President denounces antisemitism as his party frets about November.
WASHINGTON—The time had come to take a stand, and so President Biden gripped both sides of his lectern and made an urgent vow to the marbled atrium filled with Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
“People are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror,” he said, speaking seven months to the day since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. “It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas that took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you. And we will not forget.”
Biden’s speech to the annual Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the U.S. Capitol came at a fraught moment for his foreign policy and political hopes alike. This week, Israeli troops moved into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, seemingly crossing what Biden had previously called a red line. Cease-fire talks in Cairo were on a knife’s edge, with Hamas claiming to have accepted truce terms Israel called intolerable. Anti-Israel demonstrations continued to convulse dozens of campuses, leading to police crackdowns and canceled commencement ceremonies.
Against this backdrop, the stakes for Biden’s speech went beyond the fate of a distant conflict. The war and the protests have sharply divided Democrats between pro-Palestinian progressives and the pro-Israel establishment, and the president’s slow and equivocal response has inflamed both sides. Images of hate and disorder have undermined Biden’s claim to be a unifying, values-driven leader who could restore order to a chaotic nation and world. Many Democrats privately worry that the college conflagrations have exacerbated the unpopular incumbent’s existing political weaknesses and pose a grave danger to his re-election hopes.
“My biggest concern is that Republicans are going to run a message of law and order, the border, cities, law enforcement, and now the protests,” a pro-Israel Democratic lawmaker said, contending that that message would be appealing to independent, moderate and suburban voters concerned about safety and stability. “Especially given his age, showing resolve and strength is so important. Once you start equivocating, you look weak.”
No protests disturbed Biden’s Tuesday speech, in which he drew a direct if implicit line connecting the conditions that led to Hitler’s murder of six million Jews and the hateful displays that have marked many of the current protests, which Biden called “a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world.”
