Biden’s ‘Don’t’ 3 Years Later

Three years after October 7, Joe Biden is no longer president. He is 83, seriously ill, and far from the center of American political life. But this week, there are a few moments from October 2023 worth returning to: an aircraft carrier sent toward the Eastern Mediterranean, a story about Golda Meir, a three-year-old girl named Abigail, and one word spoken by the president of the United States when Israel was still trying to understand what had happened to it.

“Don’t.”

Biden said it on October 10, three days after the massacre. Israel was still counting its dead. Families did not yet know whether the people they loved had been murdered, kidnapped or were still hiding somewhere. The scale of the attack was only beginning to become clear, and behind the horror in the south was another fear: that Hezbollah, Iran or another of Iran’s proxies would look at a wounded Israel and decide that this was the moment to join the war.

“To any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation,” Biden said, “I have one word: Don’t.”

It was memorable because it was so unlike the language of diplomacy. There was no paragraph of qualifications, no carefully balanced formulation. But it was not merely rhetoric either. The United States had ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean and reinforced its military presence in the region. The message was visible as well as audible: whatever Israel’s enemies thought they had learned about Israeli vulnerability on October 7, they should include the United States in their calculations.

It is impossible to know what that warning prevented. Deterrence leaves behind no photographs of the attacks that were never launched and no casualty lists from wars that did not begin. Hezbollah did attack Israel, and the northern front eventually escalated dramatically. The “Don’t” did not place a protective dome over the country. But in those first days, when nobody knew how far the war might spread, the most powerful country in the world made an unmistakable decision to stand behind Israel.

Eight days later Biden came here. During that visit he returned to a story he had told before, about meeting Golda Meir as a young senator in 1973. She had described the dangers facing Israel, and apparently noticed his concern. “Don’t worry, Senator Biden,” she told him. “We have a secret weapon here in Israel.” When he asked what it was, she answered: “We have no place else to go.”

The story had been part of Biden’s repertoire for years. But in Israel in October 2023 it no longer sounded like an anecdote from an old politician’s collection. Almost exactly 50 years after the Yom Kippur War, Israel had again been surprised by an attack it had failed to anticipate. This time Biden was not the young senator listening to Golda Meir. He was the American president standing in Tel Aviv eleven days after Israelis had hidden for hours in safe rooms while gunmen moved through their communities.

That day he gave an answer of his own alongside Golda’s: “I come to Israel with a single message: You are not alone.”

There were other moments, smaller and perhaps more revealing. One of the hostages Biden spoke about was Abigail Edan, the three-year-old American-Israeli girl from Kfar Aza whose parents, Roy and Smadar, were murdered on October 7. Abigail survived the attack and was taken into Gaza. She turned four in captivity.

When she was released after 50 days, Biden spoke about her from Nantucket. “Thank God she’s home,” he said. He described what had happened to her, spoke of the trauma she had endured and said he wished he could be there to hold her.

A few months later, Abigail and members of her family came to the White House. There is something about that meeting that captures what was present in Biden’s response during those months. Abigail was no longer a name in a hostage briefing. She was a four-year-old child standing in the Oval Office. Biden was no longer speaking about alliances or deterrence. The American president who had sent aircraft carriers toward the region was bending down to a little girl who had lost both her parents.

None of this means that everything that followed was simple. It was not. As the war continued and the devastation in Gaza grew, Biden became increasingly critical of the Israeli government and increasingly concerned about Palestinian civilian suffering. There were disputes over humanitarian aid, military operations and the future of the war. Israelis can disagree about those decisions, just as Americans do. But disagreement does not cancel gratitude, and gratitude does not require agreement.

That distinction may be especially worth preserving now. Politics encourages us to rewrite people retrospectively, to make every earlier act conform to whatever we eventually decided about them. Allies become disappointments, opponents become enemies, and moments that once mattered are reinterpreted in light of everything that came afterward. Memory should be capable of greater precision.

In October 2023, Biden showed up. He did so politically and militarily, by moving American forces and warning those who might widen the war. He did so symbolically, by becoming the first sitting American president to visit Israel during wartime. And he did so personally, in the embraces with survivors and families.

Perhaps the Golda story explains why those gestures resonated. “We have no place else to go” is usually heard as a statement about Jewish self-reliance. Israel exists because Jews cannot entrust their survival to the goodwill of others. October 7 made the necessity of that idea brutally clear, but it also exposed its limit. Even a sovereign country with a powerful military needs friends. Self-reliance and friendship are not opposites.

For a few days in October 2023, Biden understood both. Israel would defend itself. America would not do that for it. But anyone looking at the smoke rising from the communities around Gaza and imagining that Israel’s catastrophe presented an opportunity was told that the wounded country was not standing by itself.

Three years later, Biden is no longer the man at the podium. The presidency has passed to someone else, the region has changed, and the arguments of those years are already becoming history. Abigail is no longer the three-year-old whose photograph appeared in reports about the hostages.

But some moments deserve to survive the politics around them. An old story about Golda. A little girl who came home. American ships moving across the Mediterranean. And an American president looking toward anyone thinking of making a terrible day even worse and saying one word.

Don’t.

For that, Mr. President, thank you.