[News] Pure theater: The Biden–Netanyahu ’fallout’ over Rafah

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Pure theater: The Biden–Netanyahu ’fallout’ over Rafah

Despite public disagreements between Washington and Tel Aviv over Gaza,
ongoing US–Israel weapon supplies suggest that the discord is more media
spectacle than policy shift.

Abdel Qader Osman <https://thecradle.co/authors/abdel-qader-osman>

MAY 15, 2024 -
https://thecradle.co/articles/pure-theater-the-biden-netanyahu-fallout-over-rafah
(Photo credit: The Cradle)

With Israel appearing determined to launch a large-scale military operation
in Rafah to reverse its current image of defeat in Gaza, another public
confrontation – between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu – intensified last week.

Biden claims to have halted the shipment
<https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-delays-sending-precision-weapons-to-israel-253f12f0>
of
precision weapons to Israel to prevent a large operation in southern Gaza,
where around 1.3 million displaced Palestinian civilians have sought
shelter, while Netanyahu threatens to continue the war without Washington’s
help.

In a CNN interview last week, the US president said
<https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/12/politics/biden-lawmakers-congress-israel-ultimatum-weapons-israel/index.html#:~:text=And%20last%20week%2C%20Biden%20told,that%20deal%20with%20that%20problem.%E2%80%9D>,
“I’m
not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with
Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem.”

To which Netanyahu responded that same evening, in a podcast discussion
<https://www.instagram.com/dansenor/reel/C64KI4AroFf/> with American Jewish
journalist Dan Senor, “If we have to stand alone, we will do so, because
I’m the prime minister of Israel, the one and only Jewish state, and we
will not go down.”

At first glance, the growing tensions between the two allies playing out in
the political and media arenas seemed promising for those parties keen on
ending the Palestinian bloodshed seven months after Tel Aviv launched its
brutal assault on Gaza.

But the Israeli premier, who has often been caught on camera boasting about
Israel’s control over the US political scene, may have won this round.
Within just a few days, Biden’s warnings and threats all but dissipated.

It began with a flurry of American politicians hitting the TV circuit to
lambast their sitting president for veering from Israel’s war agenda, with
some US media outlets describing Biden’s decision as “encouraging
antisemitism.”

US ambassador to Tel Aviv, Jack Lew, following the script of his Secretary
of State Anthony Blinken, confirmed <https://thecradle.co/articles-id/24861> on
Sunday that “fundamentally, nothing has changed in the basic relationship”
– that only one batch of US munitions was frozen, but everything else
continues to flow “ordinarily.”

And Biden’s meek initiative ended decisively on Tuesday when his
administration informed
<https://thecradle.co/articles/us-readies-1bn-in-bombs-for-israel-days-after-pausing-arms-transfer>
Congress
that it is planning a $1 billion weapons transfer to Israel.

Netanyahu certainly knew how to turn the screws.

*Confirmation of the status quo *

As this was the first rhetorical confrontation between the US and Israel
since the Gaza war’s onset, many Arab and western media outlets interpreted
the intensity of the exchanges as a result of growing divergence between a
Biden administration concerned “for the lives of civilians” and a Netanyahu
government seeking to restore the deterrent power
<https://thecradle.co/articles-id/677> it lost on 7 October with Operation
Al-Aqsa Flood and Iran’s 13 April retaliatory strikes
<https://thecradle.co/articles/delivering-a-true-promise-an-insider-account-of-irans-strikes-on-israel>
.

Speaking to *The Cradle*, Australia-based political analyst
Hussein al-Dirani says:

The American administration is primarily responsible for the war of
extermination practiced by the Zionist forces against the Palestinians now,
in the past, and in the future, and the entity is nothing but one of the
arms of American evil in the Arab and Islamic region. Biden can, within one
day or less, stop this massacre through an order to the leaders of the
aggression to the effect: ‘Stop the war now,’ and it will stop immediately.

*The west’s commitment to Zionism*

The roots of today’s conflict remain an age-old one: the implantation of
the Israeli entity into West Asia, a project of global Zionism originating
from the “Herzl Conference” at the end of the 19th century.

For decades, no American or European political leader has had the option of
ending support for Israel. The global Israel lobby, now deeply entrenched
in western political, academic, media, and finance institutions, aims to
protect the existence of Israel at all costs, stabilize it in the region,
and push Arab countries to normalize relations with Tel Aviv, explains
Yemeni political journalist Osama Sari.

Sari, who is editor-in-chief of the *Yemeni Press Agency*
<https://en.ypagency.net/>, tells *The Cradle* that Biden cannot abandon
Israel at this stage, with the contentious US presidential election looming
in November and facing great domestic pressure from anti-war US youths and
key minority voters.

Some observers believe that Biden’s threat to cut off offensive weapons to
Israel was a feint to score points with his restless, disenchanted
electorate and to prod Israel into re-opening negotiations for a Gaza
ceasefire, which Tel Aviv recently rejected.

Others, like analyst Dirani, contend that Biden’s political ploys cannot
effectively influence the presidential contest because Biden and his chief
competition, former US President Donald Trump, are both known, longtime,
to-the-wall supporters of Israel.

*Theatrics of US-Israel’ tensions’*

Biden’s short-lived media strategy intended to market the idea
that Washington is dissatisfied with Netanyahu’s intransigence and his
insistence on invading Rafah to commit even more massacres – turning global
and US public opinion further against Israel – despite Hamas agreeing to a
ceasefire under the Egyptian–Qatari proposal.

Rhetoric and posturing aside, the US position toward Gaza does not
fundamentally differ from Israel’s and may even be more impulsive and
irrational. Had it not been for unprecedented amounts of US military
support from day one of this round of conflict, the Gaza war would have
stalled a good six months earlier. Israel would also not have been able to
withstand Iran’s retaliatory response in April without the US military
leading all defensive operations, nor even hope to thwart the combined
military operations of the region’s Axis of Resistance.

In the UN Security Council, the US has a long history of using its veto
power to shield Israel. Out of the 262 vetoed resolutions since the UN’s
inception in 1945, Washington has wielded its veto 116 times on issues
related to Palestine.

It used this power 80 times to prevent condemnation of Israel and 36 times
against laws supporting Palestinian rights, with the latest veto coming
down just a month ago.

The White House and the State Department also consistently provide cover
for Israel, claiming absurdly that the occupation state is defending itself
by international law and that the US has not observed any violations in
Gaza despite the Palestinian death toll exceeding 35,000 and the number of
wounded surpassing 78,000.

*Whose red lines? *

This unquestioning support of Israel, despite mumblings in some Beltway
corridors that Tel Aviv is becoming
<https://thecradle.co/articles/israels-war-on-gaza-is-destroying-imecs-viability>
a
“US liability
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/22/israel-gaza-biden-netanyahu-security-united-states/>,”
begs the question of whether there is any US red line for malign Israeli
behaviors. Yemeni editor Sari doesn’t see the Americans drawing any lines
for Israel, no matter the crime:

Until now, no international party has been able to classify Biden’s
red lines. His attempt to suggest that it was an invasion of Rafah is not
convincing at all. The entity has not left any red lines since the
beginning of its aggression against Gaza, and its crimes affected hundreds
of patients in the hospitals it stormed.

In fact, Sari adds, “This point does not reflect real seriousness, as Biden
and Blinken stated in November that there were no red lines that would
prevent military support for Israel against Hamas.”

Journalist Dirani agrees, reflecting growing Arab opinion that the US is
only stage-managing matters and shows little intent to pressure Tel Aviv
into a resolution of this brutal war:

Biden wants to tell Netanyahu that instead of committing 100 massacres a
day in Rafah, he should commit 90 massacres. This is why he did not reach
100, meaning that the massacres should be commensurate with America’s
brutality and not with Netanyahu’s well-known brutality.

Dirani further assesses, based on their statements, that all Resistance
Axis factions understand the US is complicit in the Gaza genocide and is
ultimately the root cause of all tragedies, scourges, and wars in the
region.

Finger-pointing aside, this perception of US complicity in Gaza is growing
fast in global discourse. Efforts to divest from and boycott Israel are on
the rise; many of these targets are weapons factories and transport and
logistics firms.

If Israel proceeds with an invasion of Rafah, the repercussions could be
severe, leading to the wholesale collapse of US interests in West Asia. As
Yemen’s waterway blockades, Iranian strikes, and strategic military
operations and salvos from Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Palestinian resistance,
and the Iraqi resistance have demonstrated, today it is the leaders of the
Axis who are setting those red lines, not western powers.
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