Did Biden really mean to blame the Gaza hospital horror on ‘the other team’?

As Rishi Sunak so rightly put it: ‘Words matter’. So what was the US president thinking when he used a sports analogy to describe the violent death of hundreds of people? Or, asks John Rentoul, wasn’t he thinking at all?

‘The words we say have an impact and we should be careful with them’ (Getty/Reuters)

Joe Biden used a surprisingly casual phrase when he spoke to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, about the explosion at the hospital in Gaza, saying for the benefit of the TV cameras: “Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”

It is impossible to say whether this was a deliberate use of the folksy register for which Biden has long been known, or a spontaneous simplification by a president unsure of whether he could say “Hamas or one of its affiliates” without mangling it.

President Biden appeared to be reading part of his comments from prompt cards, which hardly inspired confidence that he was across the detail.

A few hours later, in the House of Commons, Rishi Sunak said: “The words we say have an impact and we should be careful with them.” He was responding to a question from Stephen Crabb, a former cabinet minister, who said: “The way this conflict is being reported has massive implications for our Jewish community.”

This was more an attack on the BBC for failing initially to report the uncertainty about responsibility for the hospital explosion than a point about language as such, and the prime minister went on to say that we “don’t treat what the Kremlin say as the gospel truth, [so] we should do the same with Hamas”.

Yet there is no doubt that politicians the world over are threading their way through the minefield of language. “The words we say have an impact”, as Sunak said. As Biden spoke to Netanyahu, just as in the chamber of the House of Commons, it felt as if the world was watching and waiting to see if someone would say something that would unexpectedly inflame one side or the other.

In the Commons, some MPs called, with the best of intentions, for a “ceasefire”, apparently unaware of the implications for Israeli attempts to recover the hostages. Others spoke of Israel’s treatment of some Palestinians as a form of “collective punishment”, which they called a “war crime”, apparently oblivious to the slaughter of civilians by Hamas a mere 10 days ago.

Given such sensitivities, it makes sense for President Biden to rely on his cue cards, even if they add to the impression that he can no longer trust himself to go off script. At one point he started telling Netanyahu an anecdote, before stopping himself and saying he would do it later because it would take too long.

Biden has always been verbose, but in the past this has concealed a sharp political mind. One of my claims to fame is to have interviewed him for the BBC in the 1990s, when he was pressing Bill Clinton to threaten the use of military force against Serb aggression in Bosnia. He was then able to make a cogent case for liberal interventionism and to distil it into TV sound bites. I am not sure he could do that now.

On the other hand, the use of the term “the other team” may be a good way of simplifying the message, whether it was written on a card or not. I remember Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press secretary, trying – not altogether successfully – to cut through a lot of journalists’ questions about UN sanctions and the use of mercenaries in Sierra Leone in 1998 by saying: “The good guys have won.”

But it was not reassuring to see the US president obviously reading what were designed to sound like spontaneous comments, like a bad actor who couldn’t remember his lines. As Sunak said, words have an impact, and it is alarming to think that the leader of Israel’s most powerful ally could be moments from using the wrong ones.