been more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the US since the October 7 attacks, including more than 8,000 instances of verbal or written harassment, more than 1,800 acts of vandalism and more than 150 physical assaults.

Trump has also contributed to the angst. The ex-president has used antisemitic tropes about dual loyalties to Israel and the US in saying that Jewish voters who back Biden and Harris should have their “head examined” and that if he loses next month, Jewish voters will be partly to blame.

Ever-widening shockwaves in the year ahead

What’s next?

The next occupant of the White House will inherit one of the most perilous crises facing a modern president.

If Harris wins, she will have to chart her own policy on the war after being unwilling to address her views outside the constraints of Biden’s approach. She will likely face the same tests to her authority and the complications of a clash between US and Israeli interests that have bedeviled Biden since there seems little chance a widening war will be concluded in the next few months.

And while Trump is often seen as likely to offer Netanyahu a blank state, his antipathy to US involvement in foreign wars – especially in the Middle East – may mean that he is less open to an escalation if he is in office when such a step could impinge upon his own political standing.

Whatever happens next month, the US will remain deeply entangled in the new realities of the Middle East after October 7, 2023.

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