Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – At his rally in Detroit on Friday afternoon, President Joe Biden at one point said, “That’s why I put together a detailed plan that the United Nations accepted that the Israelis accepted that the Palestinians have accepted to end this war. This war must end must end.”
Biden probably would survive a lot of fact checks, but on the Israeli total war on Gaza, he can’t seem to be straight with us. No, the Israelis have not accepted the peace proposal Biden put forward in late May, even though Biden characterized it as an Israeli proposal. As I explained in mid-June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported in the Israeli press as completely rejecting what Biden laid out. Netanyahu said, “There was no deal because we will not give up on completing the war objectives. The main disagreement with Hamas revolves around the commitment to end the fighting without completing the objectives.” Even as Netanyahu openly threw a spanner in the works, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken kept saying that it was Hamas that had rejected the Biden proposal — even though Hamas kept saying it accepted it.
Hamas was, however, demanding an actual cease fire, not a pause in the fighting during which it would give up most of its leverage, after which the Israelis would continue their total war.
Last weekend, Hamas dropped the demand that the war would not start back up again after the negotiations. The US said last weekend that Netanyahu and Hamas have accepted a “framework agreement,” an outline for negotiations within which finer points still need to be worked out.
But there isn’t actually any evidence that Netanyahu has accepted the framework or that he is willing to make the compromises necessary to reach an agreement.
The peace deal involves allowing Palestinians to return to North Gaza, from which a million of them were exiled by the Israeli military. Yesterday, Jeremy Diamond at CNN reported a leak that last Sunday, Netanyahu had abruptly said that no armed men would be allowed to return to the north. I’m not sure how you would even verify whether the returnees had firearms, and given that the Israelis have destroyed the Gaza police, assassinating many of them on the inaccurate grounds that they are all Hamas, there is no law and order in the Strip and a family that had a gun would certainly want to bring it with them. Netanyahu is demanding an “enforcement mechanism” for disarming returnees.
The Israeli hostage families are in no doubt that Netanyahu is attempting to wreck the negotiations, as he has consistently done all along.
Not only that, but Netanyahu has started demanding a permanent Israeli occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah checkpoint crossing on the Egyptian side of the border. The Egyptians have gone ballistic, and Cairo is key to getting the pause in fighting.
For Biden to tell Detroit that the Israelis have “accepted” his “detailed plan” is just dishonest, an attempt to put lipstick on a pig, and it is more redolent of Trumpian rhetoric than of the straight shooting Biden says he aims for.
This problem was also visible in Biden’s remarks about the war at his news conference Thursday after the NATO summit.
Mr. Biden took a question from Nation Public Radio correspondent Asma Khalid:
Thank you, Mr. President. Asma Khalid with NPR. I have two questions. Earlier, you spoke about the ceasefire plan between Israel and Hamas. We’re now looking at ten months of war, and I’m curious if there’s anything that you feel personally you wish you would have done differently over the course of the war. Secondly, if I may, I wanted to ask you about your presidential campaign. I remember covering your campaign in 2020, and there was a moment when you referred to yourself as a “quote” Bridge candidacy, a transition to a younger generation of leaders. I want to understand what changed.
- Biden: Two things. Let’s go back to when you talked about whether I would have changed anything that’s happening with Israel and the Palestinians and the Palestinian movement. The answer is, as you recall, from the very beginning, I immediately went to Israel, but I also got in immediate contact with Lisi in Egypt. I met with the king of Jordan. I met with most of the Arab leaders to try to get a consensus on what had to be done to get more aid and food and medicine into the Gaza Strip. We pushed it really hard, and Israel occasionally was less than cooperative. The Israeli War Cabinet is one of the most conservative war cabinets in the history of Israel.
Israel has not allowed sufficient aid into Gaza, creating vast food insecurity and a critical failure of health and medical facilities, leading to large numbers of unreported deaths from those causes, which a communication in the Lancet recently suggested could mount to 189,000 deaths or more. Biden has continued to supply Israel on a daily basis with all the munitions necessary to this war on Gaza civilians and he is deeply implicated in it. He speaks as though he has no leverage on the uncooperative Israeli cabinet. At one point Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich personally sequestered trucks full of flour destined for Gaza.
- Biden: There’s no ultimate answer other than a two-state solution here. The plan I put together was for a process for a two-state solution. We got the Arab nations, particularly from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, to be in a position where they would cooperate in the transition so that they could keep the peace in Gaza without Israeli forces staying there. The question has been from the beginning: what’s the day after in Gaza? The day after in Gaza has to be no occupation by Israel in the Gaza Strip and the ability for us to get in and out as needed.
Yes and there is no ultimate answer to the problem of the helplessness of horses but the unicorn, but it is a fantasy, too. Netanyahu and his cabinet completely and openly reject a two-state solution and Smotrich has now de facto annexed the Palestinian West Bank to Israel. I’m sorry, but it is just dishonest to keep holding out this prospect as realistic, especially since Biden has shown himself to be completely unwilling to pressure Israel in any meaningful way. Biden’s factotum for the Middle East, Brett McGurk (a George W. Bush leftover) used the two state solution as a carrot for Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel. But since Netanyahu plainly would do no such thing. that entire set of negotiations, initiated by corrupt Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, crashed and burned. So Biden may as well have left this part out of his answer, since it went nowhere.
- Biden: I’ve been disappointed that some of the things I put forward have not succeeded as well, like the port we attached from Cyprus. I was hopeful that it would be more successful, but that’s why I went to Israel immediately after the massacres at the hands of Hamas. One thing I said to the Israelis, and I met with the war cabinet and with BB, was don’t make the same mistakes America made after Bin Laden. There’s no need to occupy anywhere. Go after the people who did the job. You may recall, I get criticized for it, but I was totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan. Once we got Bin Laden, we should have moved on . . .
Again, he is pretending that he hasn’t supplied the Israeli military with the tank shells and 500-pound bombs, and until very recently 2000-pound bombs they have used to destroy Gaza.
- Biden: Remember what happened when you had the [Iranian] attack on Israel with rockets and ballistic missiles. I was able to unite the Arab nations as well as Europe, and nothing happened, nothing got hurt. It sent an incredible lesson to what was going on in the Middle East.
This is true, but irrelevant to the ongoing total war on Gaza’s civilians.
- Biden: There’s a lot of things in retrospect I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do, but the bottom line is we have a chance now. It’s time to end this war. It doesn’t mean walking away from going after Sinwar and Hamas. If you notice, there is a growing dissatisfaction on the West Bank from Palestinians about Hamas. Hamas is not popular now.
Hamas is not in the West Bank. He meant Gaza. He could have convinced the Israelis of anything he wanted to. He could have cut their military supplies off. He didn’t. Why does he think he is powerless in this regard? Why does he want us to think so?
Having presided over a genocide and not lifted a finger to stop it, Biden has now taken to lying to us and saying that “Israel” has “accepted” his “detailed” proposal.
Meanwhile, dozens of civilians in Gaza are killed daily, and on Thursday I reported on the Great Soccer Massacre. Biden’s peace process subsists in the same fantasy-land as Trump’s cancerous windmills.
When questions arose about Biden’s fitness for office, it seemed to me that his Gaza policy was the most worrisome sign that something is not right. Biden had slapped down Netanyahu back in the old days, but won’t do it anymore, and doesn’t seem to realize that he even can do so any more. In his answer to Asma Khalid he depicted himself as a helpless giant, giving out wise advice that his client states for some reason willfully ignored, and portraying himself as unable to stop the most destructive military campaign in the 21st century. The Lilliputians tying down Lemuel Gulliver flashed through my mind. It just doesn’t sound to me as though he is any longer in control, and it seems clear that whoever actually is in control is malign and disserving the interests of the United States of America.
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