Andreas Kluth: Biden must prove he doesn't have a double standard for Israel

Secretary of State Antony Blinken hates the question in all forms. “Do Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian and Muslim lives?,” he was recently asked on a global stage. “No, period,” he replied, visibly startled. That evidently satisfied nobody. “Do we have a double standard? The answer is no,” he had to answer yet again this week, while launching his department’s annual report on human rights. It documents violations across the world, including abuses committed by both Hamas and the Israeli army.

The reason these awkward questions keep coming is that much of the world simply assumes that the administration of President Joe Biden does have a double standard — according to which the U.S. condemns or punishes abuses by adversaries, such as Russia, but ignores or excuses those by friends, such as Israel. Correct or not, that perception is widespread not only in Muslim countries and the Global South but also closer to home. It’s why American students are protesting on college campuses — for both sides, but disproportionately for the Palestinians.

I’ve been among those arguing that Biden has actually been better than most in showing empathy for both sides. And yet I see the pressure growing in the court of world opinion. Sometimes literally: The International Court of Justice in The Hague is deliberating in a case charging Israel with genocide in the Gaza Strip. Other times politically: Many people inside the State Department have signed protests in the internal “dissent channel,” and two have resigned.

One of them told me that they’re especially upset that the U.S. seems to be ignoring not only international but also domestic law, and specifically the so-called Leahy Law. Named after Patrick Leahy, a former senator from Vermont, it prohibits the State Department and the Pentagon from aiding units of foreign armed forces that are implicated in “gross violations of human rights.” At the time it was written, in the 1990s, the statute aimed at wayward commandos of the Colombian army, say.

This week, though, Blinken prepared to apply the Leahy Law to a unit of the Israeli army for the first time. The plan is to withhold American aid to a battalion called Netzah Yehuda (“Judah’s victory”). Founded for ultra-orthodox soldiers (who won’t fight alongside women), this outfit has also attracted recruits from far-right Zionist settler communities in the West Bank. According to evidence the State Department has been reviewing, Netzah Yehuda has committed human-rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank.

So an American censure may well be justified. But this diplomatic move is also a reminder that neither the Leahy Law nor any other purely legalistic tool can solve Biden’s larger problem, which is the appearance of a double standard.

The Leahy Law is designed to censure specific commandos, but not foreign nations or their governments as a whole. So if the problem in the Middle East is that Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu orders “indiscriminate” (Biden’s word) force against civilians in the Gaza Strip, then punishing Netzah Yehuda for what it did in the West Bank (before Oct. 7, incidentally) is neither here nor there. Moreover, the Leahy Law allows for “remedy;” if the Israeli government disciplines the battalion, the unit will be restored to America’s favor.

In that way, the Leahy Law is meant to be a moral scalpel in U.S. foreign policy, not a chain saw. And a blunt scalpel at that: It constrains the Defense and State departments, but not, say, the Central Intelligence Agency, which can work with any foreign commando it pleases. Moreover, the process is cumbersome and bureaucratic; a State Department review begins with leads from non-governmental organizations and the like, and can stretch out for months or years.

In the current context, targeting the Leahy Law at Israel is mainly symbolic. Curtailing aid to Netzah Yehuda won’t coax Netanyahu into moderating his policy any more than Biden’s other entreaties and “red lines” have done, which is to say hardly at all. For his part, Bibi has already dismissed the Leahy action as “the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

This leaves Biden’s overall message as scrambled as ever. Even as Blinken’s people were finalizing their Leahy action, Congress was rushing a legislative package to Biden’s desk. It will, among other things, provide another $26 billion to Israel, on top of the oodles the U.S. already sends every year. (Having received some $124 billion since its founding in 1948, Israel is easily the world’s top recipient of cumulative U.S. aid.) That kit will include American bombs of the kind that Israel has also been dropping on Gazans.

Only last week, moreover, Biden also sent another, altogether more ambiguous, signal in the Security Council of the United Nations. One council member, Algeria, had proposed upgrading Palestine’s status at the UN from “permanent observer” to full member, and 12 countries voted in favor, with two abstaining. Only the U.S. cast its veto. That was hard to explain, because Washington claims to be adamantly in favor of Palestinian statehood as the only long-term solution to pacify the Middle East.

And so Biden and Blinken will keep having to answer the same pesky questions. If they want to convince the world that they don’t have a double standard, they should condition military aid to Israel on the proper use of the American weapons — as the U.S. does vis-a-vis most other recipients of its aid — or halt all shipments. And at the United Nations, the U.S. should side with Israel or Palestine depending on the matter at hand.

If Biden is not prepared to make these changes, no invocation of the Leahy Law can solve his problems in the Middle East. Bibi will keep ignoring him, American students will keep rioting, and the world will keep accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy. That’s not a good way to run for four more years in office.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.