Joe Biden has praised racist Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Golda Meir on many occasions, but don’t expect Kamala Harris to score points off him for it, as she did over his fondness for southern racists. She has had a warm meeting with Netanyahu, refused to criticize Israel’s human rights record, and told the rightwing pro-Israel group AIPAC that she raised money for Israel as a girl and Israel’s story reminds her of the civil rights struggle in the U.S.
Senator Kamala Harris is seeking to separate herself from the Democratic field by being an unapologetic booster of Israel. Her message to the AJC yesterday contains a vow– “I will do everything in my power to insure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense” — but not a word of criticism of the “democratic and Jewish state.”
Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg hint at mild criticisms of Israel in comments to the American Jewish Committee while Cory Booker avoids the topic. Biden said American friends have to be honest with Israel before using the opportunity to criticize Palestinians: “They have to be ready to negotiate. They have to be ready to recognize a two-state solution as the only way forward.”
As a US carrier steams toward Iran, Trump risks another disastrous neoconservative war in the Middle East. The pundits and pols who supported the Iraq war, from Joe Biden to Jeffrey Goldberg to Roger Cohen, still have not accounted for that tragic error; and they could clear their account nobly today by coming out against any war with Iran based on sad experience.
Joe Biden has bragged of raising money from the Israel lobby group AIPAC, declared “Israel…the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East,” professed, “I’m a Zionist,” and in 2014 said he had told Netanyahu, “I love you. Read an overview of Biden’s remarks on Jews and Israel, including his belief that efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, or even to protest the 2014 Gaza onslaught, are anti-Semitic.
Having spent most of the day stressing “his personal love for the Jewish state as…