Prior to the election, I think we were all aware that Joe Biden was an ineffectual waffler on Middle East issues. He would wag his finger and then do nothing but wobble along the status quo line. I had this wishful hope that Harris was just going along out of loyalty to her president — unfortunately, we’ll never find out if she would have changed the country’s course if she’d gotten out from under Joe’s feeble thumb. All we can know for sure was that Biden stood by doing nothing while children were murdered in Palestine.
Now ProPublica lists all the cowardice behind the Biden administration’s Israel policy. He kept saying one thing, and doing nothing.
Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.
Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.
“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”
“Don’t you dare bomb that Palestinian town!” Israel, without hesitation, bombs the town. “Oh, OK, here’s a billion dollars worth of bombs to replenish your supply.” Over and over again. The article talks a lot about all these “red lines” the US was drawing in the conflict, and how US credibility was constantly diminished because Israel didn’t care and knew they’d get all the money they wanted, no matter how far over the line they crossed.
The article doesn’t end on an optimistic note.
On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)
During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.
Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.
“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”
Who in the world cares what red line the US draws anymore?
Biden was a weak president, but don’t expect Trump will be any better. He’s going to bluster and lie louder is all.
Actually more or less all of the Gaza population has been displaced multiple times as Israel systematically destroys everything standing.
Around a million people, half the population, is spending the winter in tent camps.
That is such an obvious lie, Mr. Patel shouldn’t have even bothered.
I think this assessment is a bit one-sided. Biden’s policy with respect to Israel has been worthy of condemnation, but he did end US support for the genocide in Yemen, something previous Presidents, both Democratic and Republican, did not have the courage to do. He also ended the US occupation of Afghanistan, and took a lot of heat for it (it arguably sunk his presidency).
If future Presidents took the criticism of Biden from both left and right to heart, they would likely conclude that he was too timid and that they ought to be more aggressive, more militaristic, and more willing to deploy US troops overseas.
leovigild: two things. First, it’s focused on Israel. Anything good that Biden did in any other field doesn’t affect what happened in Israel.
Second, in what reality are you thinking the war in Yemen is over? The US launched a major air strike on North Yemen just last week, and under Biden’s watch the war has expanded to now blocking most shipping through the Red Sea.
The one success in the middle east that happened under Biden is the overthrow of Assad, which he seems mostly to have allowed to happen rather than proactively doing anything.
At least you can talk about hypothetical red lines regarding Israel in US politics. In Germany that would be an instant declaration of antisemitism and political suicide. Anything but “unconditional support” would be “unthinkable”.
The ceasefire is imaginary. How do you get ceasefire when you give the side committing genocide several billion dollars in munitions to allow it to continue whenever it feels like it? In fact Netanyahu has already broken the ceasefire. The agreement included the release of Palestinian prisoners. He has already refused to do this, falsely claiming that the are all members of Hamas.
You’d think Germany would be a bit more attuned to avoiding abetting a genocide, but no, that’s not the lesson they learned.
None of this will ever change until we drop religion in its entirety. Once we realize that the “end times” prophecy in the bible is bullshit, then we’ll stop supporting Israel.
The ultimate goal of Israel is the annexation of the West Bank and the relocation of the Gaza Arabs to neighboring Arab nations. But, saying this out loud is anathema to much of the world. Trump has chosen Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel. He’s an End Timer who opposes a two-state solution. So, whatever faults you may find with Biden’s approach, things will be much worse for the Palestinians under the Trump administration.
And if Biden had sided with the people in Gaza the Dems would have been branded “antisemites” and lost a huge chunk of the American Jewish vote along with white middle America who tend to associate the term “Palestinian” with “terrorist.”
Harris probably would have lost by a larger margin than she did by ignoring the issue.
No: these “end time” prophecies are only one reason why the USA and other western states support Zionism, and only important in the USA itself – because only there do Christian “end times” numpties have any influence on policy. Israel is an extremely useful strategic ally in a crucial region for the USA and to a lesser extent for its allies; guilt over the Holocaust is a major reason for Germany’s uncritical support for Israel; many diaspora Jews do their best to influence policy in their own countries in favour of Israel (most notably AIPAC in the USA but also e.g. Labour Friends of Israel in the UK); antisemitism was historically an important reason for non-Jews to support Zionism (the hope being that Jews would emigrate to a Jewish “homeland” – this was for example a motivation for Arthur Balfour of the eponymous declaration), and probably still has some significance.
Under Biden, Palestinians were suffering genocide. How is it going to get worse? If it’s happening either way, is speeding it up actually worse?
Akira MacKenzie: does the Jewish vote go for Democrats? I had the impression that Biden had already lost them with merely talking about red lines — the mere suggestion that maybe genocide was bad was already labeled antisemitic.
@ 10
Two other reasons:
1) Israel is a trade partner. There is no way we are going to screw up that revenue stream.
2) The Israeli’s are “white” enough to serve as our Imperialist proxy state in a decidedly non-white region.
I mean, I guess this is all historically interesting, for as long as non-revisionist history exists. As has been made clear, all our humanist foot-stomping will change nothing.
KG @10,
perfect summary.