Last month, Richard Haass, the former longtime head of the Council on Foreign Relations, approached top officials in the Biden administration, including Vice President Kamala Harris, with an audacious plan for changing the politics around the Israel-Hamas war.
Haass believed that Joe Biden needed to separate himself from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose military campaign was hurting U.S. credibility abroad and the president’s popularity at home. And he proposed that Biden do so by going to Israel to deliver a speech — possibly to the Knesset, the nation’s parliament — where he’d lay out his vision directly to the Israeli people.
Haass, who previously worked in the State Departments for both Bush administrations, had come to the idea after growing increasingly dismayed by Israel’s defiance of Washington’s warnings that its bombardment of Gaza was causing widespread civilian casualties and threatened to destabilize the Middle East. And he first floated it from his perch as a panelist on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the cable news show Biden closely watches.