Biden doesn’t have much to show for his embrace of Israel
U.S. response to the Israeli Prime Minister’s comments on the 2016 Air Force One war in Ukraine and the attack on Hamas
President Biden got off Air Force One and greeted the Israeli prime minister with a hug.
Biden is following in the footsteps of popular politicians and backing Israel. It’s one long-held by political leaders in both parties, because Israel is the U.S.’s strongest ally in the Middle East.
The war in Ukraine and the attack on Hamas are expected to be discussed by him, as well as Israel’s response. Biden is trying to get funding for both conflicts. Congress has the power of the purse and that makes it more difficult for him to go through them.
The Republicans failed to pick a speaker. That leaves the US unable to respond in a substantive and strong way.
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It was quite an admission for a president. Biden can only warn if he maintains influence and that’s because Netanyahu is keeping him in a close embrace.
The world watched then and the world didn’t do anything, Biden said. We won’t do nothing again, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
For the first time this year, Gallup found this year that Democrats’ sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis. And that is driven by young voters.
The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll reflects that. People younger than 45 were less likely to say that they want a public show of support for Israel compared to people older than 45. Non-whites were 20 points less likely than whites to say so as well.
The cracks started showing after the Gaza hospital bombing. Before the United States weighed in, Democrats Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — the first two Muslim women elected to Congress — joined a pro-Palestinian chorus blaming Israel.
“Bombing a hospital is among the gravest of war crimes,” Omar tweeted. “The IDF reportedly blowing up one of the few places the injured and wounded can seek medical treatment and shelter during a war is horrific.”
After the U.S. intelligence assessment, Omar called for “an independent investigation to determine conclusively who is responsible for this war crime.”
A bipartisan statement from the Senate Intelligence Committee also said after reviewing available intelligence, it feels “confident that the explosion was the result of a failed rocket launch by militant terrorists.”
But a lot of damage had already been done. People weren’t waiting for confirmations, and protests erupted in countries like Jordan, where Biden was originally supposed to meet with Jordanian, Egyptian and Palestinian leaders.
“As an American, not just as a member of the United States Congress, I am ashamed,” she said, per ABC News. I am ashamed that they want to wait. Maybe next week.’ Is this possible? How many more have to die?”
She stated, “To our president.” I want him to know that I am a Palestinian American and a Muslim. And I think a lot of people are not going to forget this.”
“It’s truly disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, for example, tweeted. Who would say that a group just massacred innocent Israeli civilians over our ally?
He added, “Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire. … Hamas wants to destroy Israel. I can talk about a ceasefire after Hamas is destroyed.
When anything happens in the world, especially something of this magnitude, the president is expected to respond, to take a position and show leadership.
A president has to balance his view of the world with that of domestic politics. Initially, both looked like they were in line with each other.
Partisanship is entrenched, and foreign policy often ranks very low on the list of priorities for voters — despite it being one of the areas a president has the most control over.
To Mr. Biden’s mind, this has been the moment he has trained for his entire political career, a point he often makes when challenged about his age. In the past eight months, he has visited two countries in the midst of active wars. He married his public embracing with private cautions, and kept American troops out of both conflicts. He seems determined to prove that the US is still the only nation that can make things happen in a world of unpredictable chaos.
Biden said he also wants to help Israel avoid some of the mistakes the U.S. made in its “war on terror” following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaida.
“I understand,” Biden said Wednesday. Many Americans understand. I caution you not to be consumed by the rage you feel, as you cannot look at what has happened and not scream out for justice. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States, and while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
The Israelis praised Biden for his courage in coming at a time of war and for his support, as he pledged “we will not let you ever be alone” after attacks from Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis.
This degree of consultation is rare, if not unprecedented, even in a relationship this close, Israeli analysts said. If it has potential benefits for Mr. Netanyahu, it also carries risks. He may have political cover for a longer war, but it might also hamper how he conducts it.
Satellite images showed that Israel had already deployed hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles north of Gaza as it prepared to send tens of thousands of soldiers into the enclave.
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“The late Ariel Sharon was in the habit of saying, ‘We will defend ourselves, by ourselves,’” wrote Nadav Eyal, an Israeli analyst, in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Netanyahu has not projected these values over the past few days. He wants to be the United States’ 51st state. This comes with a price, symbolic as well as practical.”
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is cautious of overstepping in the Gaza area, his right-wing coalition partners are eager to cause a fire that will burn down the entire neighborhood. Settlers there have killed at least seven Palestinian civilians in acts of revenge in the last week, and the Israeli military is even more hawkish than the prime minister now and is determined to deliver a blow to Hamas that the whole neighborhood will never forget. The ability to keep the West Bank under control has been undermined by Israel’s refusal to transfer tax money owed to the Palestinian Authority.
President Biden could go down as the last American president born in World War II and shaped by the view of American power brought about by the Cold War. No other leader on the world stage today can boast that they sat in the Israeli prime minister’s office 50 years ago with Golda Meir, or discussed dismantling Soviet nuclear weapons with Mikhail Gorbachev.
So perhaps it is no surprise that the twin wars in which Mr. Biden has chosen to insert the United States — defending Ukraine as it tries to repel a nuclear-armed invader, and now promising aid to Israel in wiping out the leadership of Hamas — have brought out a passion, emotion and a clarity that is usually missing from the president’s ordinarily flat and meandering speeches.
“When presidents get into their sweet spot you usually see and hear it, and in the past few weeks you have seen and heard it,” said Michael Beschloss, the historian and author of “Presidents of War,” which traces the rocky history of Mr. Biden’s predecessors as they plunged into global conflicts, avoided a few, and sometimes came to regret their choices.
The backdrop of his rare Oval Office address on Thursday night and a question about whether Mr. Biden can bring the American population along are more ambiguous questions than at any point in his presidency. The past 18 months have shown that he is focused on restoring a global order that is fast unraveling and protecting free people from invasion and terrorism.
It is a far harder case to make now than in February 2022, when President Vladimir V. Putin tried a lightning-strike attack to overthrow an imperfect democracy in Ukraine and restore the Russian empire of Peter the Great. The initial overwhelming support for Ukraine — one of the few issues that seemed to unify Democrats and Republicans — is clearly shattering, with a growing part of the Republican Party arguing that this is not America’s fight. The slog across the Donbas, and the prospect of a long conflict in which Mr. Putin is waiting to see if America will elect former President Donald J. Trump or someone of similar antipathy to the war effort, only complicates the picture.
The high-stakes visit served simultaneously to illustrate the limits and the capability of U.S. influence in the region, and the importance of America’s longstanding relationship with Israel.
It also ties the administration to what happens next including more deadly Israeli air strikes in the densely populated Gaza Strip, targeting Hamas, and a possibility of a bloody ground campaign where civilian casualties could quickly mount, further inflaming anger among Israel’s Arab neighbors. Gaza’s health ministry says more than 3,400 Palestinians have been killed.
Biden’s 31 hour visit was mostly symbolic, but he also managed some concrete accomplishments. These included announcing $100 million in aid to the Palestinians, and convincing Israel to agree to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza and persuading Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi to open up a vital land crossing into southern Gaza.
The visit almost didn’t happen. Biden said that his team wanted to know whether or not it should happen. Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid the groundwork in a whirlwind visit to the Middle East last week that that included seven hours of talks with Netanyahu and his war cabinet.
That message of engagement was not only directed at Israel, but also to the rest of the Middle East — particularly Iran and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militia it backs, Katulis says.
Biden’s visit reinforced his warnings and the hard power signals that were sent when the U.S. deployed carrier task groups to the eastern Mediterranean.
The U.S. is worried that some members of Israel’s war cabinet want to attack Hezbollah even as they try to end the conflict with Hamas. The Americans told the Israelis that it was difficult to fight both Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north.
He says Biden and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “were very clear in warning Iran and Hezbollah, and this was a major contribution by the Biden administration to consolidating the status quo.”
But a planned meeting between Biden and regional leaders fell apart after a catastrophic explosion at a hospital in Gaza killed hundreds of Palestinians just hours before the president landed in Israel.
The cancellation of the Amman meeting does not mean that the door is not open between the Biden administration and key Arab countries.
“There’s genuine concern among U.S. officials about how civilian casualties can impact the mission itself and achieve the desired goals that Israel has stated.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has said the U.S. is “actively trying to find out exactly where” the American hostages are located and is doing its utmost to gain their release. The leader of Hamas said that the terrorist group might be open to releasing non-Israelis.
“I think it’s great that President Biden spoke to some of the families of the hostages, I think there’s some hope for that,” she says. But he calls the fate of those American captives “a big open question.”
The effort by top American officials to head off an Israeli offensive on Hezbollah, reported in detail here for the first time, reveals anxieties by the Biden administration over the war planning of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides, even as the two governments strive to present a strong united front in public.
Senior U.S. officials have told me that the possibility of a regionwide war drawing the United States into it is much greater than it was five days ago. As I write on Thursday night, The Times is reporting that a U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea on Thursday shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from Yemen that the Pentagon said might have been headed toward Israel. More missiles likely from pro-Iranian militias were fired at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and at Israel from Lebanon.
Israel is not likely to let Iran use its proxies to hit Israel without eventually firing a missile directly back at Tehran. Anything can happen if that happens. Israel is believed to have submarines in the Persian Gulf.
Israel should not operate End-Hamas-once-and-forall, but instead Operation Save Our Hostages: How Israel should send a single vote to Israel
According to Nahum Barnea, the P.I.J. achieved more this week with a failed rocket than it did in all of its successful missile launches.
How so? After that rocket failed and fell on the Palestinian hospital in Gaza, killing scores of people, Hamas and the P.I.J. rushed out and claimed — with no evidence — that Israel had deliberately bombed the hospital, setting streets ablaze across the Arab world. When Israel and the United States offered compelling evidence a few hours later that the P.I.J. accidentally hit the Gaza hospital with its own rocket, it was already too late. The meeting of Arab leaders with Biden was canceled as the Arab street was on fire.
That is why I believe that Israel would be much better off framing any Gaza operation as “Operation Save Our Hostages” — rather than “Operation End-Hamas-once-and-for-all” — and carry it out with surgical strikes and special forces that can still get the Hamas leadership, but also draw the brightest possible line between Gazan civilians and the Hamas dictatorship.
I have a single vote in America. The president said during his speech that he would ask Congress for an additional 14 billion dollars in assistance for Israel, and $100 million for the Palestinians in Gaza.
If Israel needs weapons to protect itself from Hamas and Hezbollah, by all means ship them. But in terms of broader economic aid for Israel, it should be provided only if Israel agrees not to build even one more settlement in the West Bank — zero, none, no more, not one more brick, not one more nail — outside the settlement blocs and the territory immediately around them, where most Jewish settlers are now clustered and which Israel is expected to retain in any two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Netanyahu’s coalition agreement actually vows to annex the whole of the West Bank.)
The keystone of Bibi Netanyahu’s 15 years as prime minister has been strategically expanding settlements to prevent any prospect for a contiguous Palestinian state ever coming into being.
The Palestinian Authority needs to appoint a new leader quickly if it wants to build decentPalestinian institutions that earn its people’s trust and legitimacy. In order to win a free and fair election against Hamas in the West Bank or Gaza, the Palestinian authority needs to coexist with the Jewish state.
The leader blatantly acted against the interests of the U.S. He was willing to destabilize America’s allies, Jordan and Egypt, to pursue more settlements. He was willing to risk America’s biggest diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, if the pact meant halting settlements. He has shown no willingness yet to halt settlements to secure a historic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia.
America has been indirectly funding Israel’s slow-motion suicide — and I am not just talking settlements. Look at what Netanyahu did last June. Netanyahu needed to buy off the ultra-Orthodox parties to keep himself out of jail, and he gave them an unprecedented increment of allocations to not teach English, science and math. Israel invests an average of 14 years of total funding for the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T., according to Mr. Ben-David. “It is completely nuts.”
This season of war has to be a season for answers about what will happen the morning after. I am hardly the only who wants to know. The essay written by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari about Netanyahu was published in Haaretz this week.
The Status of the Hezbollah War and Implications for the Security and Security of the State of Israel and the U.S.
The US and Israel say that President Biden and his top aides have warned Israel against launching a big attack against Hezbollah because it could end up in a war with Hamas.
U.S. officials believe Israel would struggle in a two-front war and that such a conflict could draw in both the United States and Iran, the militia’s main supporter.
