For President Joe Biden , it’s all about November 2024 . The Israel-Hamas war came as an unwelcome diversion that has forced the Biden campaign to confront an unexpected and largely new problem: major division within the Democratic Party .

Biden’s clumsy efforts to appease the pro-Palestinian wing of the party while maintaining his declared solidarity with the Jewish state proves it’s impossible to straddle the fence on such a hot-button issue. And despite Biden’s insistence that Israel has the right to defend itself, when forced to choose between offending the Palestinians or offending our closest ally in the Middle East, he routinely chooses the latter.

At a private fundraiser last week, Biden told donors that Israel was losing the support of the international community over its indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians. This refrain is nothing new. It’s been expressed repeatedly by Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other administration officials since the war began.

The Biden administration is holding Israel to an impossible standard. As the IDF tries to adhere to the new U.S.-imposed rules of engagement, Israeli troops are paying the price. And Israelis are left wondering just whose side America is on.

The typically unflappable Israeli journalist Caroline Glick highlighted Biden’s remarks in a recent podcast titled, “Biden has declared war on the Netanyahu government.” Responding to Biden’s comment that “Hamas does not represent all Palestinians,” she pointed out that 75% of Palestinians support Hamas. Among Palestinians who live in the West Bank, who don’t have to live under the “boot of Hamas” on a daily basis, support grows to 86%, Glick said.

She also noted that many Gazan “civilians” are part-time members of Hamas. They work for the terrorist group one day and go to their regular job the next. Currently, Hamas has employed Palestinian women to work as “sighters,” she said. When these women see IDF troops, they inform Hamas.

Particularly disturbing to Glick was Biden’s renewed call for a Palestinian state. A two-state solution has been offered to Palestinians many times, and they have repeatedly rejected it. They want a one-state solution, a Palestinian state that extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The long and blood-soaked history of relations between the Jews and the Palestinians has proven that the two peoples cannot peacefully coexist. A two-state solution is simply impossible.

We hear the Israelis repeatedly referred to as colonizers and occupiers by the pro-Palestinians. And, yes, there is a case to be made that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews did “colonize” the land that Palestinians had inhabited for 1,300 years. But the validity of these charges depends entirely on how far back into history one cares to go. Jews were violently expelled from Israel, their ancestral home, in the sixth century BC.

Following the Holocaust, the brutal reign of terror that resulted in the genocide of approximately 6 million European Jews, the United Nations understood that Jews needed a home where they could live in peace. The result was the establishment of a Jewish state. Since then, Arabs have sought to destroy Israel in three major wars, and each time Israel has prevailed.

Since the dawn of history, territorial disputes have been settled on the battlefield. The Sioux Nation had inhabited the great plains of North America for several thousand years when they were displaced by American pioneers during the great westward expansion of the 1800s. It was tremendously unjust and cruel. But no one refers to midwesterners as colonizers. Nor do the conquered Native Americans continue a campaign of guerrilla warfare against their “oppressors.”

Like it or not, war is part of life. And displacement is part of war. According to the New York Times, “Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.”

The New York Times notes: “In 2001, 40 million people were displaced from their homes because of armed conflict or human rights violations. … World War II displaced 40 million non-Germans in Europe, and 13 million Germans were expelled from countries in Eastern Europe.”

In a recent segment, HBO’s Bill Maher drives the point home as only he can, telling his audience: "History is brutal, and humans are not good people. History's sad and full of wrongs, but you can't make them unhappen because a paraglider isn't a time machine. People get moved, and yes, colonized."

“Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn't do it by asking," Maher reminded us. "There's a reason Saudi Arabia's flag is a sword. Kosovo was the cradle of Christian Serbia, then it became Muslim. They fought a war about it in the '90s but stopped. They didn't keep it going for 75 years."

So why do the Jews continue to be demonized? I came across the best answer yet from Tablet magazine’s Liel Leibovitz: “It should be obvious by now that so many of the creeps who purport to weep for Palestine don’t really care about Palestinians, dead or alive, or about Israelis, or about the historical and moral intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What they want is an excuse to indulge in something deeper, more libidinal, ancient, and indeed erotic — hating Jews.”

More significantly, why is the Biden administration so intent on putting time limits on the war, holding Israelis to a higher standard than the Geneva Convention requires, and keeping the prospect of a two-state solution alive?

The answer is, sadly, political. This conflict is fracturing the Democratic Party, and the longer it continues, the more it poses an existential threat to Biden’s reelection chances. Indeed, from now until Election Day, we can assume that all U.S. foreign policy decisions will be dictated by their anticipated effect on Biden’s reelection bid.

Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner, Power Line, and AFNN, and she is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation Academy. She is a past contributor to RedState, Newsmax, the Western Journal, and  Bongino.com . Her articles have appeared on RealClearPolitics, MSN, the Federalist, and many other sites. Please follow Elizabeth on  X  or  LinkedIn .