Joe Biden has been cravenly subservient to whatever the Israeli government does. Nowhere has this been more apparent that his non-response to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and their additional brutal assault on Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and their attacks on Lebanon. Kamala Harris’s failure to distance herself from those policies and refusing to even allow a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic convention hurt her with many Arab-American voters and also those who are outraged at what is going there, though whether it was decisive in her defeat is unclear.

The one tiny step that Biden took was to say in October that he would cut off military aid to Israel if they did not increase the supply of food, water, medicine, and other essential items to Gaza where they have been deliberately starving the population, a war crime of staggering proportions. The target that Israel had to meet to prevent this cut off was very modest, just an increase from the almost zero that was going in at the time of the ultimatum. Biden also conveniently put the deadline to be after the election.

Well, that deadline finally arrived with Israel not doing anything close to meeting the targets and, to no one’s surprise, Biden decided not to carry out his threat.

Jonah Valdez writes about what happened.

ON OCTOBER 13, the Biden administration sent a strongly worded letter to Israel with a simple message: Allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza within 30 days, or we may pull away our military support. 

At the time, Israel was in the early stages of its siege on northern Gaza, where thousands of civilians had been sheltering. The leaked letter, written by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and addressed to Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, outlined a list of concrete demands intended to ensure the flow of supplies into Gaza to address starvation, the lack of medical resources, and avoid the forced displacement of Palestinians out of northern Gaza. 

When the deadline arrived 30 days later, on Tuesday, November 12, a group of humanitarian organizations published a report finding that Israel has failed to deliver on most, if not all, of the criteria outlined by the U.S in the October letter. In response, the U.S. said it will continue providing arms to Israel.

“We at this time have not made assessments that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law,” State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday. “We are going to continue to assess their compliance with U.S. law. We’ve seen some progress being made, we’d like to see more changes happen.” 

For humanitarian aid groups who are doing work on the ground in Gaza, the State Department’s position couldn’t be further from reality. 

A group of eight humanitarian organizations released a report Tuesday that tracked each of the letter’s demands and how Israel is failing on all but several of them. The “Gaza Scorecard” showed that within the past 30 days, Israel has failed to open any new border crossings into Gaza; only 42 trucks have been allowed per day, well short of the U.S. benchmark of 350 trucks; the Israeli military killed four aid workers; the military bombed a polio vaccine clinic during a humanitarian pause; about 80 percent of Gaza remains under evacuation orders, continuing the displacement of Palestinians; and aid groups have been prevented from entering northern Gaza where the Israeli military continues its siege.

Is anyone surprised that Israeli governments and their prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu treat Biden and other American leaders with open contempt? They have justifiable reason to believe that they can do whatever they want to Palestinians and Lebanese and the US will do absolutely nothing but will continue to lavish aid on them.