One of the most disgusting things about the Biden administration was his steadfast refusal to condemn Israel’s horrific genocidal behavior in Gaza. Kamala Harris’s refusal to distance herself from that policy when she became the Democratic nominee, and the Democratic Party establishment’s condoning of the genocide, was one of the factors that led to a lack of support for her, especially among the progressives and the young, and led to the poor performance in the 2024 elections.
David Kirkpatrick writes about how Biden ignored the plea of Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, that Israel was egregiously violating human rights and asking him to do something.
Allowing the Red Cross to visit detainees during a war or an occupation is one of the brightest lines established by the Geneva Conventions. Yet, after October 7th, Israel, for perhaps the first time in its history, fully blocked the organization’s access to Palestinian detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, putting it in the company of pariah states such as North Korea and Eritrea; even the warring factions in Yemen allowed Red Cross visits. Spoljaric noted that humanitarian groups and journalists had reported a “massive surge” in the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. At least a thousand had been released back into Gaza, and many of them gave accounts of torture, even though the Israeli military had concluded that they were not Hamas fighters. The Times reported that one released detainee, a law student named Fadi Bakr, described being beaten so severely that his genitals turned blue and blood still appeared in his urine weeks later. He said that Israeli guards had played music so loudly that one of his ears bled.
Of course, Biden did nothing, other that making weak appeals for restraint to Israeli prime minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to not do anything extreme, which he completely ignored, so confident was he of unquestioned US support.
At the same time, the Biden Administration’s staunch public backing of Israel during the Gaza war had created what Philip Gordon, the national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, described to me as a “moral hazard”—it had invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to expand the battle into a regional one. Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that: a January, 2024, strike on Damascus killed five senior Iranian military advisers; an April, 2024, strike on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria killed more than a dozen; a July, 2024, strike in Tehran assassinated a top Hamas political leader; a September, 2024, operation in Lebanon detonated explosives planted in thousands of walkie-talkies and pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters; a subsequent air strike killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The Israelis gave U.S. officials no meaningful warning in advance of these attacks, and, in what a former White House official called a “humiliation” of Biden, Netanyahu ordered the Nasrallah assassination just two days after the U.S., France, and several other allies called for Israel and Hezbollah to observe a three-week ceasefire. Yet the White House never publicly criticized Israel for acting unilaterally—and each time one of these actions triggered a clash the U.S. felt compelled to defend Israel. In April and October of 2024, the U.S. helped fend off Iranian counterstrikes so effectively that Israel suffered little harm. After the second round, Biden sent Israel about a hundred U.S. service members and a missile-defense system.
Some Biden advisers privately lamented the fact that U.S. protection was unintentionally encouraging Netanyahu’s brinkmanship. Gordon told me, “We could advise them very firmly—and Biden did that with Bibi repeatedly—‘Goddammit, take the win and don’t drag us into a further war.’ But the Israelis knew we were going to defend them.” Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, reportedly likened Netanyahu to a gambler “playing with house money.”
Israel had long been itching to have the US attack Iran but that seemed to be the one line that Biden would not cross. But with Trump, Netanyahu felt that he could be persuaded and we now know what happened.
Trump went along with Netanyahu. In June, 2025, the Israelis conducted an extended assault that appeared partly aimed at overturning the Iranian government. After about a week, Trump directed the U.S. military to join in a night of air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, perhaps because he feared missing out on a chance to take credit for the blow. But when Trump and Netanyahu launched a surprise attack eight months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that, this time, the President had decided to strike Iran “preëmptively,” because “there was going to be an Israeli action” that “would precipitate an attack against American forces.” Trump later claimed, unconvincingly, that he’d taken the lead with the Israelis and might even “have forced their hand”; Rubio’s account more credibly suggested that the Trump Administration had believed it couldn’t stop Israel from launching an attack but would nonetheless shoulder any backlash—a pattern painfully familiar to the Biden White House. Indeed, in retrospect, Biden and his closest advisers seem to have been perversely passive about Israel’s dissembling and defiance, especially when it came to the protection of Palestinian civilians.
The article goes on to say that Biden administration officials were shocked at the scale of the destruction carried out by Israel in Gaza that did not discriminate between civilian and military targets, killing men, women, children, young and old, and using starvation as a tactic by blocking shipments of food and medicine, and Netanyahu felt that the Israeli public was in support of these horrific actions.
Netanyahu wouldn’t budge until Blinken threatened to cancel a planned visit by Biden. Even then, Netanyahu agreed to let in only a small amount of supplies, which would have to come through Rafah, on Gaza’s border with Egypt; he also asked that this minor concession remain secret. He feared a domestic backlash for not starving Gaza’s women, children, and other civilians. Biden made his visit, and as he left Netanyahu bragged publicly that he’d defied the President. He declared that Israel “will not allow humanitarian assistance” from “our territory into the Gaza Strip.”
The article focuses on how Biden, who would often proudly refer to himself as a Zionist, went out of his way to give Israel military aid despite its carnage. Apparently Biden, with the arrogance that politicians often have, saw himself as the supreme expert on the Middle East, knowing more than the people who had studied the region deeply.
Nevertheless, in December, 2023, Biden went around Congress to authorize the emergency sale of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel. Soon after, he pushed Congress to pass an additional $8.7-billion assistance package, which he signed into law in April, 2024. The Biden Administration ultimately agreed to sell Israel more than twenty billion dollars’ worth of weapons during the Gaza campaign, on top of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. provided annually. Whatever Administration officials were saying behind the scenes, these commitments of military assistance publicly conveyed full-throated support for Israel’s vague goal of “total victory.”
Is it any wonder that Israel ignores any US appeals for restraint and indeed treats its benefactor with such contempt?
The whole article is about the capitulation of Biden to Israel, avoiding anything but the most symbolic ineffective actions. The article quotes senior Biden officials expressing remorse for not doing more. (In articles like these where the reporter is told things on background, the sources are usually those who are painted in a sympathetic light. In this case, they are likely secretary of state, Antony Blinken and national-security adviser Jake Sullivan.)
Blinken and Sullivan told me that they, too, felt remorse. Blinken said, “How can you not have regrets given the toll that this took on innocent men, women and children?” But he repeated a quote from Biden: “Question my judgments. Don’t question my motives.”
Sorry, I do not buy that. We can question your motives. When whatever you have done for the longest time fails to achieve its purported goal of preventing horrific crimes, and you do not do what might actually work, then it means that your motives were not what you say they were but were merely self-seeking rationalizations, meant to assuage your guilt and complicity in these war crimes, so that history will not judge you too harshly.
The fact is that the US underwrites Israel by vast amounts of money and thus they have huge leverage that they refuse to use. Without US military and financial aid and political support, Israel could not get away with its crimes. These officials wringing their hands about how they were helpless to stop these war crimes are simply not credible. They were enablers of war crimes and they should not be allowed to forget it.
The one good sign is that public opinion in the US has significantly changed, and that even congresspeople who once would not dare criticize Israel even in the mildest of terms are now using the word genocide to describe its actions, even as Trump continues US participation in its war crimes.
Mano, Thank you for saying exactly what needed to be said. I agree with you completely.
https://www.congress.gov/112/statute/STATUTE-126/STATUTE-126-Pg1146.pdf
How about you now do one about trump so we can compare?
@ ^
Famously, Mano has never criticized Trump. (AKA. Convicted sex offender Trump as Mano would say.)
It grates on me that we are conditioned to call US funding of Israeli genocide “aid”. The term suggests some nation in dire straights needing financial relief to survive.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Israel has the 14th most powerful economy in the entire world measured by GDP per capita. Stronger than the UK, Canada and Germany. It utterly dominates the Middle East. Israel has zero need for “aid”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
I fail to see how selling weapons to Israel can be considered “aid”.
And when it is US law that Israel must be armed such to maintain it’s military edge over its adversaries, what else can your government do short of changing the law?
Anyway, this is my last comment on this thread. I am too disappointed in the blatantly partisan Biden-bashing herein to take a third pass.
partisan? there’s bashing, but to call it partisan is to suggest it’s motivated by allegiance to a party besides biden’s. do you have any familiarity at all with the place where you are posting right now? parachuting in from mars?
I don’t really care that much about people’s motives. I care about their actions..
@Silentbob #3:
/s, in case Nick didn’t realise
@Nick #5:
Why “short of”? That’s what government is for, or am I missing something?
@Dunc #7:
Actions, yes, but I also care about people’s motives. That’s not to say they can use them as an excuse for their actions. It seems Biden would prefer us to believe that his heart is pure but that he’s just too incompetent for his motives to make any difference! Is that really an improvement?
I’m sceptical anyway. I find it hard to believe that anyone who can support Israel despite its persecution of Gaza doesn’t have something wrong with their moral compass.
Well said. Unfortunately, Biden’s supporters have already memory-holed it. Those “most symbolic ineffective actions” are instead touted as foreign policy accomplishments.
@5 Nick Wrathall
And Genocide Joe deserves every bit of it. If Democrats want to win the presidency in 2028, their candidate will have to loudly and forcefully criticize and disavow Biden’s shameful history with Israel and Gaza, similar to what Trump did by repudiating Dubya’s warmongering — that Trump turned out to do the same thing later is beside the point, it was and is good politics to bash on Dubya within the Republican party. Other Republican candidates were completely unprepared for it and fell like cardboard cutouts.
A candidate positioning themselves as a clean break with Biden with some credible assurance would do much to heal the party and appeal to the huge demographic of non-voters (you know, the ones Democrats treat with utter contempt, yet they critically depend on them to win every presidential election). Emphasizing the opposite was Harris’s biggest mistake. Doubling down on it now will only contribute to defeat after defeat.
#4 SilentB
Agreed that Israel has no need of aid, but GDP per capita does not mean the nation is an economic powerhouse. Have an actual look at the top end of the list you used! Most of the nations are tiny, but prosperous …for their size.
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#5 Nick
Aid does not need to take the form of a gift. Consider the alternative: USA could choose not to sell arms to Israel.
Have you forgotten what ‘partisan’ means, or is this your first visit to this blog? Have you seen the level of criticism regularly heaped on Trump?? Biden is getting the gentle treatment by comparison.
@Nick #5:
Selling weapons isn’t aid, AID is aid! https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-israel-four-charts
Did you catch that? 174 BILLION dollars. Read up on all of it at https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/RL/PDF/RL33222/RL33222.51.pdf, including details of how the government tries to hide it, eg. “The United States “Leases” Its Own Iron Dome Batteries Back to Israel”. You can’t make this shit up.
Okay, since I have to; from the document that I linked above:
Signed into law in 2012 by President Obama.
Last I heard, POTUS is constitutionally bound to carry out the law. They don’t write law and they don’t interpret law. The law clearly commits the USA to unwavering support for the defence of Israel, including supplying the nebulous “specialized munitions” [SEC4.4]. Since Biden when president could not create law (most of you are presently trying to stop your current lawless POS POTUS behaving this way), you “Americans” need to push for law changes to be made by your congress.
So I am not sorry to push back when someone claims that Biden is the genocidal one when in fact the USA itself, according to official US government policy and regardless of who the president is, is a willing partner.
Could Biden have done better? Hell yes. he should have pushed back a lot harder.
Should the USA repeal or amend the above-cited law? Hell yes.
US law also requires no aid be given to nations that have poor humanitarian records, and Israel has amongst the worst. What we find however is infinite political will to bend or even break law in favour of Israel.