There is a growing consensus that Joe Biden, President of United
States needs to take back US policy from the Israel lobby and stop backing
Israel’s extremist and utterly illegal policies. Israeli leaders have shown not
the slightest compunction in killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians,
displacing 2 million Gazans, and calling for ethnic cleansing.
The International Court of Justice has determined that
Israel may well be committing genocide, and the ICJ could make a definitive
determination of genocide in the next year or two. Biden would enter history as
an enabler of genocide, yet he still has the chance to be the US president who
prevented genocide.
Biden needs to take back US policy from the Israel lobby.
The US should stop backing Israel’s extremist and utterly illegal policies. Nor
should
The US should not spend any more funds on Israel unless and
until Israel lives within international law, including the Genocide Convention,
and 21st century ethics.
Biden should side with the UN Security Council in calling
for an immediate ceasefire and indeed in calling for an immediate move to the
two-state solution, including recognition of Palestine as the 194th UN member
state, a move that is more than a decade overdue since Palestine requested UN
membership in 2011.
The cabinet of Prime Minister Netanyahu is filled with
religious extremists who believe that Israel’s brutality in Gaza is
at God’s command. According to the Book of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible, dated by
scholars to the 7th century BC, God promised the land to the Jewish people and
instructed them to destroy the other nations living in the Promised Land.
This text is used by extreme nationalists in Israel today,
including by many of the 700,000 or so Israeli settlers living in occupied
Palestinian lands in violation of international law. Netanyahu pursues the
religious ideology of 7th century BC in the 21st century.
Of course, the vast majority of the world today, including
the vast majority of Americans, is certainly not in line with Israel’s
religious zealots. The world is far more interested in the 1948 Genocide
Convention than in the genocides supposedly ordained by God in the Book of
Joshua.
They don’t accept the Biblical idea that Israel should kill
or expel the people of Palestine from their own land.
The two-state solution is the declared policy of the world
community, as enshrined by the UN Security Council, and of the US government.
President Joe Biden is therefore caught between the powerful
Israel Lobby and the opinion of American voters and of the world community.
Given the power of the Israel lobby, and the sums it expends
in campaign contributions, Biden is trying to have it both ways: supporting
Israel but not endorsing Israel’s extremism.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken hope to entice
the Arab countries into yet another open-ended peace process with the two-state
solution as the distant goal that is never reached.
Israeli hardliners would of course block every step of the
way. Biden knows all of this but wants the fig leaf of a peace process.
Biden also hoped until recently that Saudi Arabia could be
lured into normalizing relations with Israel in return for F-35 fighter jets,
access to nuclear technology, and a vague commitment to an eventual two-state
solution... someday, somehow.
The Saudis will have none of it. They made this clear in a declaration
on February 06, stating, The Kingdom calls for the lifting of the siege on the
people in Gaza; the evacuation of civilian casualties; the commitment to
international laws and norms and international humanitarian law, and for moving
the peace process forward in accordance with the resolutions of the Security
Council and the United Nations, and the Arab Peace Initiative, which aims to
find a just and comprehensive solution and establish an independent Palestinian
state based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as capital.
Domestically, Biden confronts AIPAC (the innocuously named
American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the lead organization of the Israel
lobby. AIPAC’s long-running success is to turn millions of dollars of campaign
contributions into billions of dollars of US aid to Israel, an amazingly high
return.
Currently, AIPAC aims to turn around US$100 million of
campaign funding for the November election into a US$16 billion supplemental
aid package for Israel.
So far, Biden is going along with AIPAC, even as he loses
younger voters. In an Economist/YouGov poll of January 21-23, 49% of those
aged 19-29 held that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian
civilians. Only 22% said that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, their
sympathies are with Israel, versus 30% with Palestine, and the remaining 48%
“about equal” or unsure. Only 21% agreed with increasing military aid to Israel.
Israel has utterly alienated younger Americans.
While Biden has called for peace based on the two-state
solution and a reduction of violence in Gaza, Netanyahu has brazenly brushed
Biden aside, provoking Biden to call Netanyahu an asshole on several
occasions.
Yet it is Netanyahu, not Biden, who still calls the shots in
Washington. While Biden and Blinken wring their hands at Israel’s extreme
violence, Netanyahu gets the US bombs and even Biden’s full backing for the US$16
billion with no US red lines.
To see the absurdity—and tragedy—of the situation, consider
Blinken’s statement in Tel Aviv on February 07.
Rather than putting any limits on Israel’s violence, made
possible by the US, Blinken declared that “it will be up to Israelis to decide
what they want to do, when they want to do it, how they want to do it. No one’s
going to make those decisions for them. All that we can do is to show what the
possibilities are, what the options are, what the future could be, and compare
it to the alternative. And the alternative right now looks like an endless
cycle of violence and destruction and despair.”
Lately, the US used its veto power to kill the Algerian
draft resolution in the UN Security Council calling for an immediate
cease-fire, with US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield calling the effort to
pass the measure "wishful" and "irresponsible."
Biden has put forward a weak alternative, calling for a
ceasefire “as soon as practicable,” whatever that means. In practice, it would
also surely mean that Israel would simply declare a cease-fire to be
“impracticable.”