Netanyahu has not driven Israel into its current dead end alone. For years his settlement project and Iran policies were given cover by AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby; the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; the American Jewish Committee; and knee-jerk supporters in both the Republican and Democratic Parties.
And unfortunately, I don’t think President Biden fully understands his “old friend” Bibi, whose government is the first to ever formally declare annexation of the West Bank as its goal and actually tried to strip the Supreme Court of its power to stop it.
For months, the Biden team has beseeched Netanyahu to articulate a post-Gaza vision that would involve Palestinian and Arab control over Gaza and a long-term pathway to demilitarized Palestinian statehood — so that the United States is not facilitating an Israeli occupation of Gaza, along with the West Bank — and to pave the way for a U.S.-Saudi security pact that could also produce normalized relations between Israel and the Saudis.
Netanyahu has said no to all of it. He did, though, show his gratitude to Biden by having his parliamentary majority give Elise Stefanik, a hack Republican congresswoman with no foreign policy standing whatsoever — and a person groveling to become Donald Trump’s vice president — the extraordinary honor of giving an address Sunday in the Knesset, where she slammed the U.S. president and praised Trump.
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