Ten days after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and took 250 hostages last year, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv and vowed to protect Israel, minimize civilian deaths, deliver humanitarian aid and bring lasting peace to the region.
What followed was a year of political and social turmoil inside the United States, repeated clashes with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the aggressiveness of Israel’s response and a conflict that has spread across the Middle East.
The events since Mr. Biden’s remarks have demonstrated the limits of his influence in the region. Even as the United States has continued to arm Israel, the administration has been repeatedly thwarted in reining in Mr. Netanyahu, who has sidestepped or dismissed entreaties from the White House to de-escalate the conflict and leave room for a postwar creation of a Palestinian state. And with Israel now poised to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iran, the wider war that Mr. Biden sought to avert is at hand.
“The gap between what Biden hoped to achieve and what ultimately he was forced to encounter is as wide as the Grand Canyon,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In the 2020 campaign, Mr. Miller said, Mr. Biden promised voters that “America was going to be back, it was going to lead again” on the international stage. But the year since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel “shows the limitations of American influence and power.”
On Monday, Mr. Biden marked the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks by lighting a yahrzeit candle in memory of the dead during a ceremony in the Blue Room at the White House. Rabbi Aaron Alexander of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington conducted a brief ceremony, praying for “the souls of the holy ones, men, women and children who were killed on October the seventh.”
In a telephone call with President Isaac Herzog of Israel on Monday, Mr. Biden promised to “never give up” efforts to bring home the remaining hostages being held by Hamas. He expressed what the White House said was “deep sadness” about the loss of life in Gaza, but vowed to remain steadfast in helping Israel defend itself.
Mr. Biden did not talk with Mr. Netanyahu on Monday, extending the silence between the two men that has existed since they spoke on Aug. 21, nearly seven weeks ago.
The tension between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu has been at the center of questions about the way his administration has handled the situation in Israel: How do you pressure an ally facing a threat to its existence? How far should you go if that ally ignores your advice? And, with just 29 days before the next presidential election, how do you explain the unrelenting violence both to voters who feel he has been too deferential to Israel and to those who think he has not done enough to support Israel?
Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Mr. Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, is now facing the electoral consequences of those questions. In a statement Monday, she pledged that she will “never stop fighting for justice” for those killed by Hamas, but also saying she is “heartbroken over the scale of death and destruction in Gaza.”
Over the past year, the administration has made halting progress and some modest achievements — all of which fell far short of the goals Mr. Biden laid out nearly a year ago.
In his remarks in Tel Aviv that day, Mr. Biden pledged to secure the release of the people taken by Hamas, including some United States citizens, saying that “for me as the American president, there is no higher priority than the release and safe return of all these hostages.”
A year later, nearly 100 hostages still remain in captivity, including Americans, while some others have been killed. Hostages were released in a cease-fire deal in November, but at the end of August, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American who had been living in Israel, was among six hostages killed by Hamas.
Mr. Biden vowed a year ago to help ensure that civilians in Gaza received “food, water, medicine, shelter” amid Israeli fighting. Over the past year, Americans helped negotiate increased aid deliveries, but even those have fallen far short of what is needed, according to global health officials.
Mr. Biden’s message then included a blunt warning to Iran and others in the Middle East not to use the fighting in Gaza as an excuse to attack Israel. “My message to any state or any other hostile actor thinking about attacking Israel remains the same as it was a week ago,” he said. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”
In the year since, those warnings have proved ineffective. Iran has twice launched missile attacks directly against Israel, including last week, and Mr. Netanyahu is now weighing options for retaliatory strikes. Hezbollah’s near-constant barrage of attacks from Lebanon over Israel’s northern border has triggered a vast Israeli military response over the past several weeks, including the killing of Hezbollah’s leader.
Mr. Biden urged Israel not to give in to rage as it considered how to react to the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. He compared the decisions facing Israel to the ones that the United States had to make after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“We were enraged in the United States,” he told the Israeli people that day. “And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
The decisions by Mr. Netanyahu and his cabinet mirrored those of the post-9/11 American politicians who felt that only war would ensure long-term security. At several points during the past year, Mr. Biden and his team have been unable to talk Israel down from escalation.
As the conflict with Hezbollah intensified, Mr. Biden succeeded in rallying almost a dozen nations to call for a cease-fire. But their proposal foundered almost immediately when Mr. Netanyahu approved the killing of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, just hours later.
Mr. Biden has only 105 days left in his term, and like many of his predecessors, he faces the prospect of leaving office frustrated by the cycles of conflict in the region. But on Monday he vowed to keep working toward the goals he articulated that day in Tel Aviv.
“We will not stop working to achieve a cease-fire deal in Gaza that brings the hostages home, allows for a surge in humanitarian aid to ease the suffering on the ground, assures Israel’s security and ends this war,” he said in an early morning statement.
“Israelis and Palestinians alike,” he wrote, “deserve to live in security, dignity, and peace.”
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