As the war in Gaza drags into its eighth month, and as the Palestinian death toll mounts and their suffering continues to flood social media, and as Israeli hostages return as bodies rather than living people, Joe Biden and his national security team are continuing to try to thread a seemingly impossible policy needle: How do you maintain America’s traditional support for Israel while reining in the Netanyahu government’s prosecution of a war that, even according to the State Department, has likely violated international law? And how do you do all this while mollifying your domestic critics, both on the left and the right, on an issue that has become one of the most polarizing in a generation? 

The answer, according to multiple administration officials and people close to the president’s national security team, seems to be: You can’t. Biden’s policy, which stems from his own deeply held views, has evolved with the war but has still managed to infuriate just about everyone. To wit: When Biden announced that he would be pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of the civilian carnage in Gaza, absolutely no one was happy with the micro-adjustment. The left sneered that it was too little too late, and the right screamed that Biden was abandoning Israel during a time of existential danger. Senior officials and Biden advisors sighed: What could they do that wouldn’t precipitate this kind of bipartisan fury?