In Gaza, Biden is an equal partner in Israel’s mass murder

Rather than use vital US leverage to stop Israel's assault on Gaza, Joe Biden fuels the carnage.

(Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

At a Minneapolis fund-raiser on Wednesday, President Joe Biden was interrupted by Jessica Rosenberg, a rabbi and member of the group Jewish Voice for Peace, who called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Biden rejected the suggestion, but claimed that he now endorses a “pause” to help “get the prisoners out.” To make his case, Biden revealed that he recently convinced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt the bombing of Gaza and allow for Hamas’ release of two American hostages. “I’m the guy that convinced Bibi to call for a cease-fire to let the prisoners out,” Biden said.

The White House later clarified that Biden’s use of the word “cease-fire” was an error, when he meant to say pause. But his botched admission underscored that his White House holds unprecedented leverage over the Israeli government, which has relied on US military, economic, and diplomatic support since becoming its client state in the aftermath of the 1967 war. Accordingly, Biden’s refusal to demand a ceasefire makes him an equal partner in Israel’s assault on Gaza, and the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians — a majority of them reportedly women and children — that continue to mount.

Biden, the Washington Post notes, “has so closely aligned with Israel and its right to retaliate that he runs the risk of being held responsible for how it carries out its response.” That responsibility has been made clear from the start, when Biden brushed aside Israeli leaders’ genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians to declare his full support for their war plans. Recounting an October 10^th call with Netanyahu, Biden said: “I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive and overwhelming.”

As Gaza’s toll grew to unprecedented levels, Biden took the extraordinary step of denying it, telling reporters that he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” without bothering to explain why. White House spokesperson John Kirby doubled down by claiming that Gaza’s Health Ministry cannot be trusted due to its affiliation with Hamas. “The numbers are not reliable. They’re just not reliable,” Kirby said. He declined to mention that the State Department has previously relied on the ministry’s numbers in prior conflicts. “If anything, the dead are undercounted,” a UN official told the Wall Street Journal, which noted that “the health ministry’s tally doesn’t include people still under the rubble.”

Biden’s support has continued even through US officials were privately informed that Israel has no concern about causing “mass civilian casualties” on the scale of World War II, according an account in the New York Times:

It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.

Despite hearing of these private plans for mass murder – possibly to the level of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the White House has given a green-light. “Although the United States has considerable leverage over Israel as its largest military, political and economic backer,” the Washington Post notes, “U.S. officials have not threatened to withdraw support or impose any consequences if the Jewish State forges ahead.”

According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the US has only offered private feedback on how the massacre is carried out. “We have pressed them on questions like objectives and matching means to objectives, about both tactical and strategic issues associated with this operation,” Sullivan told CNN. “But we have done all of that behind closed doors.”

As for whether Israel is complying with international law in pursuing its “objectives,” Sullivan insists that the US will ensure “accountability” that US “weapons will be used in accordance with the law of armed conflict.” Yet the top State Department official responsible for that very compliance, Josh Paul, recently resigned in protest of Biden’s impunity for Israel. According to Paul, calls for a review of Israeli adherence to US law were “met with silence — and the clear direction that we needed to move as fast as possible to meet Israel’s requests.” To him, this marked “an unprecedented unwillingness to consider the humanitarian consequences of our policy decisions.”

In Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas on earth, this has meant aiding an Israeli bombing campaign that, in just over three weeks, “has become one of the most intense of the 21st century,” the New York Times notes. Marc Geralsko, a former UN war crimes investigator, reports that Israel has already “dropped the number of bombs that the US drops in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller and denser area - where the margin of error increases.”

According to Save the Children, the number of Palestinian children killed in just three weeks has already surpassed the annual number of children killed across the world's conflict zones since 2019. “Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” a UNICEF spokesperson says. “It’s a living hell for everyone else.” In a statement demanding a ceasefire, seven UN special rapporteurs now warn that “the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.”

When the White House has opted to use its leverage, Israel has complied. When Israel shut off Gaza’s phone and internet connection – depriving 2.3 million people of contact with themselves and the outside world – the US intervened. “We made it clear they had to be turned back on,” a US official told the Wall Street Journal. Before that, the US also pressured Israel to allow a trickle of aid into Gaza, rather than follow through on its vow for a complete cut-off. “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them,” Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant privately explained. “We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

If the Biden administration opted to use that leverage to end Israel’s assault, it would not be for the first time. According to the book “The Last Politician,” an insider account of Biden’s presidency by The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, a May 2021 Israeli assault on Gaza only ended under White House pressure.

Foer describes a hands-off approach in which Biden initially “declined to chastise” Israel after it destroyed civilian buildings in Gaza, including one housing the Associated Press. And even when Netanyahu “inadvertently admitted he had no defined objective” in Gaza, Biden still “held his tongue.”

When Biden finally decided to act, Israel complied. In their fourth call of Israel’s offensive, Netanyahu “kept begging for time” but “struggled to justify his request, because he couldn’t point to fresh targets that needed striking.” And so Biden finally laid down the law. “Hey, man, we’re out of runway here,” he told Netanyahu. “It’s over.” Foer describes the result:

And then, like that, it was. By the time the call ended, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a cease-fire that the Egyptians would broker.

Beyond its current call for a mere pause to Israel’s assault, the White House is also engaging in damage control with the Muslim-American and Arab-American communities, whose votes are no longer assured in 2024.

One such outreach attempt came at a recent White House meeting. According to the Washington Post, the White House initially invited a Palestinian American as part of a small group to meet with Biden personally. But after this individual, who “lost scores of relatives in the Gaza strikes,” became “publicly critical of the U.S. response,” the invitation was withdrawn.

In avoiding a face-to-fate encounter with someone mourning slain relatives in Gaza, Biden was being consistent. When it comes to Palestinians, the White House has made clear that it is only comfortable abetting their mass murder from afar.