Biden is following Netanyahu off a cliff

BY MITCHELL PLITNICK

In refusing to pressure Israel into a ceasefire while continuing to launch strikes on Yemen, Biden has shown utter contempt for all Arabs and Muslims, including his own Arab and Muslim American citizens who say they won't vote for him over Gaza.

The two-state song and dance is back on center stage again in Palestine and Israel. As part of their ceasefire idea, the United States, with the backing of Egypt and Qatar, have tied reconstruction in Gaza to normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia and a “credible and irreversible path” to a Palestinian state. 

It’s hardly news to anyone that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately rejected this idea. Netanyahu has centered blocking a Palestinian state for most of his political career. It is the basis on which people vote for and support him. 

Yet when U.S. President Joe Biden, after a conversation with Netanyahu, was asked if a Palestinian state is impossible with Netanyahu in office, he said, “No, it’s not,” a response which launched a million laughs around the world at the blatant obliviousness of the President of the United States. 

Netanyahu, for his part, immediately implied Biden lied, stating unequivocally that Israel would retain security control over Gaza, a position which “clashes with the principle of sovereignty but what can you do.” Indeed, just a day earlier, Netanyahu had stated explicitly that Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River.” That was Netanyahu’s way of saying “from the river to the sea,” though, despite a mistranslation by i24 News that caused some commotion, he didn’t use those exact words. The meaning, however, was clear: Israel alone would exist between the Jordan and the Mediterranean as one apartheid state. 

This was yet another direct shot at Biden, who is, maddeningly, continuing to inflict massive harm to himself politically with his steadfast support of Netanyahu despite the Israeli PM going out of his way to insult and embarrass Biden at every turn. Biden tied U.S. policy to Netanyahu’s whims at the very beginning, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack, and he has allowed Israel to lead the U.S. by the nose in every way ever since. 

Biden’s entire administration has been reduced to useless rhetoric while refusing to take any action to defend Palestinian lives. That may not be all that unusual, but Biden has also allowed Netanyahu to jeopardize U.S. security concerns and strategic interests throughout the Middle East in an unprecedented manner even for this most unusual of all relationships. He has done this despite growing voices in Israel that are recognizing, even while they themselves are still screaming for vengeance, that Netanyahu is pursuing the war based on his personal needs and interests, not Israel’s.  

Despite reports of Biden “growing frustrated” with Netanyahu, there remains no sign that the lock-step support for Israel is being shaken in the slightest. Biden even seems to be abandoning strategic concerns in order to protect Israel’s onslaught. This is evident in his response to Ansar Allah (commonly referred to as the Houthis) targeting ships with some connection to Israel in the Red Sea. 

Asked if his repeated bombing of Yemen — one of the poorest and most devastated countries in the world after years of Saudi-U.S. attacks — was working, Biden responded, “When you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

The response was stunning. Biden stated plainly that he knows that bombing Yemen will not stop the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Even leaving aside the implication that protecting shipping is worth risking American lives and potentially sparking a regional war while the lives of over 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza with thousands more deaths to come isn’t worth just stopping the massive flow of arms to Israel, this single-minded devotion to violence for the sake of violence should be giving every American pause. 

American leaders will argue that they have to “impose a cost” on Ansar Allah for their actions, and that they are “working to end the fighting in Gaza as soon as possible.” But this is obviously futile and false. The attacks in the Red Sea are only happening because of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, and stopping that genocide will make shipping in the Red Sea secure. The White House is well aware of this, as they are equally aware that the entire temperature of the region is rising every day, with the potential for setting off a much bigger war, intentionally or accidentally, growing by leaps and bounds.

Only one party benefits from the war continuing, and that is the far-right Israeli government headed by Netanyahu. For him, the longer the war continues, the longer he avoids the consequences of his corruption from before October 7 and the outrage of the Israeli people for his actions on and since October 7. 

For Israel’s far-right parties, including Likud, the goal of this war has always been to destroy the Palestinian national movement, not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank as well. It is very much to solve the entire question of the 1967 occupation by establishing an Israel “from the river to the sea” that includes few Palestinians and no “Palestinian nation” as such. The war needs to continue for quite a while for that goal to be achieved. Expansion of the conflict to the Red Sea or Lebanon would widen the opportunities to escalate in the West Bank. 

Biden, as well as his accomplices Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and others, seem oblivious to these realities. Indeed, they seem determined not only to allow Israel to gradually push harder and harder on Hezbollah in Lebanon, but to continue to ratchet up the tensions in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Ignoring domestic realities, too

Biden seems intent on communicating his utter contempt for all Arabs and Muslims — not just Palestinians — and is by no means sparing American citizens in doing so. When asked if he is concerned about so many Arab-Americans saying they will not vote for him, Biden dismissed this by saying that Trump wants to “ban Arabs” from entering the country. 

In response, Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan — a key battleground state that Biden is currently losing because of his genocidal policy toward Gaza — said the response was insulting “on so many levels. 1 – Trump instituted a Muslim ban not Arab ban. 2 – most Arab Americans are Christian and most Muslim Americans are non-Arab. 3 – We’ve lost loved ones– family and friends. Our families villages wiped off the map. Not something you simply forget about. Trump is a threat, I’ll never deny that. But so is Biden’s support of a genocide and endless wars in the Middle East.”

The blithe dismissal of Arab American concerns and the lack of familiarity with an issue as huge as Trump’s Muslim ban reflect a deep racism and indifference to Arabs that cannot be disconnected from Biden’s policies in both Palestine and the broader Middle East. The political short-sightedness of literally telling a group of marginalized Americans that they have to vote for you because the alternative is even worse is staggering. Arab and Muslim Americans are not the only group Biden treats this way; just ask Black Americans. But taking such a condescending attitude while funding, arming, and enabling genocide raises both immorality and political suicide to new levels. 

Biden’s comments reflect a lack of strategy both in the region and domestically. They also reflect a U.S. president who is following the lead of a far-right, corrupt Israeli prime minister not only in matters of policy, but also in the racist view of Arabs, be they in Palestine or the United States. 

In Israel, there have been many who have voiced concern about the absence of an endgame or any real strategy in Israel’s assault on Gaza beyond causing as much death and destruction as possible. And while that has been discussed in the United States as well, none of this seems to have penetrated the White House or other parts of the administration. 

Despite Biden’s boundless genuflection to Israel, Netanyahu is positioning his rhetoric to attack the president to forestall any efforts at a ceasefire and also to undermine his already shaky re-election chances. This is being noticed by Biden’s supporters in the media. 

Yet it seems that nothing will be enough for Biden to use the only tool that he has to stop Netanyahu: stopping the flow of arms. Biden seems determined to allow Israel to determine the course not just of the assault on Gaza but of U.S. policy. The question is not why he’s doing that. The question is, why are we in the United States allowing it?