Liberals Are Always Trying To Distance Biden From Netanyahu, And Netanyahu From Israel
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Western liberals are always doing this weird dance where they try to rhetorically create space between Biden and the atrocities of the Israeli government, working tirelessly to frame the president as an innocent passive witness to the genocide he is directly facilitating in Gaza. Those western liberals who support Israel are also simultaneously performing a second bizarre contortion in which they try to distance the Israeli state from Benjamin Netanyahu, as though Israel would be a nice, normal, non-genocidal nation if it only had a different prime minister.
Two good examples of this frantic compartmentalization campaign came out in the mass media in the last few days, with a New York Times article titled “Providing Both Bombs and Food, Biden Puts Himself in the Middle of Gaza’s War” and an Axios article titled “Biden breaks with Netanyahu but sticks with Israel”.
Both the New York Times and Axios write-ups go out of their way to inform the reader that Biden has been growing “frustrated” with the Netanyahu government — yet more examples of a trend in liberal media reporting that’s been going on for months in which spinmeisters convey the idea that Biden is secretly hopping mad at Bibi and his cohorts behind the scenes despite all of his actions and decisions and public statements conveying the opposite. The idea is to manipulate the reader into accepting that while Biden may be backing a genocide, secretly his feelings feel very upset at the people he’s backing so you should like him and vote for him anyway.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker and Michael Crowley present a poetical reframing of Biden’s genocide in which they depict this lifelong Beltway swamp monster’s self-evident depravity as a poignant story about a kindhearted leader facing difficult decisions, saying “The United States finds itself on both sides of the war in a way, arming the Israelis while trying to care for those hurt as a result.”
“From the skies over Gaza these days fall American bombs and American food pallets, delivering death and life at the same time and illustrating President Biden’s elusive effort to find balance in an unbalanced Middle East war,” write Baker and Crowley, presumably while high-fiving about their eloquent prose.
“Mr. Biden has grown increasingly frustrated as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel defies the president’s pleas to do more to protect civilians in Gaza and went further in expressing that exasperation during and after his State of the Union address this past week,” write the authors, before adding, “But Mr. Biden remains opposed to cutting off munitions or leveraging them to influence the fighting.”
That last sentence right there is all anyone needs to know about Joseph R Biden. Those are the raw facts, and everything else is narrative spin. Israel gets the actual material weapons it requires to continue its genocidal atrocities, and the readers of The New York Times get empty narrative fluff about aid drops and Biden’s feelings to help them feel okay about it.
Axios’ Barak Ravid is somehow even more ham-fisted, writing that “President Biden has begun a tricky maneuver: breaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Gaza war strategy — while sticking with Israel and its fight against Hamas.”
“U.S. officials say Biden — and many other senior officials at the White House and the State Department — are extremely frustrated by what they see as ungratefulness by Netanyahu,” writes Ravid, because when you’re writing about Biden and Gaza in a liberal publication you’re required to work that “frustrated” angle in somewhere.
To substantiate his claim that Biden is “breaking” with Netanyahu, Ravid references Biden’s oblique finger-wagging at “the leadership of Israel” in his State of the Union address and the president’s “I told Bibi ‘You and I are going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting’” hot mic moment immediately thereafter, as well as Biden’s statement on MSNBC that Netanyahu is “hurting Israel more than helping Israel” by tarnishing Israel’s image.
Then, immediately thereafter, Ravid nullifies everything he just wrote in the preceding paragraphs by noting another quote from Biden’s MSNBC appearance: “I’m never gonna leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical.”
Liberals love pretending there’s a meaningful difference between supporting Netanyahu’s murderousness and supporting Israel, as though Israeli murderousness does not have a healthy and vibrant existence entirely independent of who its prime minister happens to be. Pinning all the blame for Israel’s depravity on one evil bad guy lets them justify their continued support for Israel despite that position’s self-evident contradiction with everything they claim to stand for.
Polling by the Israel Democracy Institute has found that three-quarters of Jewish Israelis support Netanyahu’s planned assault on Rafah, which the prime minister has said will proceed as planned despite Biden’s empty bloviations that doing so would be crossing a “red line” with this administration. Polls also found that 68 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose any humanitarian aid entering Gaza via any agency at all, which is to say they support starving huge numbers of Gazan civilians to death.
Israeli violence isn’t the product of Netanyahu, Netanyahu is the product of Israeli violence. He built his political career upon popular sentiments that were already in place long before he turned up. If it wasn’t him inflicting violence and abuse on Palestinians it would be someone else, and it has been in the past, and it will continue to be for as long as Israel exists.
There is no state of Israel that is separate or separable from the violence, abuse, apartheid and racist indoctrination necessary for its continued existence. Liberals like to pretend they live in this imaginary fantasyland where a nice and peaceful Israel is possible, despite Israel’s entire historical existence making an obvious lie of this premise.
Israeli violence is not distant from Israel; they are fully united. Israel is not distant from Netanyahu; they are not meaningfully distinct. Netanyahu is not distant from Biden; they are partners in every way that matters. Liberals only try to compartmentalize these things away from each other to stave off the cognitive dissonance inherent in their contradiction-soaked worldview.
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I think this must be one of your best articles, (and they're all good). This gets right to the point: your aim is as straight as an arrow, and you hit the bullseye.
That kind of double talk makes my blood boil. Biden is enabling genocide. If he didn't want to he'd stop shipping arms and money to Israel.