Were there not an Israel,
the United States of America would have to
invent an Israel
to protect her interests in the region.
If I were a Jew, I would be a Zionist.
As a matter of fact, you don’t have to be a Jew
to be a Zionist.
I have had the view for the past 24 years that the
only way in which there’d be peace in the
Middle East is when the Arab nations know there is
no division between the United States and Israel.
What my record has been...
It has been unstinting in the defense
and support of Israel.
The United States has never and will never
lose our resolve.
Israel
Will never waiver.
I’m never going to leave Israel.
- For the past six months, the images of a genocide out of Gaza
have gripped the world.
Razed neighborhood after razed neighborhood,
mass grave after mass grave,
mass slaughter after mass slaughter;
fathers carrying their children’s body parts in plastic bags,
mothers screaming, looking for whatever remains of their families;
children left without limbs, without faces.
What did these children do wrong?
What crime did they commit to deserve
tons of bombs on their heads?
While the genocide of the Palestinians is carried out by the state and military of Israel,
The United States, under the leadership of President Joe Biden,
has played the role of its sponsor.
The defense of Israel is still critical.
So there's no red line.
We are not going to create any conditions on the support
that we are giving Israel to defend itself.
We will always
be there. By your side.
The United States strongly supports Israel and its right to defend itself from Hamas.
And that support is unwavering.
I wanted to ensure, is that still the case, that the administration has
no red lines at all?
That is still the case.
Since October 7, The United States government has provided billions in military aid to Israel
and unwavering political and legal support —
both domestically and internationally —
in addition to direct military support.
But as the Biden administration and the
Democratic Party find themselves in a
political crisis in the middle of an election year,
there’s been a specific media narrative shift on who’s actually running the show.
Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done
to break the cycle of violence.
It’s curious to me to see Netanyahu talk the way
he does when he tried to interfere
in American elections.
We can go down the list of what Bibi Netanyahu
has done to make Israel weaker,
to make them open to that attack.
This line isn’t necessarily new, but it actively erases not only U.S. culpability in the genocide of
Palestinians, but Joe Biden’s own ideological support of it.
And what his legacy should and will be.
There is no apology to be made. None.
Welcome to “Backspace,” where we look at how the story is told in the headlines and then,
we think about how we can tell it a little differently.
On March 18, The Washington Post published this article,
detailing how President Joe Biden had
“found himself deeply entangled in a war he
does not want and that [threatened] to become
a defining element of his tenure.”
The article, drawing from 20 interviews from
administration officials and external advisors,
reported that the Biden administration was
well aware, three weeks into Israel’s bombardment
of Gaza, that civilian structures were being
targeted and that there was no actual plan,
presented by the Israelis, to defeat Hamas.
All this, while the administration was publicly
giving Israel a carte blanche to do whatever it
wanted in Gaza, all while it approved more than
100 military arms sales.
The article, however, relies on what has become a popular refrain from not just this administration,
but also the Democratic Party — the idea that President Joe Biden, and thus The United States,
is beholden to the whims of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu, I think, made a huge mistake by making himself a partisan figure.
Netanyahu’s interests in a way, politically speaking,
is to prolong the war.
And right now, that's a direct conflict with the Democrats and Joe Biden.
What is the president of The United States to do with an ally like that?
Israel has a Prime Minister now
who is incapable, unwilling and in many ways politically
unable to articulate such a vision.
Netanyahu is not listening to us.
And he's a part of a rather extremist project.
The goals of President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu are fundamentally at odds.
No more money to Netanyahu’s war machine.
Now, there are three problems with this framing:
first, it reduces the blame — of not just the genocide unfolding in Gaza,
but also the occupation, system of apartheid, the land theft, ethnic cleansing — to one person,
Netanyahu.
It furthers this idea that, “hey, this isn’t Israel,
this isn’t democratic Israel.
This is Netanyahu. He’s the problem here.”
And so if Netanyahu is the problem,
if he’s gone — like Schumer alluded to — then,
well, there is no issue and we’re back on track to a two-state solution status quo
where there is only actually one state:
Israel.
This purposely erases not only 75 years of history
but also ignores what are core truths about
Israel as a nation, from the day it was founded,
especially that there is no room for Palestinians
and Palestinian self determination.
While Israeli polls find little support in Israel for Netanyahu himself,
his government’s genocidal war has continued to be overwhelmingly popular amongst Israeli Jews.
Two-thirds oppose ending the occupation,
two-thirds oppose aid
reaching Palestinians in Gaza
and 80% believe that the suffering of Palestinians
in Gaza shouldn’t be take into consideration
over the course of the war.
The second problem with the focus on Netanyahu as “the issue,”
is that is presents the United States as not only having no leverage on Israel, but also that the
foreign policy of the world’s most powerful country and military is being controlled by
a small country that militarily depends on aid from it to survive.
And you’d think that these folks would be a little bit more careful about the consequences of
rolling out something that sounds a lot like an “Israel controls America” trope.
And the third problem with reducing all of this — everything we have seen unfold for the last
seven months especially — to just Netanyahu’s belligerence, is that it erases American
direct culpability in this genocide — a genocide that would not be possible without the United States.
It also requires that we ignore everything Biden himself is saying
and has said and done for decades.
Early on when I was a kid, I'd say,
when I was a young senator, I’d say,
“If I were a Jew, I’d be a Zionist.”
I am a Zionist.
“Were I a Jew, I would be a Zionist.”
And my father pointed out to me
I did not need to be a Jew to be a Zionist.
You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist.
I'm a Zionist
Joe Biden is, inarguably, the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history.
From his days as a senator,
to his tenure now as president,
Biden has openly and repeatedly made his commitment to Israel
as not just a country, but as a necessity, known.
I don't think there's any senator who's ever done more fundraisers
for AIPAC, or gone around the country more for AIPAC.
And while we know that the Israel lobby plays a massive political role in The United States
in a bipartisan way,
Biden has never really needed the lobby.
By his own admission, the roots of his affinity for and belief in Israel started when he was a child,
listening to his father extol the virtue and necessity of a Jewish state post-WWII.
The miracle of Israel
is Israel.
It's Israel itself.
The hope it inspires.
The light it represents to the world.
There’s an infamous story about Biden’s
zeal for Israel told by Menachem Begin,
who was the sixth Prime Minister of Israel
and the former leader of the Irgun,
the Zionist paramilitary group responsible for
some of the most notorious massacres in the
1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
In 1982, as Israel is conducting a devastating
aerial bombardment of Beirut,
Begin met with a young Senator Joe Biden from Delaware.
According to Begin, Biden applauded
the Israeli aggression in Lebanon and said that
he personally would have bombed more,
even if it meant killing more women and children.
For perspective, then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan
would go on to call Israel’s actions in Lebanon
a “holocaust.”
Children are not avenged
by the murder of other children.
During his 36-year career as a senator,
Biden became the top recipient to receive money
from the Israel lobby —
something he, as Vice President,
even boasted about at a dinner in front of
more than 2,000 members of the
American Jewish community in 2011.
But Biden’s commitment to Israel really came to a head and changed the course of American-Israeli
relations when he became Vice President in 2008.
The presidency of Barack Obama marked a
critical moment in U.S. history:
he was seen as this fresh-faced future vision
for a country that,
after suffering the worst attack on its soil
since WWII,
had plunged itself into political
and economic disaster.
Two wars.
A planet in peril.
The worst financial crisis in a century.
But while so much hope and change rested on the young senator’s shoulders during his campaign,
he was missing experience, especially in foreign policy.
With relatively little foreign policy experience of your own,
how will you rely on so many Clinton advisers and still deliver
the kind of break from the past that you're promising voters?
Well, the, you know, I am... [Hillary Clinton laughing]
-I want to hear that.
-You want to hear that?
Well, Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well.
[Clinton continues laughing]
And that’s where Joe Biden came in —
the senator from Delaware who was known as
the foreign policy guy.
Biden was the architect for President Obama’s
foreign policy —
a foreign policy that, while focused on diplomacy,
also expanded America’s war footprint
across the world.
It was also a foreign policy that made Obama one of the most pro-Israel presidents
in U.S. history.
Despite Obama’s well known dislike of also then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and their tumultuous relationship, especially over the Iran deal, his presidency saw the relationship
between Israel and the United States reach unprecedented heights —
especially in military support.
As almost a parting gift,
the Obama administration left Israel with
a $38 billion military aid package —
the biggest in U.S. history.
No president
has done as much for Israel's security,
as President Obama.
In a 2020 article for Jewish Currents,
Peter Beinart noted that Vice President Biden
actively and repeatedly shielded Netanyahu
from any consequences and criticism
from President Obama.
Biden wanted Obama to show stronger support
for Israel and its right to defend itself.
Beinart, in his piece, ultimately argued that
were he to be the Democratic nominee,
Biden would set back any progress
the Democrats may have made ideologically
on defending the Israeli government.
That rupture, for many, became evident in
President Obama’s strikingly different approach
to Israel and the United States’ response
to the October 7 attacks.
And what is also true is that
the occupation,
and what’s happening to Palestinians
is unbearable.
All of us are complicit to some degree.
I look at this and I think back,
“what could I have done
during my presidency
to move this forward?”
And so, what happened with Biden’s presidency — what have the Palestinians gotten? The Israelis?
The Donald J. Trump presidency was, undoubtedly, disastrous for Palestinians:
It saw the expansion of settlements,
the Abraham Accords,
the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem
and the defunding of UNRWA.
The Biden administration, having campaigned as the antidote to MAGA, did little to reverse much
of the previous administration’s extreme policies —
instead, it embraced most of them and set them as the new status quo.
Until now.
Over the last six months, the Biden administration
has created a new normal
in the American approach to the Israeli
occupation of Palestine:
that of genocide.
While the administration has spent those six months saying they have some
about Israel’s conduct,
There is nothing this president
and the administration have done to show that
they have any other interest than the continuation
of the genocide in Gaza.
And they can’t just throw that blame on Netanyahu.
After all, was it Netanyahu who made Biden say he saw, with his own eyes, beheaded Israeli babies?
Was it Netanyahu who made Biden say that he
“has no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth”
about their number of dead?
Was it Netanyahu who made Biden flood arms into Israel?
Who made Biden and Blinken bypass Congress twice on emergency weapons sales to Israel?
Push for an $18 billion military aid package?
Have every spokesperson of the administration get up in front of journalists
and cover for Israel’s documented and undeniable war crimes?
And was it Netanyahu who made
former Clinton advisor Aaron David Miller say,
in an interview with the New Yorker,
that Biden does not hold Palestinians
as equals to Israelis?
It took one phone call from Biden to Netanyahu, following the World Central Kitchen massacre,
to make Israel temporarily open up three aid corridors to allow food and medical supplies
into North Gaza, which it has been starving for months.
And we’re supposed to believe this president is just paralyzed from doing anything
to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians?
To stop this genocide?
Really?
The U.S. news coverage of Joe Biden’s role in this genocide has to change —
and that change begins with reckoning with the simple truth that Gaza is Joe Biden’s genocide.
[chanting] Biden, Biden you can’t hide!
We charge you with genocide!
Biden’s statements and the statements of any and all administration officials,
need to be seen in the context of both the history of the President
and the current actions of this government.
By refusing to do that, the basic contextual work,
U.S. news media is doing propaganda for the Biden administration that allows them to shirk
any and all culpability in this genocide.
Newsrooms are also paving the way for
the Biden administration’s carte blanche to Israel
to escalate the war into a regional one.
But for the U.S. news media to have that reckoning, it needs to first reckon
with the role it’s played over six months in
pushing lies and Israeli talking points that have
made the case for the destruction and slaughter in Gaza.
But that assumes that it would even want to.
As we noted in our October episode, the U.S. media
works to protect Israel, not hold it accountable.
What we’ve seen from U.S. newsrooms
since October 7 exponentially exceeds the level of
propaganda we saw
in the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
And when that is the order of the day — what future is there for this industry?
When basic journalistic practices are not just simply forgotten but viciously thrown to the side,
what is the point of journalism?
What does it become and where does it lead itself and others to?
And if there is no moment of introspection,
then it just ensures a continuation of propaganda that only worsens.
Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-U.S. genocide,
with over one-third of them being children.
There’s forced starvation.
We’ve seen the entire health care system in Gaza burnt down,
as hospitals have become slaughterhouses.
Mass graves, tens of thousands of amputations, widespread diseases,
mass executions and disappearances,
aid seekers gunned down.
War crime after war crime.
And while that is Joe Biden’s legacy —
it is also the legacy of a news media that has refused to hold him, his government
and his closest ally accountable.
Thanks so much for watching.
We know that the last six months
of coverage have been
pretty rough.
But we want to still ask you,
What stories out of Gaza
do you think were actually covered well?
Or weren’t covered at all?
Let us know in the comments.
And don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
And we’ll see you soon.