Will Netanyahu outlast Biden?

Michael F. Brown Power Suits 23 March 2024

President Joe Biden puts his arm around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with American and Israeli flags behind them

US President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in October 2023.

EyePress / Newscom

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might yet outlast US President Joe Biden.

Biden faces a likely election against Donald Trump in November.

The current president may well lose as Democratic support from key constituencies disintegrates due to his ongoing arming of Israel in the midst of its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.

Netanyahu, though unpopular in Israel – even if not for pursuing genocide in Gaza – could put off elections for two years, a fact that motivated Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to call in a 14 March speech for “a new [Israeli] election once the war starts to wind down.”

“Bibi could prevent any election until 2026,” Schumer later told The New York Times. “I worry under his leadership, Israel would become such a pariah in the world and even in the United States, because I look at the numbers and they’re rapidly decreasing. I had to speak out before it erodes.”

Without American support, he continued, Israel’s “future could well be over.”

Speaking Wednesday via video conference to Senate Republicans, Netanyahu reportedly called Schumer’s speech “outrageous.”

Schumer said a conversation with Rabbi Rachel Timoner influenced his thinking ahead of the speech.

Timoner told The New York Times she advised Schumer that the right-wing extremists in Netanyahu’s government were “endangering all of us, because their agenda is about dehumanizing Palestinians and it’s undermining Israel’s democracy and dearest values.”

This, of course, disregards decades of Israeli apartheid under “left” and right-wing governments alike. Some democracy and values. It’s like looking at the Jim Crow American South and calling it democratic.

The problem goes far deeper than Netanyahu when a likely replacement such as Benny Gantz has bragged in a 2019 campaign ad about returning parts of Gaza to the stone ages.

Even The Washington Post recently acknowledged that not much could be expected to change were an election to replace Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister might well lose the next election, but he’s right that most Israelis support his campaign against Gaza.

In fact, in a recent poll some 68 percent of Israeli Jews opposed transferring humanitarian aid to Gaza even if didn’t go through Hamas or UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.

This is not just about Israeli leaders as Schumer and Timoner contend, but an apartheid-based society now significantly gripped by genocidal intent and actively carrying out the devastation of the Gaza Strip.

Biden, with his ongoing support for military aid to Israel, is advancing such sentiments and the consequent devastation even as he employs words intended to convey to Democratic voters that he is doing something – style over substance – to help Palestinians.

Now, however, even the cynically reluctant progressive representative from New York City, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has referred to Israel’s actions as an “unfolding genocide.”

It’s terribly late, and her speech gives outrageous credit to the genocide-promoting Biden as a “decent man,” but Ocasio-Cortez is currently listening more to protesting voters than the president. Her speech demonstrates that urging elected officials to do the right thing is vital.
Biden is losing the base of his party because his love of the apartheid state of Israel is proving more important to him than stopping a genocide and winning re-election.

Eviscerating Democratic Party

The president’s recalcitrance is ripping the Democratic Party apart as young people, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans want nothing to do with a party they see arming Israel to destroy a destitute, refugee population.

The backlash in Michigan to the Biden campaign – demonstrated by the “uncommitted” vote – received considerable media attention, but less sustained attention went to the fact that over 1,000 Black pastors representing large numbers of Christians signed a letter in January calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

According to The New York Times, “Many of their parishioners, these pastors said, are so dismayed by the president’s posture toward the war that their support for his re-election bid could be imperiled.” Young church attendees are described as particularly engaged.

Reverend Frederick Haynes III, senior pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church and president and chief executive of the Rainbow PUSH coalition, a “multi-racial, multi-issue, progressive, international membership organization fighting for social change,” spoke to CNN’s Michel Martin on 31 January about the profound concerns held by Black Americans regarding the president’s stance toward Israel and Gaza.

Haynes, a signer of the letter to Biden, spoke of “the nightmare unfolding in what so many of us have labeled the holy land,” and how “we became increasingly impatient with the response of this administration.” Regarding the more than 1,000 signers, he noted, “I cannot tell you how many other pastors said, I wish you had included me. I wish you had reached out to me. So, the numbers are much more.”

He also stressed the engagement of young people. “I look at the young people in my congregation and in the community, the young people are on fire. Because again, this is a generation that, on their cell phones, they have notifications coming at them all of the time. And those notifications, I promise you, continue to enrage what they see as this country being complicit in what is going on because they feel a connection with what is happening to the Palestinians.”

Referring to Black Americans recently killed by a largely white and militarized police force, he added, “They can also relate to [the situation in Gaza] because we are only three and a half years removed from the summer of George Floyd. We are only three and a half years removed from Breonna Taylor and what happened to so many during that summer where we saw in real-time such horrors.”

Haynes faulted Biden for continuing to “fund the carnage.” Criticizing Netanyahu, he said, “We will no longer give you military resources and stand by, watching the carnage unfold, that is a profound statement. It’s one thing to talk it, it’s another thing to walk it and exert it.”

Yet Netanyahu has taken the arms from the US and now is disregarding softly voiced complaints from Biden as key Democratic voting blocs look for an exit even as an ever-more vicious Donald Trump looms on the horizon pushing racist rhetoric.

Trump asserted in an interview posted online on 18 March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.” He added, “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”

The former president claimed of Democrats, “I think they hate Israel.”

In fact, many elected Democrats support, fund and even love Israel despite it’s being an apartheid state. When it comes to funding Israeli violence, most Democrats in the US Congress remain indistinguishable from Republicans.

For most voters, the choice this November is between the known genocide promoter in Biden or the known bigot in Trump, who both hates Palestinians and routinely employs anti-Semitic tropes. An important number of Democrats want a better choice rather than being told to vote for the “lesser evil.”

When these voters see White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre downplaying constituents’ concerns about Gaza, it does nothing to win them back and much to confirm their concerns.

Jean-Pierre’s response “is a perfect example of why we rejected Genocide Joe’s request for a meeting in Chicago,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, National Chair of the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) in an email to The Electronic Intifada.

“His administration and its spokespeople, from Karine Jean-Pierre to Matthew Miller, are callous apologists for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. So while hundreds of thousands are already rejecting Biden this election year, tens of thousands will also be protesting the DNC in Chicago in August,” Abudayyeh said in reference to the Democratic National Convention.

Biden, who has spent months arming Israel for what the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible genocide in Gaza, may lose to Trump in less than eight months because he has insisted on following the lead of Israel’s prime minister who has overseen one war crime after another against Palestinians.

Democrats inveighing against Biden understand the dangers of Trump.

Genocide, however, is not simply a “lesser evil” to be painfully stomached in the voting booth. To many Democrats what is happening in Gaza is an indication of Democratic Party depravity and criminality that cannot be countenanced and must be strenuously rejected.

The reckless support for Biden in the midst of a genocide may turn off enough voters to result in the return of Trump. Democratic leaders, including Biden, won’t be able to say they didn’t receive ample warning.

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David Archibald replied on

Imagine that some right wing Neo-Nazi group published a story of 40 beheaded babies killed by Jews. Imagine if you will, that, the same group, published another story of how Jews mass rape Gentile women as a means of terror. There would be no hesitation in our world's press, among our leaders, and our law enforcement to hunt down the perpetrators of these filthy Anti-Semitic tropes, and rightly so. But the Israeli government has not only been the origin of one story but actively promoted another lie to the US president (if you are to believe that particular rotter). And what of the death toll on the 7th of October. just over 1100 deaths are reported by Israel, but no actual demography provided. How many corpses were Jewish, how many Hamas? If we know of the appalling killing power of tanks and gunships we can know the impossibility of separating one shredded human from another unless DNA is carefully used, but no such evidence is provided.
We are expected to accept Israeli words as "gospel" and yet never has Israel been a source of anything but outrageous lies. So place your mind in a small bottle, and read about the October 7th massacre over and over again, that is all you should concern yourself with. Do not take your mind out of the bottle to examine, the history, the Israeli massacres of civilians, the outrageous lies Israel produces over and over again; that could alter your state of mind, and that would never do,

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william replied on

Yes, Netanyahu will outlast Biden. And, he will be laughing as his 81 year old "Zionist" enabler heads home to Delaware. Netanyahu will be content with his new enabler Trump.

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John Costello replied on

Concluding that Biden is allowing the Dem base to slip away because of his love for Israel, is a sadly naive misunderstanding of him, and the deep doodoo the Dems find themselves in neck deep, after decades of allowing the Israel lobby et. al, determine their future.
It's not complicated, John Mearsheimer offered some explanation to EI, but it wasn't very thorough really.
While I don't see the bright side of this tragedy some around here seem to, the damage being done the Dem coalition is also dividing Dems from the Lobby. Slowly and too late for the Palestinians and probably for anything like peace in our lifetimes, the Lobby is finding the prospect of having nowhere to go but the party of truly crazy people, a stark reality.
And I think they are being forced to realize that the reality that, absent a political solution, they won't even have an apartheid state mirage of a democracy to hold onto.

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Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.