The Washington Post writes today about President Biden's decision to transfer $1 billion in arms to Israel after halting a shipment last week:
The decision underscores the administration’s reluctance to defy pro-Israel donors in the Democratic Party who criticized Biden’s decision last week to withhold the shipment, which included controversial 2,000-pound bombs that have been involved in mass casualty events in Gaza.
I know it's longstanding habit to casually interpret every presidential decision in the rawest political terms, but this is crazy. Biden, for better or worse, has demonstrated from the start an absolute commitment to his principles in the Gaza war. He supports Israel utterly because he believes in Israel and always has. He simultaneously supports humanitarian assistance to Palestinians because he's a decent person and always has been. He withheld last week's shipment of bombs because recent events genuinely shocked him. But he continues to otherwise transfer billions of dollars in military aid because he hates Hamas and supports Israel—as he made clear at the time. There's not the slightest indication that he's been influenced in any of this by polls or Jewish donors or progressive aides or AIPAC or student protesters or Republican critics or personal pique at Benjamin Netanyahu's treacherous behavior.¹ He hasn't budged an inch from the convictions he's held for decades.
Why pretend otherwise? This is hardly some kind of 11-dimensional chess Biden is playing. It's all out in the open and has been plain since October 8th.
¹This one in particular impresses me. It's very mature, and presidents should put personal feelings aside in matters of great import, but damn. If I were Biden I'd want to spit in Bibi's face after the way he's betrayed years of (supposed) friendship and unquestioning support. The man is a total piece of shit.
The deranged shrieks from the AIPAC/right that Biden has "betrayed Israel" which is "fighting for its existence" are beneath contempt. Ditto comical attempts to argue Israel's position in Gaza is just like America's in 1945.
Interesting that Bibi supporters would bring up the World War II era. ….
An NBC News investigation into seven deadly airstrikes has found Palestinians were killed in areas of southern Gaza that the Israeli military had explicitly designated as safe zones.
….
Bibi runs an efficient killing machine. Crowd your victims into a small area, making it easier to kill as many innocent victims as possible with relatively little effort. It all sounds so …… familiar.
Btw, it was reported that during Israeli Independence Day celebrations on Tuesday, Israeli marchers were demanding that Bibi let them go into Gaza to rebuild the shattered cities into Israeli settlements. .. Oh boy! Maybe they will do it with American construction materials sent by Biden! The u.s. destroys. And then the u.s. rebuilds. It’s what we do.
So all that money distributed to Democrats by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups has no effect at all. Democrats would support Israel to the same extent even without this huge largesse. Who would have guessed?
I have no idea whether Democrats would support Israel in the absence of donations, and Kevin made absolutely no claim that they would. He said, and I agree, the Joe Biden, one single person, would do so.
I wouldn't do so if I were in Biden's position, but there's no reason to think that he's said anything insincere on this particular issue at any point over the last seven months.
I suspect another big reason is AIPAC's backup threats that, if YOU don't toe the line, we'll give all that money and more, more , MORE to a more right-thinking opponent.
Fear and greed. It's what makes America run.
It's a racket.
One of the things that has bothered me for a long time is that Democrats haven't figured out how to separate support for Israel from rejection of Bibi. Decades of this issue and no one's been able to resolve this, even though he's the one thing every Democrat -- left, center, or right -- agrees on, that he's a piece of shit.
Oh dear lord. What color is the sky in your world, Cliffie? I'm a Democrat, I don't cotton much to Netanyahu or his pack of theocidal Zionists ... and I support Israel. But you're right, that's anectdotal, literally just one data point. So let's see your (stat-supported) evidence.
I didn’t like it when Obama / Biden helped the Saudis attack Yemen. Or when they ran the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I was happy they didn’t intervene directly in Syria, but ultimately they did enough damage to be worthy of criticism there too. All of them run operations in Africa though perhaps now the US military has been kicked out of some countries like Niger and Chad.
Now Biden is faced with another decision with this Israeli war. Does he send weapons to Netanyahu who, it seems, comes close to acting like Assad in Syria? Apparently the answer is yes, he does. I think is this wrong for American interests just as I found all these other wars and interventions wrong for American interests.
The Middle East and Africa are shit shows. They will always be shit shows. If the Palestinians by some miracle had managed to defeat the Israelis, then Palestine would be a shit show too. This is why it’s best to not pick sides. It’s no win for American interests. And I surely don’t give a shit about Israelis or Palestinians there. I can’t believe they do this to their own children, but they do. They are despicable people.
Believe me when I say I myself am a bewildered cauldron of conflicting emotions and ideas on the I/P War...But I have to ask, why now? Why...why not two weeks from now, or a month, even two?
It is true that the House was going to mandate this, (did they actually have the votes?!?)...but so what?
This is another unforced error on the part of Mr Biden...I just don't understand the timing of this, I thought he was more adroit politically....I am also unhappy with SoS Blinken playing on stage with a rock band in Kiev last night. Traveller
"I thought he was more adroit politically". This is exactly Kevin's point: Biden acts on principles he believes in. He does not make policy decisions based on short term political considerations (that would be more Bill Clinton's style). He withdrew from Afghanistan because he thought--and still thinks and I think so too--it was the right thing to do. Or his actions on climate change: His motive is not that these are attractive for most of his base. He thinks they are necessary on the merits and therefore he acts. And his base likes his actions but that was not the point for Biden.
Now this time, with the Gaza war, his base does not share his beliefs and so we have a conflict. But what he acts on are still his beliefs and convictions. He does not try to manage his reelection via Israel-policy finesse. He tries to do the right thing--according to his lights--in this matter as in every other.
At what point will the Palestinian body count be high enough for Biden to put a halt to the turkey shoot in Gaza?
Inquiring minds want to know...
Gaza
Killed: at least 35,173 people, including more than:
More than 14,500 children killed
Injured: more than 79,061 people
Missing: more than 10,000
Anyone who is “shocked” by anything Israel has done since 10/7 is very, very deluded.
Anyone who is 'shocked' at anything Israel has done since, oh Prohibition or thereabouts is either very deluded, very ignorant, or very, very willfully obtuse.
I don't think anyone should feel too confident that they know what Joe Biden thinks.
He's dishonest, not in a Trumpian, "there is no truth but that which benefits me" manner, but more in a life-long politician sort of way. He swears he saw pictures of beheaded babies, for example.
And he portrays himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist. Maybe he is. Or maybe for essentially his entire political career, that position has been a mainstay of his political fund raising strategy.
Anyway, it's probably a distinction without a difference. Biden is very loyal to Israel, however that loyalty came about. His minor rebuke to the genocide was more to take the edge off of the concerns of those in the Democratic Party who think Israel is in the wrong.
This is a completely vacuous use of evidence. Drum starts with the premise that Biden is decent and then simply concludes that whatever he does is based on that decency. It is hard to imagine what behavior would undercut this conclusion. That is not to say that Drum is wrong. It is possible that Biden is not trying to navigate a difficult political issue. But, of course, the evidence is equally consistent with the idea that he is trying to navigate a difficult political situation with moneyed interests supporting giving aid to Israel while decency supports doing something to stop the human catastrophe that Israel is unleashing.
It would seem like the more interesting question is whether "decent" people really help their friends slaughter civilians as Biden is doing. And unfortunately the answer seems to be that they do when they have bought into a kindergarten version of history that treats only one side of a conflict as human.
Since only the protesters are loudly challenging this racist childish history, it is a good thing they are out there.
Right, This is at least the 3rd time Kevin has labeled Biden as "decent" without giving any definition of the word decent.
And honestly, I'm not sure "decent" is the criteia we should be looking at. Instead, it's a question of making correct moral choices in a complex situation. I think Biden clearly fails that test when it comes to what's happening in Gaza.
That clearly is not the standard of decency. The standard of decency is being horrified when horrible things happen, or something like that.
The problem, which we see a lot when it comes to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is that there are a lot of people who get to count as decent because they treat the deaths of Palestinian civilians as a shame. Often these same people treat the fact that Jewish students in the US have to hear criticism of Israel's slaughtering of Palestinians as a tragedy. By that distinction I mean that a shame is something one wishes wouldn't happen while a tragedy is something one feels motivated to prevent.
At this point I think that treating the deaths of Palestinians as a shame should not qualify as decent. Or to put it another way, I keep seeing arguments that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians does not explain the protests against Israel. This strikes me as almost sociopathic. Of course it does. The more interesting question is why decent people are OK with giving weapons to the people who are slaughtering civilians (and journalists, and aid workers). That question raises difficult questions of psychology that explain why bad things, like slavery and apartheid, happen. The question of why college students are protesting the slaughter of a captive people is that they are not confused about what decency entails.
Godwin's law be damned, but I'm sure ~1940 Germany was full of Germans who felt it was "a shame" how their Jewish neighbours were being treated too. "Yes, something must be done, but can't the SS be more restrained?"
> The man is a total piece of shit.
I think we need a blog post ranking shittiest shits. Trump vs Bibi vs Putin vs Kim vs ...
Is Trump going to get a pass because he hasn't committed genocide yet?
" he hates Hamas and supports Israel"
...and as with many he passively equates Hamas with Palestinians (you know, the people that have lived there for 1000s of years) and thus can blur out the devastation to civilians.
The state of Israel and zionists in particular have been gas lighting the US for decades.
There’s not a ton of daylight between the average Palestinian and Hamas. Palestinians elected Hamas and still support them. I didn’t see too many Palestinians speaking out against the 10/7 terror attack. I don’t see too many urging Hamas to surrender and release the hostages.
You didn't dig very hard to understand Hamas and their support and I'm not going to bother doing it for you.
Palestinians elected Hamas and still support them.
Palestinians elected Hamas once, almost two decades ago. They are held responsible for everything that Hamas does.
Israelis have elected Netanyahu's coalition six times. We are told that they shouldn't be held responsible for the awful things that the Israeli government does.
I didn’t see too many Palestinians speaking out against the 10/7 terror attack.
I see even fewer Jewish Israelis speaking out against settler terrorism in the West Bank.
I don’t see too many urging Hamas to surrender and release the hostages.
I don't see too many urging the end of settlement expansion and the return of stolen land.
I see a lot of people who seem to think that it is antisemitic to argue that Israelis have agency over their own actions.
One election in which the vote was 44.4-41.4. And the only other party tht had a chance of winning was Fatah, whcih was hated by many for its corruption and incometence. (the article below is from one day before the 2006 election).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jan/24/israel
So you are saying that in the way there is no daylight between Israelis and Netanyahu, there is no daylight between Hamas and the Palestinians. Of course the Israelis have elected Netanyahu more often than the Palestinians have voted for Hamas.
Or would you say that the relationship between the Israelis and Netanyahu should be thought about with some nuance since the Israelis deserves to be thought of like human beings, but there is no distance between Hamas and the Palestinians.
I think their brains are so damaged from all the propoganda they've consumed over the years that they're not even capabale of thinking on their own. All they do is repeat the same talking points (most of which are lies) over and over and over again. It's the same as the MAGA crowd.
This is one thing recent events have opened my eyes to. Israelis are a heavily propagandized population (not all, but as a general rule).
Here is an excellent talk from someone on the inside
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnaacT4eBrA
Not just Israelis. There's a video with Seth Rogan where he basically says "We were lied to. We were told it was a land without people".
The US history regarding Native Americans is a tragedy but at least we don't feel the need to lie about it.
Although to be fair we did lie about it until the 1960s at least, and at that point being honest had very little cost to it.