As a new barrage of Iranian missiles have been fired into Israel, setting off the sirens of major war in the region, one leader stands at the center of all the carnage: U.S. President Joe Biden.
Biden and Netanyahu, October 2023 - public domain image
By Brian Tierney, Common Dreams
For the past year, the world has watched in horror as Israel waged one of the most brutal and murderous military campaigns against a civilian population in the 21st Century.
What began as a war of collective punishment following October 7, 2023 quickly exploded into a full-scale genocide against the people of Gaza. Israel deployed the familiar trope about Hamas using civilians as “human shields” to justify the merciless targeting of population centers, dropping U.S. bombs on homes, hospitals, schools, and overcrowded refugee camps across the narrow strip of land that is home to some 2 million Palestinians.
Using starvation as a weapon, Israel has blocked most humanitarian aid from entering Gaza and brought the territory’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. Lives spared by Israeli airstrikes face hell on Earth, displaced many times over by the attacks while enduring famine, disease, and unimaginable psychological trauma. Among the more than 40,000 deaths accounted for in the official death toll, at least 11,000 children have been murdered by U.S. bombs, and another estimated 10,000 people remain buried under the mountains of rubble that is now Gaza’s landscape.
The nightmare in Gaza set the stage for Israeli state terrorism on two additional fronts: first, beginning shortly after October 7 with escalating attacks by Israeli occupation forces and settlers in the West Bank; and now, with its bombing campaign and ground invasion of Lebanon to pull Hezbollah and Iran into a wider regional conflict.
As a new barrage of Iranian missiles have been fired into Israel, setting off the sirens of major war in the region, one leader stands at the center of all the carnage: U.S. President Joe Biden.
While working in close collaboration with his Israeli counterpart, Biden has carried on a decades-long partnership in ethnic cleansing, colonialism, land theft, and apartheid.
From the White House, Biden has dutifully performed various roles to prolong the suffering in Gaza and expand Israeli aggression into a greater Middle East war. These include the roles of frustrated ally to an unhinged maniac, dishonest statesman in cease-fire talks, and loyal arms supplier to a regime of war criminals. For all of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stubbornness and belligerent bombast, it is Biden who has always held the lion’s share of leverage.
Biden’s routine hand-wringing in the face of genocide and Israeli intransigence can never excuse the endless arsenal of U.S. military aid still flowing into Netanyahu’s lap.
Bibi, Unbridled
After so many resolutions and rounds of global condemnation, the toothless authority of international law and global governing bodies has been laid bare.
Netanyahu is unrestrained and has used the blood of Gazans as political currency to retain power. Faced with scandals and flagging popularity, the Israeli despot has ignored calls for a cease-fire, moved the goalposts during negotiations, and resisted calls for his resignation in order to hold together his extreme right-wing Zionist government and stay in office. In Gaza, an estimated 180,000 people have been killed from all war-related causes, including starvation and disease. Some experts warn the total number killed by direct or indirect causes related to Israel’s genocide could exceed 335,000 by the end of this year.
For Netanyahu, no amount of Arab deaths and displacement—whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon—is too much to achieve these goals.
Netanyahu has been able to cling to power with U.S. support and by heeding the most violent and racist impulses of Israeli society following October 7. But as growing numbers of Israelis, led by the family members of hostages, have demanded a cease-fire and Netanyahu’s resignation, the prime minister has again turned to provoke new threats.
Indeed, following Israel’s initial attacks on Lebanon using terrorist sabotage of mobile devices, its subsequent airstrikes across southern Lebanon and Beirut, and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Netanyahu has seen a boost in popularity and an Israeli public again whipped into the frenzied bloodlust of war.
Biden’s Monster
Today, after repeatedly loading the canons of a global pariah, the White House speaks out of one side of its mouth to feign alarm at the specter of the wider war that Netanyahu always wanted. Out of the other side of its mouth, it gives full-throated support to Israel’s every provocation in Lebanon and loudly echoes Israel’s denunciations when the predicted response is delivered from Tehran.
“Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” Biden told reporters as the final missiles from Iran were intercepted. Vice President Kamala Harris agreed, saying she “fully supports” Biden’s decision to direct the U.S. military to help Israel shoot down the missiles.
“I condemn this attack unequivocally. I’m clear-eyed. Iran is a destabilizing, dangerous force in the Middle East,” Harris said, pretending the rest of the world hasn’t noticed Israel’s longstanding and recent actions which have proven far more destabilizing and dangerous to populations throughout the region.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said of the latest Iranian retaliation that “the best answer is diplomacy.” Yet Biden joined Netanyahu’s threats that “Iran will pay,” promising “severe consequences.”
If Netanyahu is the monster in this ongoing nightmare, Biden is the mad scientist who keeps him alive.
Pundits will spin Biden’s handiwork as a dilemma, a delicate balancing act of diplomacy fraught with impossible choices. Yet, as Israel escalates the year-long genocide from Gaza to Lebanon, it is clear there was never a “red line” for U.S. support.
Not content with laying waste to Gaza, Israel is drawing in more adversaries and putting more and more civilians in its crosshairs. There should be no doubt that Israel has cemented its purpose as a cancer in the region—and the only leader with the power to extract this metastasizing tumor refuses to do so.
For Gazans, this was always Biden’s genocide to end or to escalate. And for people throughout the Middle East, this was always Biden’s war to prevent or provoke.
A choice has clearly been made.
Having withdrawn himself from a second term as president, Biden’s career may be invulnerable to the protests raging against this choice. But his legacy is as vulnerable as ever.
In our organizing and our protests, we must see to it that Biden’s place in history is relentlessly targeted everywhere that history is told.
Because we cannot allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to die in vain.
We can never stop attacking the machinery of colonialism and empire until it is forever broken.
Brian Tierney is a freelance labor journalist in Washington, D.C.
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