Biden didn’t hold Israel accountable. Now his chickens are coming home to roost

On Thursday evening, President Joe Biden said that he was “outraged and heartbroken” at the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza after Israel conducted airstrkes against the unarmed convoy.

Specifically, as Independent White House reporter Andrew Feinberg said, Biden leveled what might be his biggest criticism of Israel in his 52 years of national politics, when he said attacks like the one that killed aid workers “should not happen” and added that Israel “has not done enough” to avoid them.

The fact that the aid workers came from an organization headed up by celebrity Chef José Andrés made matters worse, politically speaking: Andrés runs many restaurants that Washington’s power players patronize (your reporter is partial to Jaleo). He’s a fixture on Washington’s party circuit and he became a hero to many Washington liberals when he pulled his restaurant out of Donald Trump’s now-shuttered hotel.

But even Andrés’s elevated profile has not made Biden shift his policy on Israel.

“He wants to see an investigation that’s swift, an investigation that's comprehensive, that brings accountability, and he wants to make sure that it is made public,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday. When a reporter asked what such an investigation might entail, Jean-Pierre would not elaborate.

This renders Biden’s critiques all but meaningless — especially as he pushes for the House to pass a foreign aid package that would provide $14.1bn in aid to Israel and as multiple publications report that he is considering selling $18bn worth of fighter jets to the country. As my colleague Katie Hawkinson explained in Tuesday’s Inside Washington, the president set the red line himself when he