Tom Brenner/Pool/Cnp/CNP/Zuma; Fatima Shbair/AP

Last week, Politico reported that President Joe Biden would “consider” conditioning military aid to Israel if the country launches a large-scale invasion of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering. “It’s something he’s definitely thought about,” said one of the four anonymous US officials cited as a source. This was about as weak of a position as could be imagined: The President had definitely thought about maybe doing something.

Still, even this proved too much. One day later, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the article was based on “uninformed speculation” by anonymous officials and that he wouldn’t be entertaining hypotheticals about how the US would respond to a major invasion of Rafah, which US officials have signaled they would accept in a more limited form. The dismissal was the latest indication of the administration’s almost complete unwillingness to even discuss imposing serious consequences on Israel for waging a war that has killed more than 30,000 people, most of whom were women and children.

Instead, the administration has adopted a newfound feeling of impotence. As State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller put it last month, “The United States does not dictate to Israel what it must do, just as we don’t dictate to any country what it must do.” The absurdity of this position was made clear when a reporter interjected, “Unless you invade them.” Miller couldn’t help but laugh.

It has been obvious for months that there are many things the Biden administration can do to restrain Israel and distance itself from a war that has been condemned throughout the world. The problem has not been a lack of options but a lack of political will. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who is now the president of the US/Middle East Project, told me, “I think many of us who had very low expectations of the US and of Biden have had a rude awakening as to how much lower the actual performance has been [compared] to even the lowest of low expectations.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision on Thursday to call on Israel to hold new elections is a sign of mainstream Democrats’ increasing awareness that the status quo is unsustainable. Still, neither Schumer nor Biden have supported more immediate and consequential steps such as limiting the transfer of US weapons to Israel.

Experts disagree about whether the United States could immediately force Israel to end the war. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and others believe that Biden could likely end the war in short order with a phone call, absent domestic political constraints. Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Algeria and Syria who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told me he was more skeptical of Biden’s ability to quickly force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand but agreed the United States has more leverage than it is using.

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