Five-time draft dodger who never saw a war he didn’t love, President Joe Biden last week visited Israel and assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. will provide support for as long as the war with Hamas lasts. 

“You can’t look at what happened here and not scream out for justice,” the president said. 

Netanyahu indicated that the meeting with Biden was successful and told reporters that there was an agreement on Israel’s plans to carry out a “just war.”

“We agreed on cooperation that will change the balance on all fronts, and help us to achieve the war aims,” Netanyahu said, according to AntiWar.com. 

TRENDPOST: It is worth noting that the U.S. government could be complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told The Intercept that U.S. officials could be held responsible for “their failure to prevent Israel’s unfolding genocide, as well as for their complicity, by encouraging it and materially supporting it.”

The U.S. has repositioned carrier groups and, as of Friday, completed five -17 Globemaster III missions to pump Israel with more munitions to drop on Gaza. The U.S. said these shipments will continue.  

Bullshit Biden managed to keep a straight face when he said it was the U.S. leadership that “holds the world together.”

The White House announced on Friday that it will request a supplemental funding request of just over $105 billion to help fund wars in Ukraine and Israel. The funding will also be earmarked for Taiwan and border control in the U.S. amid a jump in illegal immigration.

The Associated Press noted that the package is not certain to pass given that Republican support for continued funding for Ukraine is waning. The budget would provide another $61.4 billion to Ukraine and $14.3 billion for Israel, the report said.

Like Ukraine, there is a growing feeling that the war in Israel will drag on for some time. Benny Gantz, the former Israeli defense minister, told reporters that he sees the conflict lasting months and the “rebuilding will take years.”

Private Backing

Netanyahu reportedly said Biden privately approved a ground operation in Gaza, but there are indications that the U.S. is not too keen on the idea. 

Biden was asked on Friday if he thought Israel should delay the operation given the risks involved, and he said “Yes.” 

The Guardian reported that Biden answered the question while boarding Air Force One, and the White House later said he misheard the question. 

Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesperson, said, “The president was far away. He didn’t hear the full question. The question sounded like ‘Would you like to see more hostages released?’ He wasn’t commenting on anything else,” according to The Jerusalem Post.

The Times of London reported earlier that the U.S. president privately told Netanyahu that Washington is in “full support” of a ground invasion to snuff out Hamas. Axios reported that Biden asked officials in Israel what they planned on doing after the invasion, and was told that it was yet to be decided. 

TRENDPOST: Howard W. French wrote in Foreign Policy that Biden could be making a costly error because of his “complete unwillingness thus far to discuss how Israel’s own behavior toward Palestinians living under its direct control, or on contested territory, has played a role in fueling violence in that region.”

He noted that he was not justifying Hamas’s attack, but he said the government under Netanyahu had been expanding settlements and treating Palestinians poorly. The Trends Journal has reported extensively on some of the atrocities. (See “UN: OK FOR ISRAEL TO KILL PALESTINIAN CHILDREN, BUT SHAMES RUSSIA FOR KILLING CHILDREN IN UKRAINE” 27 Jun 2023, “HUNGER STRIKER DEATH SPARKS ROCKET EXCHANGE BETWEEN PALESTINE AND ISRAEL” 9 May 2023, “ISRAEL KILLS 3 MORE PALESTINIANS DURING ANOTHER DEADLY WEEK” 14 Mar 2023 and “DOES ISRAEL SEEK A ‘FINAL SOLUTION FOR PALESTINIANS?’” 14 Feb 2023.)

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told The New York Times in May 2021 that the “oppression of Palestinians there has reached a threshold and a performance that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.”

Palestinians have been making the claim about the conditions there since the 1960s. President Jimmy Carter agreed with this back in 2006, and there is a growing number of Jewish human-rights groups that also make the claim. Jerusalem-based B’Tselem also made the claim.

Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, warned that Israel risked becoming an apartheid state unless peace was made with the Palestinians.

“Israel has established and maintained an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis—wherever it has exercised control over Palestinians’ lives since 1948,” Amnesty’s report summary said.