Will it Take the Irish Get Biden to Change His Policies on Gaza?

Every year, the Irish come to the White House on St. Patrick’s Day for a ritualized event that always veers a bit closely to leprechaun kitsch. (Once, when Ronald Reagan was president, there were actual little people dressed as leprechauns running around, trying to sit on his lap.) The taoiseach, as the Irish prime minister is called, presents a bowl of shamrocks to the president, shamrock-shaped cookies are served, and various notables of Irish descent get a little buzzed. This year it was much the same: Various Kennedy spawn showed up (though not the one currently running for president), along with Tip O’Neill’s daughter and lots of journalists with nice Irish names: Norah O’Donnell, Samantha Barry, Kaitlan Collins, and Donie O’Sullivan.

Yes, it was a good, green time. The fountain outside was burbling emerald and the Guinness was flowing, but, despite having a self-declared Irishman as president, St. Patrick’s Day at the White House this year felt more like an intervention than a party. We love you, we believe in you, but right now, we’re worried about you. Many of the actual Irish — the ones who came over from Éire for this annual celebration of the shamrock diaspora — spent the afternoon trying to talk sense to Biden over his Gaza policies, and his confounding (to them) support of Israel’s relentless military response.

“Look, President Biden is his own man,” the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, told me while standing in the State Dining Room, “but he is always somebody who listens to what we have to say.”

The Irish have a long-held kinship with the Palestinians. They see parallels between  their struggle against Israel and the Irish struggle against British rule. They see in the famine that is gripping Gaza today a tragic echo of their own. This has been true for decades, but never more so than now. In December, Dublin’s city council voted unanimously to fly the Palestinian flag over City Hall. While standing beside the president in the East Room, Varadkar explained: “When I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people. And the answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes — a story of displacement, of dispossessions and national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger.”

In Ireland, there is such rage at Biden right now for his unwillingness to buck Bibi that Varadkar has faced his own backlash for even showing up at this party. “I just think it would be kind of gross to be drinking pints of Guinness and eating canapés when Biden is facilitating what’s happening in Gaza,” Colum Eastwood, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party there, told CBS News Friday.

When I asked Vardkar about this, he said, “I’m just not somebody who generally believes in boycotts.” He added, “And Biden is a good friend of Ireland.”

Varadkar’s most formidable political opponent, Mary Lou McDonald, the head of Sinn Fein, was also at the St. Patrick’s Day party at the White House. Earlier this month, I caught up with her when she was in New York and was reminded that, no matter what happens in Ireland’s coming election, the nation’s stance on this subject would not change. “The experience of colonization is the same whether you’re a Celt or an Arab,” she told me. “If your land is taken, if your identity is taken, your language, if you have an experience of dispossession as a human being, that lands the same way, whether you are like us, on the brim of the Europe and looking into the Atlantic, or if you’re in the Middle East.” She called Netanyahu “utterly, utterly reprehensible” and said that this St. Patrick’s Day would be about saying to Biden — “an Irish man to his core” — that, in the “spirit of friendship, the United States has this wrong. And we dearly wish to get it right.”

Biden has remained mostly circumspect, even as Senator Chuck Schumer — such a strong supporter of Israel that he opposed the Iran nuclear deal against the wishes of the Obama-Biden White House — broke with Benjamin Netanyau over his pursuit of the war in Gaza in a stunning speech on the floor of the Senate last week. Official Washington sees Schumer’s speech (he gave the White House a heads-up, but didn’t plan it with them) as perhaps providing Biden with an opening to follow. Some in Biden’s orbit say this president can be a bit stuck in the geopolitics of the past (if not so glaringly as his ranting, revanchist predecessor and current opponent). Maybe the Irish could be the ones to finally give the president a push into the present, if not the future?

A tricky task for any taoiseach. But Varadkar is not like any other taoiseach. He was a doctor before becoming the youngest taoiseach in Irish history when he was elected in 2017 at the age of 38. He’s conservative, half-Indian, and gay. All of which is to say: He was not going to let himself be played for just another leprechaun, no matter how much Yeats or Guinness was going around on Sunday at the White House. Varadkar was statesmanlike and clever, I thought, in how he appealed to Biden. In his remarks the Irish leader quoted Beau Biden, which clearly had an affect on his father, who dabbed at his eyes with a napkin when violinists played the hymn “On Eagle’s Wings.”

“Mr. President, as you know, the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza,” Varadkar said in their joint address. “The people of Gaza desperately need food, medicine, and shelter, and most especially they need the bombs to stop.”

But this is where the two sides of Biden’s political identity clash. He loves to think of himself as Irish — loves quoting Yeats and Heaney and talking about “the Finnegans of County Louth and the Blewitts of County Mayo.” He casts himself as the patriarch of a big and sometimes messy Irish Catholic family (that’s why he doesn’t like to ever say the word abortion). But the truth about Biden is that, beyond the poetry and the sentimentality, the arc of his long career in Washington has never had much to do with Ireland. When he was senator, Irish issues were the bailiwick of Teddy Kennedy. Then it was the Clintons who led on Ireland. Leaders of the peace process in Northern Ireland tell me Biden wasn’t really involved.

Israel, on the other hand, Biden has been a consistent supporter of; he’s visited many times, meeting with every Israeli prime minister going back since Golda Meir. He’s been called “the only Catholic Jew.” Like many members of his postwar generation, his instinct is that America must unreservedly defend scrappy Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, always in a fight for its life. It’s clearly difficult for him to adjust to the new consensus on the left, and throughout much of the rest of the world, that the underdog nation, while once David, had become the wealthy and well-armed Goliath, a nation of the dispossessed and oppressed, now behaving like an oppressor. People around him say he was perplexed when his young campaign aides put out an anonymous letter protesting his position on Israel and Gaza. The generational consensus of young progressives took him by surprise.

So, just beneath all the stout suds, these were the fault lines on display at Biden’s St. Patrick’s Day party this year: his assumption that the Irish were his friends, and that so were the Israelis. But it’s no longer so easy to be both.

In his speech in the East Room, Varadkar invoked the last mythic Irishman to live in this house. “Tonight,” he said, “let us all reflect on the words of President Kennedy, when he urged us to do the most important work of peace in protecting the weak and the small. And as he said in the Irish Parliament, ‘from Cork to Congo, from Galway to the Gaza Strip.’”

Biden reportedly spoke to Bibi for the first time in a month the next day.