🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Every single hostage whom Hamas has released and will release from Gaza owes their freedom to President Joe Biden. That is an undeniable fact.
As I have noted previously, ever since the Oct. 7 carnage, Biden has steadfastly had Israel's back. He has done so at significant political risk to his reelection chances next year (more on this below). But this has not been his only or even his most significant contribution to the daily life-and-death developments in the Middle East. Throughout the past seven weeks, he has been personally involved and invested in the complex negotiations to rescue the Oct. 7 hostages in a way that is unprecedented for a sitting U.S. president.
Biden has communicated directly with a palpably unenthusiastic, bordering on negativistic Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on at least 15 occasions, most recently on Sunday. The president also spoke at least three times each with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, most recently with the latter on Saturday to resolve Hamas' delay that day in implementing the hostage-release agreement.
Reacting to the third release of hostages yesterday, including 4-year-old Avigail Idan, Biden said that he hoped that the precarious short-term truce could be extended to enable more hostages to be freed while at the same time humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the form of hundreds of trucks of food, water, medicine, fuel, and cooking gas a day could continue to flow.
"More is needed, but this deal is delivering lifesaving results," Biden said. "Critical aid is going in and hostages are coming out. This deal is structured so that it can be extended to keep building on these results. That's my goal, that's our goal, to keep this pause going beyond tomorrow so that we can continue to see more hostages come out and surge more humanitarian relief to those in need in Gaza."
In this connection, I want every American Jew and every American to ask themselves one question: If Franklin D. Roosevelt had tried to negotiate with Nazi Germany at any time between Sept. 1, 1939, and his death on April 12, 1945, first to enable Jews to emigrate from the Third Reich and then for the release of Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe, how many of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust might have been saved?
We know, of course, that no such negotiations were ever considered, let alone attempted. In the years leading up to World War II, draconian U.S. immigration laws coupled with antisemitic State Department officials kept German, Austrian, and other Jews from obtaining visas into the United States, thereby sealing the fates of most of them. The outbreak of the war and news of the ongoing annihilation of European Jewry did not alter this reprehensible reality.
And FDR, confronted with broad-based antisemitism from the likes of Father Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh's America First crowd did not want to risk jeopardizing his 1940 and 1944 reelection prospects by appearing to favor Jews.
Indeed, the Roosevelt administration did not even make any efforts to rescue the thousands of Jews holding U.S. citizenship who were trapped in Nazi Europe, abandoning them to likely annihilation as the result of either bureaucratic indifference or inherent antisemitism or a combination of both.
Let me make this discussion very personal for just a moment. In January 1943, my mother, her first husband and her then 5-year-old son Benjamin were alive in the Polish ghetto of Sosnowiec. By then, every government official in Washington, DC, from FDR on down knew that the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was in full swing. The previous month, on Dec. 17, 1942, the United States and 10 other Allied governments had condemned the German government's "bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination" of Jews in Nazi-occupied or -controlled Europe.
Even at that stage, in the midst of World War II, if the United States—or Great Britain, Canada, Australia, or other Western democracies, for that matter—had expressed any willingness to give refuge to Jewish children, my brother might—just might—still have had a whisper of a chance.
We will never know how Berlin might have reacted to an offer to take even a few thousand children out of the ghettos and camps where they faced the aforesaid "cold-blooded extermination." No such initiative was ever put forward or even contemplated.
The doomed Jews of Europe, including millions of children, were of little interest to FDR and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. They were certainly not about to take any initiative or risk any domestic political capital to try to rescue any of them.
As Gregory Wallance chronicled in his book, "America's Soul in the Balance, The Holocaust, FDR's State Department and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy" (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2012), after Gerhard Riegner, the Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress, had sent a telegram to the organization's leadership in New York through U.S. diplomatic channels in Switzerland in January 1943 reporting that 6,000 Jews "are killed daily" at one location in Poland, and Romanian Jews are similarly being murdered under dire circumstances, Hull instructed the American legation in Bern not to accept similar "private messages" in the future.
With no one anywhere concerned about Benjamin's fate, he was murdered in due course in one of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers on the night of Aug. 3-4, 1943.
It is not a chapter of American history that reflects well on either FDR or his administration.
Moreover, this callous attitude was decidedly not an outlier among American foreign policy makers. As Henry Kissinger, then U.S. national security advisor, remarked to President Richard Nixon in 1973 in a different context, "And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."
Joe Biden views the world through a radically different prism. For him, doing the right thing, as opposed to being guided by pragmatic or political considerations, is very much an American concern, even an American priority. This includes throwing the full weight of his presidency and his administration behind the concerted endeavor to rescue as many of the Oct. 7 hostages as possible from Hamas captivity, beginning with the women and children.
Biden has known from the moment he declared his absolute support for Israel's determination to rid itself of the Hamas threat by eradicating that terrorist organization that it would cost him politically. He is risking at least one battleground state—Michigan—where support for the president among the sizable Arab American population has plunged from 59 percent in 2020 to 17 percent since Oct. 7. Biden's pro-Israel stance also puts him at odds with the Democratic Party's vocal left flank and with many younger, pro-Palestinian voters. But none of these considerations have caused him to deviate from what he clearly considers to be a moral imperative.
We know that the day will come in the not-too-distant future when Biden will remind the Netanyahu government that he believes a two-state solution to be the only viable way to resolve the Israel-Palestinian problem. At that point, Netanyahu's far-right cohort and their supporters in the U.S. will accuse the president of not being supportive of their jingoist, ethno-chauvinistic ambitions. And when this inevitably acrimonious debate will be in full swing, I fervently hope that the rescued Oct. 7 hostages and their families will take the lead in reminding Israelis and Americans alike that during Israel's darkest hours, Joe Biden did not follow FDR's example but instead embodied the altruistic humanitarian qualities that define genuine statesmanship.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Cornell and Columbia Universities. He is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and the author of Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (Kelsay Books, 2021).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
