Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss / June 1, 2023
Joe Biden won’t do anything to punish Israel for breaking its word again on settlements because he needs the Israel lobby to stay with Democrats in 2024. And liberal Zionists seem to go along.
Joe Biden’s history with Israel’s illegal settlement project is a lot longer than anyone else’s in U.S. politics. More than 40 years ago when he was a young senator, he banged the table and told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, If you don’t stop building illegal settlements across the Green Line we’re going to slash aid!
But of course Begin won on that one, Israel just kept building settlements. And in one of the iconic moments of the U.S.-Israel “special relationship”, in 2010, just when Vice President Joe Biden landed in Israel, the country announced 1600 new settlement units — thumbing its nose at the White House. Biden took it lying down. He’d learned!
Now the question is, What is Biden going to do about Israel reestablishing Homesh? Homesh is an outpost Jewish settlement in the West Bank that Israel promised the White House in 2005 that it would dismantle. But Israel’s new extremist rightwing government ministers demanded it as a “passion” project, so Netanyahu greenlighted it.
The answer is that Biden will once again lie down for Israel. The State Department will say (as it did on May 22) that it is “deeply troubled” by the Homesh reopening. But then it will do absolutely nothing to punish Israel. Just like they’ll deplore the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh but do nothing to punish Israel over that.
Biden’s reasoning for doing nothing is obvious. He does not want to alienate the Israel lobby– the donors and media influencers who support Israel — before the 2024 election. If Biden gets reelected, maybe he will take Israel on a little, like Obama did in his second term– too little, too late. But for now Biden has done nothing to reverse Trump’s Israel-slavish moves. Done nothing to revive the Iran deal. Done nothing to reopen the Jerusalem consulate to Palestinians despite a lot of promises.
And oh, by the way, the Secretary of State will go pay homage to the rightwing Israel lobby group AIPAC next week, a signal to Netanyahu that you can do whatever you like.
Biden will do nothing to alienate the Israel lobby because, as the New York Times stated once, the elephant in the room is that Jewish donors shape Democrats’ policy:
[T]here is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel. In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors.
And Jews are still perceived to be overwhelmingly pro-Israel, certainly among the donor class (people over 60). The Israel lobby likes to flash its wallet. As Bret Stephens wrote the other day in the New York Times, “In May 1991, American Jewish donors came up with what amounted to a $35 million bribe to the [Ethiopian] Mengistu regime to let the Jews go.” That’s a lot of money corrupting a government. No wonder dictators line up to join the Abraham Accords.
We say again and again here that the Democratic base is sympathetic to Palestinians: it supports boycott and divestment targeting Israel over its human rights violations, it believes Israel practices “apartheid.” But if you told Joe Biden that, he’d say, That’s still a fringe in our politics; at most ten Congress-people stand up for that position.
Biden won’t take any risks with the lobby because he fears competition. Republicans Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley both opened their presidential campaigns by traveling to Israel and bashing Biden over his policy; they are making a play for that Jewish war chest that is the elephant in the room — they know that some Jews will abandon the Democratic Party over Israel. It’s why Obama’s top foreign policy aide had to call “a list of leading Jewish donors … to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides” in 2011– as Obama was running for reelection — because Obama had upset Netanyahu by making the terrible mistake of standing up for U.S. policy by saying that a two-state solution should be based on the 1967 lines.
Don’t tell me about Christian Zionists. They won’t support Biden anyway, no one in the Democratic Party cares what they say. It’s the Jewish Zionist lobby that has sway in the Democratic Party — and over Trump too. His largest donor was the late Sheldon Adelson, whose more than $100 million in contributions got big results — moving the Embassy, trashing the Iran deal, recognizing illegal settlements. Ron DeSantis lately met with Miriam Adelson, Sheldon’s widow.
The only shocker to me about Biden’s stance is that liberal Zionists seem to be staying quiet for his hypocrisy. Liberal Zionists supposedly hate the occupation. They keep talking about a two-state solution to preserve Israel as a Jewish state, and Israel pulling out of settlements to get there (a magic trick if ever there was one).
But they’ve been quiet about Homesh. Americans for Peace Now and J Street have not issued statements condemning the Israeli settlement.
The liberal Zionists know that Biden would be asking for trouble to actually do something about Israel, so they’re not stirring things up.
Here, for instance, is analyst Dahlia Scheindlin (who often speaks to liberal Zionist groups) writing in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. government must think long and hard before it imposes a “tougher” U.S. policy on Israel. [emphasis mine]
[I]f the United States took a harder line on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, that could slightly improve American credibility in the region, but it would come at an enormous political price for any American politician or party that dares to lead such a process. The definite political costs of a tougher U.S. policy on Israel—which cannot deliver a peace agreement on its own—might well outweigh the potential benefits for U.S. leaders.
There you have it — an argument from a prominent Jewish liberal who supports Palestinian rights that the Biden administration can’t be too hard on Israel, because of the “enormous political price.”
Scheindlin is referring here to the Israel lobby, though she’s not actually telling us that’s what’s driving the policy.
Sadly, that has been the case for the Israel lobby for many decades. Everyone knows about its enormous power, and politicians defer to it, but the press has an impossible time actually naming the force at work here. I guess it will be here for a while yet!
Philip Weiss is senior editor of Mondoweiss.net and founded the site in 2005-2006
