The US and Israel on Gaza: Biden and Netanyahu Think the Same

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n the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ongoing Israeli retaliation, is there anything different in the U.S. government’s response this time around?

The question must be answered in context. Ever since the 1967 War, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands has actually been a U.S.-Israeli occupation, with the U.S. government not just fully complicit with the occupation but also the principal backer of Israel’s continued settler-colonialism economically, politically, diplomatically, and most importantly, militarily.

Given this context, nothing much has changed in the U.S. response, except it has gotten scarily worse. In any number of ways, the U.S. government has double-downed on its support for the Israeli apartheid regime and pretended that the oppression of the Palestinian people is not even a factor in its calculations.

The first statements out of the White House of President Joe Biden articulated full-throated support for Israel and condemnation of the Hamas attack as “pure unadulterated evil,” casting Hamas not just as a terrorist organization but as a group “whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.”

Raising the spectre of antisemitism–as if the armed Palestinian resistance was based purely on ethnic and religious hatred and not on dispossession, occupation, theft of lands, the 16-year long siege of Gaza, and denial of fundamental human rights–was an entirely new twist for a U.S. administration and probably reflective of the Christian Zionist views held by Biden.

From there it only got worse, with the stakes for the Biden administration heightened by the upcoming presidential elections, the killings and capture of U.S. citizens, pressure from the Israel Lobby, the desire to jettison the left-leaning wing of the Democratic Party that increasingly supported Palestinian rights, and the geopolitical calculations that the attack might spoil Biden’s efforts to entice Saudi Arabia into normalizing relations with Israel.

An early diplomatic sign was the deletion of Turkey’s call for a “cease-fire” from a social media message posted by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to X, formerly Twitter. Apparently Blinken thought better of mentioning a cease-fire after posting the tweet. Past U.S. responses to Israel’s bombardments of Gaza in 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014 usually involved an interregnum before the State Department stepped in to call for a cease-fire or softening of the bombing.

This time around, no such consideration. The deletion signaled a U.S. green light for an all-out attack against Gaza. And indeed, as of this writing, Israel has dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza’s dense population over a six-day period, almost as much as NATO forces dropped on Afghanistan over an entire year, according to calculations by war crimes investigator Marc Galasco, who was quoted in The Guardian.

According to internal memos obtained by the Huffington Post, the State Department also counseled that the word “de-escalation” was not to be used, and from there the Biden Administration began to actively take part in planning war crimes. It did so with Blinken’s initial call for a “safe corridor” out of Gaza and into Egypt for Gaza’s civilian population, a barely disguised call for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

A number of factors play into the U.S. role, principally the fact that it has a long-standing history of imperialist and colonialist behavior and is itself saturated with a settler-colonial tradition that included a genocide and forced removal of Native Americans. Indeed, the shared values that the U.S. claims with Israel include both the dispossession of the indigenous and establishing apartheid regimes—one of white supremacy and the other Jewish supremacy.

Several other developments also must be accounted for. With presidential elections looming next year, Biden already finds himself trailing in the polls against the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who endeared himself to the Israel Lobby during his first term by recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Since Biden took office, he hasn’t undone anything Trump did, but he did snub Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by not inviting him to the White House in the first few years of his term and openly criticized Netanyahu’s plan to neuter Israel’s High Court.

Prior to the Hamas attack, Biden sought to make amends by finally inviting Netanyahu to the U.S. capital, likely in the hope of soliciting more funds from the powerful Lobby for his 2024 election campaign. Since the Hamas attack, the mainstream news media highlights the cheek-to-cheek relationship between the two administrations. Meanwhile other Republican Party presidential hopefuls appeal stridently to the Christian Zionist and racist base of their party in the hopes of galvanizing support.

Thus, the following Republicans have issued statements like these: “Level the place,” said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages,” said Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). “…You can’t coexist. They have to be eradicated.” “They’re a territory that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot,” said Republican Rep. Max Miller.

Biden was hopeful of inducing Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, especially after witnessing China’s recent diplomatic moves in the region. During his 2020 presidential campaign Biden promised that Saudi Arabia would be treated as a “pariah” due to its human rights record, but he quickly reversed course once in office, fearful of a spike in oil prices. He must have anticipated that improving relations with both Israel and the Saudis would reap rewards not only from the Lobby but also from the U.S. and the Israeli military-industrial complex, which stand to gain huge profits from the so-called Abraham Accords.

Iran represented yet another geopolitical objective complicated by Hamas. Biden administration officials carefully noted that Iran seemed to be caught by surprise by the Hamas attack. However, Republicans were quick to blame Iran for the attack, claiming that $6 billion due to be freed from the sanctions regime helped enable the Hamas offensive. The Biden administration quickly shut down any release of those funds–now controlled by Qatar–which anyway were earmarked for humanitarian purposes only.

The Hamas attack has likely spoiled any effort to get Iran back into the nuclear accord that Trump exited at the Israel Lobby’s behest. Biden saw Iran’s reentry into the accord as part of his “pivot to Asia,” essentially leaving Middle East concerns behind so that the U.S. could focus primarily on its economic and political rivalry with China.

Finally, the Biden administration’s wholehearted embrace of Israel can also be seen as a way for the Democratic Party establishment to isolate its growing left-wing. Polls show that nearly 50 percent of the party’s base now has more sympathy for the Palestinians than Israel. The Israel Lobby has increasingly grown fearful of losing the bipartisan support it has long enjoyed.

By pummeling that left-wing with the images of Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians (itself a mirror image of Israel’s conduct over the last 75 years) and by casting Hamas as simply a terrorist organization, Biden and cohorts whipped most elected officials into line. Only Reps. Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib continued to center Palestinian suffering in the wake of the attack, while 55 Democratic congresspeople urged Israel to obey international law and called for humanitarian aid to Gaza.

The U.S. double standard is alive and well for the moment. But the more it enables the crimes of the apartheid regime, the more it isolates itself from the rest of the world, especially the Global South.