There is growing pressure on Joe Biden from Israel and its lobby to meet Benjamin Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister comes to the States later this month. “Netanyahu is trying to con his way into the White House,” writes a Haaretz columnist.
The conventional wisdom today is that Biden will meet Netanyahu at the United Nations, though not invite him to the White House.
Netanyahu and the lobby desperately need a presidential meeting to try make Israel normal again, and get past all the frightful news of the democracy protests and of his fascistic ministers. “He will exploit his meeting with President Biden, he will employ the use of endless lies – All to validate his attempted regime coup,” Israeli journalist Orly Barlev writes.
So, former Israeli intelligence chiefs and the democracy protesters in the U.S. are urging Biden not to meet Netanyahu. In fact, there are a great number of Israelis urging Biden to downgrade Israel, to recognize apartheid, and cut off military aid. Just like the U.S. left has been saying for many years.
The sad part of this story is that Joe Biden also needs the meeting. And what we are seeing today is not Israel’s isolation, but the White House taking one step after another to normalize the fascistic Netanyahu government. To make this government just another face of Israeli “democracy,” as the Israel lobby tells us. And make the Israel issue go away before the 2024 election cycle– in which Biden will depend on pro-Israel donors to fund his campaign.
So Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaches out to Netanyahu and affirms the relationship between the countries as if nothing is going on.
So Biden names a staunch Jewish supporter of Israel as his next ambassador, to the delight of the Israel lobby.
So yet another group of Democratic Congresspeople travels to Jerusalem for a meeting with Netanyahu, paid for by AIPAC, the rightwing Israel lobby group.
So the U.S. advances a visa-waiver program for Israeli travelers, an insult to Palestinians who spend hours at Israeli checkpoints.
So Biden tries to outdo Trump as a friend to Netanyahu, pushing a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel that Jared Kushner calls “a vindication” of Trump’s policy in the Middle East.
All this as Netanyahu makes a deal with the Russians, flouting the U.S. line on sanctions.
“The U.S. is a thing you can move very easily,” Netanyahu said in 2001, and the U.S. proves him right again and again.
Biden’s collapse is tragic for anyone who cares about human rights.
The Israeli government is doing its utmost right now to humiliate and dispossess Palestinians. Its apartheid system has been declared openly by fascistic ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. And the government is following through with actions: It has ethnically cleansed a large section of the West Bank between Ramallah and Jericho. It has advanced a record number of housing units in the West Bank in the first six months of the year– 12,000.
Apartheid and the one-state reality are now widely recognized inside the U.S. establishment, and the progressive Democratic base understands that it’s apartheid. But Biden can’t say a word.
Liberal Zionists are, as usual, caught in the middle. You would hope they would speak out as large sections of the West Bank are emptied of Palestinians. And as Netanyahu’s ministers make hateful comments. But they’ve been largely silent.
That’s because the party line in Washington has been laid down. Democrats are sticking with Netanyahu through 2024. He is still our best friend. Dozens of Democratic congressional visits affirm that. Even J Street’s congressional delegation met with Netanyahu and threw J Street under the bus to do so, and J Street urged them to do so.
Earlier this year J Street called for Biden to express his sharp disapproval of Israeli actions. The time for “business as usual” is over, it said. The American Jewish community is critical of Israel.
But look, we’re right back to business as usual. So J Street lauds Biden’s new ambassador to Israel and expresses outrage over Mahmoud Abbas’s recent speech, and calls for a retraction and apology, as other leading Jewish groups have done. But it has issued no statement against Netanyahu going to the White House, no statement deploring Ben Gvir’s “Sorry Mohammed” racist speech and asking for an apology. Americans for Peace Now has also taken that path.
Liberal Zionists have no choice but to go along with the right-wing Israel lobby if they are to maintain influence in the Democratic Party. This is a political dynamic the lobby and the Jewish community established long ago, and that politicians heed today: Don’t allow any daylight between the American government and the Israeli one if you want the support of the Jewish community.
And the number of Palestinian victims of this policy just keeps getting longer.
I guess an Israeli Jewish leader is allowed to be a racist, but anyone critical of Israel’s apartheid policies is tarred as an anti-semite. That must be President Biden’s position because his actions and words are prima facie evidence of his prejudice.
I am so disappointed in Joe Biden. His support of the Israeli government – which I assume is due simply to the need to satisfy his Dem. donors – may be his one flaw that would cause me to vote for a different D candidate next year. But if no one viable steps up I’ll have no choice, any R (and certainly tfg) is impossible to even contemplate.
Who can see that Netanyahu and successive Israeli leaders have been sponsored by the US, heavily pushed by the Christian Zionist, (Joe Biden, Mike Pence) and Evangelical movement? These Christians believe that God wants them to help re-Judify the whole of Ancient Zion including modern “Palestinian Zion” in order to meet a prophesied condition that will pave the way for the Second Coming. This, however, necessarily involves the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from (so far only) swathes of Palestine, (not a very “Christian” thing to do!) Perhaps encouraging Jews to perform this act is not regarded by Christians as being complicit, though The Saviour surely will!
Biden, (and other Christian Zionists and Evangelicals), needs to be questioned about his support for (necessarily ethnic cleansing), colonial Zionism. Let them explain why they believe that the living God requires them to commit Crimes Against Humanity against the Palestinians, ( and “because it is written in the (Hebrew) Scriptures” will not suffice). Expectations that Biden will or should do “the right thing” must be tempered by knowledge of his beliefs in End-of-Times theology and great desire to see Christ again walking on Earth
Biden is simply too old, too out of touch, and too cowed by decades of Israel lobby money, influence, mythology, and propaganda to stand up to the lobbyists, Netanyahu, his merry band of fascists, and Apartheid Israel.
He is incapable of seeing with his own lying eyes, that the lobby is nothing but a paper tiger, and that the lobby, Netanyahu, Israel, and the wealthy Jewish-American donors all need him (and the Democrats) more than he needs them.
Sadly, no significant changes or shifts in policy will happen until Biden and his generation of Israeli Apartheid defenders, apologists, enablers, financiers, donators, and facilitators dry up, retire, leave office or die of old age.
The good news is that we are already seeing this happen and a dramatic sea-change happening down ballot, as more and more younger leaders, vocal critics of Israeli Apartheid and Netanyahu, win their primaries and elections, enter office, openly question US political military, and financial support of Israel’s human rights violations, segregation, and racism, snub AIPAC, and openly defend the rights of the Palestinian people. All this as more and more Zionist and Zionist supporting dinosaurs in Congress retire or get voted out of office.
40 years ago mentioning Apartheid in the same paragraph as Israel was enough to run you out of the White House. 20 years ago questioning Israel’s indiscriminate killings was enough to run you out of Congress, 10 years ago openly criticizing Israel was enough to maybe get you primaried or knocked off the ballot. As of a little more than 5 years ago open criticism Israel, its Prime Minister, and calling Israel an Apartheid state, barely gets you a slap on the wrist in the House of Representatives and falsely being accused of anti-semitism on Twitter. Hell! Some racist and ACTUAL anti-Semitic quarters of Elon Musk’s platform of hate will probably even cheers you on.
Even without his grim trajectory of shift in support and attitude towards Apartheid Israel, time is not on its side. The candle is burning at both ends. As the money dries up, the ideologically unconditional support of Biden’s generation passes on, the entirely transactional and financially-conditional support of Jeffries’s generation runs out of donors, and the new no-strings-attached to Israel generation ascends, Israel will find that friends in Washington are few and the pressure will mount exponentially.
Regarding Biden meeting Netanyahu, the downgrade from the usual White House meeting to a UN building meeting is significant. There is no need for Left Zionists like APN and J Street to get in the headlines about this issue. It was Biden’s choice and he made the politically astute choice. I think it unfeasible for him to refuse to meet Netanyahu totally, that’s dreaming and not really useful. The timing of the announcement of this compromise UN meeting was somewhat problematic giving Bibi a boost at a particular moment that might not have been helpful (I think it was back in May), but the compromise was inevitable since Biden chose to refuse a White House invite.
Regarding Saudi Arabia, there is no comment by Phil Weiss here on Tom Friedman’s op-ed opposing the diplomatic breakthrough without the concurrent break up of the Netanyahu current coalition that would naturally oppose any concessions by Israel designed to firm up (revive) the two state solution. If the Friedman recipe for the breakthrough becomes a reality it will be significant and good. It probably won’t happen and particularly not before the November 2024 election, but if it happens in the form of the Friedman recipe, that would be a worthwhile outcome.
I don’t see that there is any use in J Street and APN getting into headlines regarding the KKK statements by Ben Gvir. (No comments here by Phil Weiss regarding the Mahmoud Abbas Holocaust statements.)