Juan Cole
Informed Comment / October 9, 2024
Ann Arbor – Joe Biden has many achievements as a domestic president, including the biggest investment ever made in green energy and fighting climate change. Whatever one thinks of how he has handled the Ukraine crisis, he certainly has been decisive and has galvanized allies to act alongside him. But on the Middle East, Biden is the worst president since George W. Bush. The odd thing is that from all accounts Biden knows what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up to, and he curses him out like an old drunken sailor. But when it comes to action, Biden has been AWOL.
CNN gleaned the following salty quotes from Bob Woodward’s new book, War:
In April, after Netanyahu had crowded nearly two million people into the small southern Gaza province of Rafah, the Israeli prime minister told Biden he wanted to invade Rafah, as well.
““What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asked Netanyahu during an April phone call, Woodward reports.
“We have to go into Rafah,” Netanyahu said.
“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy.” Biden responded.
Biden was likely saying that Netanyahu had no vision for what a post-war Gaza would look like, and how to shape it in Israel’s interest. The Israeli PM only had tactics — invading neighbourhoods and destroying them, constantly expelling Palestinians from their temporary refuges to other places, most of them in rubble and without adequate food, water or medical care. Those tactics are severe violations of international law, but Biden seemed to think that the bigger problem with them was that they were not accompanied by any grand strategy.
After Netanyahu tried to get Iran’s goat by bombing its embassy in Damascus and Iran’s response with a missile launch was ineffectual, Biden told Netanyahu to “take the win.” Netanyahu struck Iran in a minor operation to save face. Biden said he knew Netanyahu would do something to Iran, but to pressure him into a light retaliation he said he had told him to do nothing.
Biden seemed to think he could rein in Netanyahu by just jawboning him. But he realized when the Israelis defied the US president by invading Rafah in May that Netanyahu had just been shining him on with denials.
CNN says Biden said in private after Netanyahu crossed the red line and invaded Rafah, “He’s a fucking liar.”
He also said that spring, “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!”
Then when Netanyahu took out a Hezbollah military commander in Beirut in July, Biden held a tense call with the Israeli head of state, shouting, “Bibi, what the fuck? You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor.” Of course Netanyahu defended his actions in the Revisionist Zionist way, insisting that you defeat enemies by crushing them when you can.
OK, so as a writer and professor I am not impressed by profanity. A person can usually make a stronger point with a little eloquence than with a potty mouth.
That said, Woodward is reporting that Biden does not have scales over his eyes about Netanyahu. But the prime minister is not just a “bad fucking guy.” The gangster John Gotti was a “bad fucking guy.” Netanyahu has polished off tens of thousands of innocents and is now threatening to level a whole country, Lebanon, the way he levelled Gaza.
Netanyahu has become a Slobodan Milosevic. When Communist Yugoslavia fell apart in 1990-1992, some politicians saw a possibility for expanding their power through ethnic chauvinism. Milosevic depicted Serbs as beset by enemies, and came into conflict initially with both Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims. All these groups spoke a form of Serbo-Croatian, and most people were not religious, but their religious heritage was all that divided them, so Milosevic concentrated on that.
Although Milosevic depicted himself as a victim, you could tell he was an aggressor because his territory kept growing at the expense of neighbours. Early in the conflict his army fought the Croatians. He genocided the Bosnian Muslims. He went after the Muslims in Kosovo. He wanted to have his Serbian ethno-state expand and shrink the territory of the other ethnic groups. Serbia would grow much bigger through massacres.
Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright stopped Milosevic. The US Air Fore pushed his armies back from the Bosnians and Kosovars. Although NATO initially refused to intervene, Clinton ultimately got the organization’s backing for post-war reconstruction and stability operations.
In contrast to Clinton, Biden is perfectly sanguine about Milosevicism when it is carried out by the Israeli prime minister.
I cannot understand Biden’s Hamlet-like indecision. Biden lets Netanyahu get away with murder, constantly running interference for him. He said he doubted the number of Palestinian casualties. That is just mean. He said “People die in war.” He denied that Israel is committing a genocide. He set red lines, and when Netanyahu called his bluff, Biden backed down.
He may have muttered some profanities under his breath about Netanyahu, but Biden did nothing. He could have cut off Netanyahu’s ammunition. The Israelis ran out of ammunition a long time ago. Biden resupplies them in real time from Pentagon stockpiles, in ways that may be illegal in US law. Biden’s secretary of state deep-sixed a US AID finding that Israel was using American weapons to commit war crimes. According to ProPublica, Blinken lied about Israel’s war crimes to Congress, since admitting them would have triggered the Leahy Act, which forbids US weapons exports if the recipient country seems likely to use them in illegal ways such as hitting civilians. And boy, is Netanyahu hitting civilians. Biden has sent billions in extra weaponry to the “bad fucking guy.” Why?
So I’m not impressed with Biden’s potty mouth about Netanyahu. Most presidents don’t let bad guys get away with murder. Biden does.
Netanyahu’s Israel is indeed acting like a rogue state, and it is because Biden issued them a license to allow that.
In the end, Biden is as much a villain of the piece as Netanyahu. The president knows the score. He refuses to do anything about it. I don’t know if he thinks Arabs aren’t human, or really believes that over 41,000 haven’t been killed. Either way, his views are inexcusable and constitute war crimes in themselves.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
