What Biden’s ‘come to Jesus’ Bibi comment reveals about the two leaders and the US-Israel relationship
By
Joel Gehrke
March 8, 2024 8:39 pm
“Don’t repeat this.”
For a moment, it seemed like President Joe Biden didn’t want most people to know what he was about to tell Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“I told him, ‘Bibi … you and I are going to have a come to Jesus meeting,'” Biden said after his State of the Union address, as a CSPAN cameraman looked on. “I’m on a hot mic here. That was good.”
The exchange punctuated an escalating series of public signals that Biden’s team disapproves of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. The civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip has fueled outrage on the American Left at the potential expense of Israel’s standing among liberal democracies and Biden’s potential reelection prospects, which depend in no small part on Arab American voters concentrated in the battleground state of Michigan.
“The administration is thinking about this in terms of the political narrative in the United States and wanting to make sure that the people of Gaza are taken care of to satisfy a certain constituency in the United States,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies Senior Vice President Jonathan Schanzer said.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign-policy/2912222/what-bidens-come-to-jesus-bibi-comment-reveals-about-the-two-leaders-and-the-us-israel-relationship/
