Joe Biden doesn’t appear to care about the Palestinians he and his administration have helped to kill. When he finally met with a small group of Muslim American leaders in April this year who described to him the horror and peril Gazans were facing, Biden reportedly responded by changing the subject to Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 and dismissively telling a doctor he had already seen the photos of starving women and children she was showing him — which was impossible, since they had come from her phone. As former Clinton State Department official Aaron David Miller put it when asked if Biden has the same empathy for Palestinians as he does for Israelis, “No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it.”
But there is one thing we know Biden does care about: his own legacy and reputation. And as a result of his blank-check policy to Israel, one that is now moving beyond genocide in the Gaza strip and unfolding into the largest Israeli military offensive in decades on the decidedly Hamas-less West Bank, Biden now stands on the brink of obliterating that, too.
For the better part of the last year, Biden and his foreign policy team have been deluding themselves that their central role in facilitating what more and more experts are declaring a genocide of Palestinians will be forgiven and forgotten as long as he emerges from it all with the promise of Palestinian statehood. In this fantasy, Biden would let Israel rampage through Gaza until it got tired, secure a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement, broker a deal that would trade normalized Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia for “irreversible” steps toward a demilitarized Palestinian state, and the president would then embark on a “victory tour,” taking credit for finally getting something close to a two-state solution, as an international coalition rebuilt a flattened Gaza and temporarily patrolled the wreckage of its streets — all in time to win the presidential election in…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
