Right after 7 October, President Biden made it a point to visit Prime Minister Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, becoming the first US president to visit Israel in wartime. Biden told Netanyahu that he was standing next to him not just as a US president but as a Christian Zionist. He condemned what Hamas had done, calling it the worst calamity to hit the Jews since the Holocaust.
Biden counselled Bibi to not act emotionally, like the US had after 9/11. He cautioned Netanyahu not to invade Gaza. But then he watched quietly as the Israeli military invaded Gaza and went on a rampage against every living creature. Biden did not even talk of stopping military supplies to Israel, let alone sponsor a UNSC resolution calling for a ceasefire. Occasionally, he would politely call on Netanyahu to avoid civilian casualties.
In response, Israel began dropping leaflets from the air telling the civilians of Gaza to move out of the areas that Israel would be targeting. Of course, not everyone was able to move out in time. Thousands were killed or wounded in the massive and unsparing bombardment that Israel unleashed on Palestinians. The Israeli Air Force spared no building – whether a hospital, a school, an office, or an apartment. This was not a sign of Israeli military prowess – since the Palestinians neither had an air force or anti-aircraft artillery.
As Palestinians began moving to safer zones, they were attacked enroute. Those who somehow managed to arrive in one piece at the safe zone were attacked once they had arrived. What did Biden do? He continued arming the Israelis to their teeth, knowing fully well that weapons paid for by the American taxpayers would be used to slaughter innocent Palestinians. In the onslaught that followed, even babies were not spared, let alone children.
Those who survived ended up living in tents in the dead of winter, with limited food supplies and even more limited medical supplies. Biden would occasionally ask Israelis to be “more careful” but qualify that by saying tragedies happen in war and citing how many innocent civilians had died when the Allied Forces bombed Germany.
As starvation began to spread and Gaza stood on the brink of famine, Biden cut off funding for the main UN organisation that was helping manage the food supplies, claiming that it had been penetrated by Hamas. Only a handful of employees who worked at UNRWA were accused of being Hamas sympathisers out of the thousands who worked there.
Biden has created a culture in which any criticism of Israel is immediately labeled antisemitic
As the months progressed, and Israeli atrocities began to make the headlines in all major news sources, including the New York Times, Biden threatened to withhold a billion dollars’ worth of arms supplies to Israel. He came under attack for that threat and caved in, worried about losing the presidential election in November.
Thus, he repeated a pattern of behaviour which the world had witnessed earlier. He had threatened to sanction Israeli settlers in the West Bank who were attacking Palestinians by not giving them US visas. When that emaciated proposal was attacked in the US, he had withdrawn it.
As Netanyahu spoke of attacking Rafah, Biden drew a red line. There shall be no invasion of Rafah, he said, until a plan was developed for safeguarding the civilian population. Israel did not develop such a plan or share it with the US. It simply invoked the conceit of being a “western democracy.”
Having made that claim, it began attacking Rafah. The first attack killed several civilians living in tents. The world was outraged. Biden expressed regret at the loss of life but added that this was not a full-scale attack of the kind he had cautioned against. Thus, Israel had not crossed a redline and he would keep sending it billions in arms and ammunition.
Biden has created a culture in which any criticism of Israel is immediately labeled antisemitic. That’s how the massive student protests were dismissed.
But the resignation of a Jewish woman in the US Department of the Interior has stumped Biden. In her letter of resignation, said, “I can no longer in good conscience represent this administration amidst President Biden’s disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” She noted that she has spent time in Israel and Palestine and knows both Hebrew and Arabic and has been active in the Jewish community in the US for a long time.
It does not stop there. Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, a German-born Jewish man whose parents survived the Holocaust, appeared on GPS, Fareed Zakaria’s mainstream program on CNN, and said that he had been “persuaded” in recent months that Israel is “engaged in genocide against Palestinians” and that conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel is ludicrous.
Of course, among US politicians, Biden is not the worst of the lot. Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the UN, former governor of South Carolina and a former presidential candidate of the Republican Party, recently visited Israeli positions on the border with Lebanon. There, she had herself photographed writing “Finish them” on Israeli artillery shells. Later, she had herself photographed touching the wailing wall in Jerusalem.
Not to be outdone, Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina visited Tel Aviv for the fifth time since October 7. Netanyahu hailed him as Israel’s best friend. There, Graham lambasted the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for issuing an injunction that calls on Israel not to enter Rafah. He called on Israel to ignore the injunction and said, “Israel has the right to defend itself without apology, and we should give them the weapons and ammunition they need to survive.”
Defending the slaughter of civilians in Gaza by asserting that Israel conforms to Western values and that democracies do not target civilians is a lie which has been shredded multiple times on the world stage.