TEHRAN - Joe Biden’s emotional embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu on October 18 on the tarmac of Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv was seen around the world with great attention. The hug, 11 days after the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas, gave Israel a blank check to do whatever it likes against the besieged Gaza Strip. 

On that trip, Biden showed his “iron-clad” commitment to Israel regardless of the crimes that Israel was committing in Gaza, cutting off food, water, medicine and other essentials to the 2.3 million population and bombarding residential houses, hospitals, universities, schools, churches, mosques, etc. 

“I come to Israel with a single message: You are not alone. You are not alone,” Biden told Netanyahu, the criminal in chief, and his war cabinet. 

The unconditional support for Israel which is seeing its most extreme government in power since its establishment in 1948 has implicated Biden and his administration. 

The U.S. not only started shipping arms to Israel it also stood against the will of the world at the United Nations that asked for an immediate ceasefire and delivery of humanitarian aid to the besieged territory.

On Nov. 3, the U.S. House of Representatives also passed a Republican-drafted plan providing $14.5bn in military aid for Israel.  The Pentagon also sent two aircraft carriers to the region in a show of support for Israel.

Biden’s strong support for far-rightists in Israel has even made some figures within his administration uncomfortable. On Oct. 19, Josh Paul, a director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, said he was resigning because of the White House’s “intellectual bankruptcy” in deciding to boost military aid to Israel. He said the Biden administration was “repeating the same mistakes” Washington has been making for decades.

 “Carte blanche to kill a generation of enemies” 

Paul also said the administration’s “blind support for one side” was leading to policy decisions that were “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse”.

In an interview with the New York Times, Paul also said continuing to give Israel “carte blanche to kill a generation of enemies, only to create a new one, does not ultimately serve the United States’ interests”.

He added, “What it leads to is this desire to sort of impose security at any cost, including in cost to the Palestinian civilian population.” 

“I am a Zionist”

Biden openly says he is a Zionist, which is now synonymous with excessive nationalism, apartheid, and hatred of non-Jews.  

"I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist," Reuters quoted Biden as telling the Israeli war cabinet.

The politicians and generals gathered in the ballroom of the Tel Aviv hotel nodded in approval, according to a U.S. official knowledgeable of the closed-door remarks.

Despite all the crimes that Israel is committing in Gaza, Biden feels no shame in portraying himself as an “overwhelming supporter” of Israel. 

“I got in trouble many times for saying you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.  I make no apologies for that.  That’s a reality,” Biden told a White House briefing on Dec. 5.

He also boasted about his long years of friendship with the criminal in chief, saying, “I’ve known Bibi for 50 years.”  

“If there not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”

In remarks on October 26, Biden repeated his long-held view that if there were no Israel the U.S. should have created it. 
  
“If there not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”.

Such remarks are being made while Israel’s 75-year history is associated with stealing the Palestinians’ lands, displacing native people, destroying their homes, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees inside and outside Palestine, building homes on the stolen lands, killing children, destroying olive trees, burning farmlands, imprisoning those opposed to the occupation, etc.      

In his October 26 speech, Biden added, “I’ll say this 5000 times in my career the iron-clad commitment the U.S. has to Israel (is) based on our principles, our ideas, our values.”

The values that Israel stands for are a mockery of international law and labeling any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism.

Of course, it is an open secret that the United States does not care about international law when it comes to Israel’s crimes and illegal acts and also whenever it sees a commitment to international law is not in line with its wishes, just like what it did toward the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA).  

Biden's alignment with Israel has done a great blow to the image of the United States. Now people around the world see the Biden administration as an accomplice in the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza.

In the first month and a half of the war alone, Israel dropped more than 22,000 U.S.-supplied bombs on Gaza, according to intelligence figures provided to Congress and disclosed by the Washington Post. 

“It's the instinct we're seeing now"

It is quite clear that Biden sees himself as indebted to Zionist lobbies. 

During his 36 years in the Senate, Biden was the chamber's biggest recipient in history of donations from pro-Israeli groups, taking in $4.2 million, according to the Open Secrets database, Reuters reported on Oct. 21.

In a speech in the Senate on June 5, 1986, Biden defended the annual military aid to Israel, saying, “It is the best three billion dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to ‘protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”  

In a report on Nov. 4, 2023, Axios said, “Though the timing of a new security package remains unclear, the U.S. is by far the biggest supplier of military aid to Israel, contributing around $130 billion since its founding.”

Also, as vice president, Biden often mediated the testy relationship between Barack Obama and Netanyahu.

Dennis Ross, a Middle East adviser during Obama's first term, recalled Biden intervening to prevent retribution against Netanyahu for a diplomatic snub during a 2010 visit. Obama, Ross said, had wanted to come down hard over Israel's announcement of a major expansion of housing for Jews in East Jerusalem.

"Whenever things were getting out of hand with Israel, Biden was the bridge," said Ross. "His commitment to Israel was that strong ... And it's the instinct we're seeing now."

Khaled Elgindy, a former Palestinian negotiations adviser, also says
Biden's "blank check" for Israel's assault on Gaza has "shattered, perhaps irreversibly, what little credibility the U.S. had left".

Israel boasts “sacred” bond with the U.S.

During a visit to the United States in July 2023, Israeli President Isaac Herzog gave a speech before Congress. He described the bond between Israel and the U.S. as “sacred” and said calling Israel a racist state is anti-Semitic.

Describing the alliance between Israel and the U.S. as sacred is ideological and highly dangerous. Such a term reminds one of the kind of language used by ideologically driven terrorist groups that see their vicious ideas as sacred and consider others as enemies that should be purged.

Describing ties between Israel and the U.S. as sacred innately conveys this idea that whatever action Israel is doing is right. For example, Israel feels it has an inherent right to steal the Palestinian lands, demolish their homes in the West Bank, ethnically cleanse people in Gaza, and starve its entire population without facing any consequences because the U.S. as the most powerful country in the world will protect you.

It is because of such dangerous ideas that soldiers, as reported by Haaretz, are burning Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip on direct orders of their commanders, to prevent people from returning to live in them. 

It is as if loyalty to Israel is written in stone to the extent that if any official dares to criticize Israel is forced to back down from his/her position. 

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who called Israel a “racist state”, came under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans. They labeled her comments anti-Semitic, forcing her to backtrack her remarks. The House of Representatives then overwhelmingly passed a resolution proclaiming that Israel is “not a racist or apartheid state” in a 412-to-9 vote.

Aida Touma-Sliman, a member of Israel’s Knesset, was also suspended after criticizing the bombing in Gaza.

The Democrats and Republicans compete to win the support of Zionists in Israel and the U.S. regardless of the American public opinion. Severe criticism of the highest-ranking American officials is tolerated in the U.S. but it is not allowed when it comes to Israel. 

Also, repeated and decades-long remarks by Democrats and Republicans that they back a two-state solution in which Palestinians and Israelis live peacefully together are not genuine. 

In an interview with the Tehran Times, Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, simply says “no” when asked whether he sees any strong will or sincerity by the West, particularly the U.S., to force Israel to accept a sovereign Palestinian state.

The West’s blind and unconditional support for Israel, that its crimes in Gaza are unbelievable, surprising and shocking, has also angered some officials on both sides of the Atlantic. More than 800 officials in the United States, Britain and the European Union released a public letter of dissent on Friday against support for Israel by their governments’.

“Our governments’ current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice and human rights globally,” the letter says. 
It adds, “There is a plausible risk that our governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide.”

Amid such crimes and outcries against Israel’s behavior in Gaza, it seems that Biden, who boasts 50 years of political career, has lost touch with reality in a way that his support for war criminals in Israel has brought disgrace and shame for him and a bad reputation for the United States.   

Has Biden closed his eyes to mass rallies across the world, especially in Western cities, against Israeli crimes in Gaza? Surely, he has seen protestors carrying banners calling him “Genocide Joe”. Biden should have also seen the book written by fellow Democratic President Jimmy Carter titled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”.

A month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. government announced that Russia was committing war crimes. Biden even called Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”. However, when South Africa submitted an 84-page document to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing acts in Gaza which are “genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”, the Biden administration dismissed the charge as "meritless”.

This is while the way Russia is behaving in Ukraine is in no way comparable to what Israel is doing in Gaza.

Biden said the Oct. 7 attack “has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by a millennia of anti-Semitism and the genocide of the Jewish people. The world watched then… and did nothing.”

The history is being repeated. While the world was watching genocide against the Jews during World War II, this time the world is also doing nothing to prevent Israel’s genocide against Gazans with the support of the U.S.

If the world should regret the Holocaust, it should also regret what is happening in Gaza today. 

Biden also parroted what Israeli rulers claimed. For example, he said, “Babies (were) slaughtered” during Hamas’s attack on southern Israel. He also said the figures given by the Palestinians about the number of people killed or injured in Gaza are overstated.

In an opinion piece on Dec. 3, the Washington Post said, “The United States is making clear that it won’t stand up for international rules and norms if one of its closest allies is violating them.” 

Donald Trump was full of local and foreign policy blunders in four years of his presidency. However, when Biden defeated him in the 2020 elections the world breathed a sigh of relief and said relative rationality will return to the White House. 

Yet, it will take long years and possibly decades for the United States to repair its damaged reputation brought against it due to Biden’s iron-clad commitment to Israel by Biden and his lieutenants.