The most relevant fact about the Biden administration’s current position on the war against Gaza is this: There is no Israeli war crime too extreme for Joe Biden to consider pausing, to say nothing of cutting off, the flow of U.S. weapons and financial support for Israel’s war of annihilation. On Tuesday, the Senate passed an extraordinary $14 billion in additional military aid for Israel to continue its occupation and bombing of the Palestinians of Gaza. Biden remains defiant in rejecting global demands for an immediate cessation of Israel’s military assault on a starving, overwhelmingly defenseless population. Not only has Biden flatly rejected suggestions that he use the threat of halting military sales to Israel, his administration is currently preparing a new shipment of powerful munitions to Tel Aviv.
As the conservative death toll in Gaza nears 30,000 — with more than 13,000 children confirmed dead — the White House spin doctors are worried about the 2024 U.S. election. They are desperately trying to project a public image of compassion for the people of Gaza and to sell the public on the idea that Biden has reached the end of his patience with his great friend of nearly 50 years, Benjamin Netanyahu. Confronted with a disastrous series of public statements by Biden where he claimed to have recently met with long-deceased world leaders and a special counsel’s assertions about his mental acumen, the president’s re-election campaign has been thrust into a scramble to stabilize their public narrative.
Since the International Court of Justice formally ruled that South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel should proceed and issued a series of emergency orders directing Israel not to engage in genocidal actions, Tel Aviv has intensified its military operations, laying siege to hospitals and bombing civilian sites as it prepares for a possible full-scale ground invasion of Rafah. The city, which is on the border with Egypt and has been subjected to intense Israeli bombardment in recent days, creating an unsecured 25-square-mile death cage in which 1.4 million Palestinians are now trapped — after being told by Israel to flee there for safety.
Israel claims it is working on an “evacuation” plan for the entrapped mass of people in Rafah. The use of that word to describe the further forced expulsion of Palestinians under threat of death is grotesque — implying that they are being saved rather than terrorized. The Biden administration is on record as saying it won’t support an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah, but with a glaring caveat: According to a White House readout of Biden’s recent call with Netanyahu, the administration’s position is “that a military operation should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the civilians in Rafah.”
So what does this actually mean?
