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Joe Biden meets Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on July 14, 2022. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US ambassador Tom Nides are at left. Photo tweeted by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden’s trip to the Middle East was a fiasco but the Israel lobby loved it. Former ambassadors Dan Shapiro and Martin Indyk celebrate the trip as a breakthrough and manage not to mention Israel’s killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during an hour’s talk. While an AIPAC officials says of the speech Biden gave when he arrived, “you would have been hard pressed to write a better speech, for the things we believe in.”

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, January 28, 2020. (Photo: Koby Gideon/GPO)

When Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) introduced a nonbinding resolution in support of a two-state solution in 2019, Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) called it “a one-sided take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” and Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) was even more direct: “I stand against a two-state solution.” Mast doesn’t represent some sort of hardline minority — he was voicing what has now become the GOP consensus.

The new two-state bill in the House promoted by progressive Congresspeople describes Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people.” This language is “unacceptable” to Palestinians, says Jafar Farah of the Mossawa Center in Haifa, because it prolongs discrimination embodied by the fact that Palestinians are not permitted to build a university in Nazareth over 40 years of demanding that right.

Obama jokes with Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, aboard Air Force One en route from London, England, to the G8 Summit in Deauville, France, May 26, 2011. Mike McFaul, Senior Director for Russian and Central Asian Affairs, left, and Director of Communications Dan Pfeiffer, center. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

“We pretended to my shame at times in the Obama administration that Netanyahu was interested in the two-state solution. When I dont think he was, ever,” Ben Rhodes says. And Rhodes is just as cynical about Palestinian opportunities for sovereignty under the Obama administration. “I can tell you we didn’t really give them one when I was there. Not a real one.”

Now Trump is gone. Liberal Zionists can no longer comfortably argue that injustice in Israel/Palestine is mainly caused by Benjamin Netanyahu and Jewish settlers. Nathan Thrall showed calmly and persuasively that the liberal Zionists and the Peace Processors have been running a long con game for decades, insisting that Israel will agree to a 2-state solution only if you don’t criticize and give them whatever they want.