March 12, 2024
The Tragic Absurdity of Biden’s Gaza Policies
The US government is making elaborate plans to ameliorate a humanitarian catastrophe that would not exist without its own bombs.
Jack Mirkinson
Since Israel’s campaign of death began, President Joe Biden has perfected the art of cognitive dissonance, planting story after story about his ever-increasing “frustration” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while continuing to send Israel the bombs it is using against the people of Gaza. But the past seven days have taken this absurdity to new levels. That’s because this was the week when we saw both Biden’s most dramatic attempts to appear to be radically shifting his approach and the most dramatic evidence of just how deeply the United States is helping to perpetuate this war.
First, the attempts to telegraph that change is happening: Biden used his State of the Union address to announce that the United States would be building a pier off the Gaza coast so that it could deliver aid to the millions of people who are either being massacred or left to starve to death due to Israel’s unceasing bombardment and total siege of the region. He was then filmed telling Senator Michael Bennet that he was going to have a “come to Jesus meeting” with Netanyahu, though he immediately undercut the seemingly accidental nature of the broadcast by adding, “I’m on a hot mic here. Good.”
On Saturday, Biden went further, telling MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart that Netanyahu was “hurting Israel more than helping Israel” and that an Israeli invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where 1.4 million Palestinians are trapped, would be a “red line.” All of this was enough to prompt some of the White House’s more sycophantic chroniclers, such as Axios reporter Barak Ravid, to proclaim that Biden was “breaking” with Netanyahu.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-gaza-hypocrisy/
