“Democrats are still catching up to the possibility of their coalition unraveling over Israel’s offensive in Gaza,” wrote Politico’s Jonathan Martin on Sunday. It doesn’t mean that registered Democrats are going to vote for Trump, but, as was the case in the last two White House races, the outcome of the November 2024 race will hinge on marginal factors, according to Martin, and Biden faces the potential of losing crucial support from younger and left-wing voters to third-party candidates or apathy.
In this context, President Joe Biden is “deeply suspicious” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, writes Martin, who reports that the President privately has told people in his circle that the PM is a “bad [expletive] guy.” Of course, Biden’s spokesperson Andrew Bates denied it, insisting “the president did not say that, nor would he,” describing Joe and Bibi as having “a decades-long relationship that is respectful in public and in private.”
Everybody who’s ever reported about US-Israel relations will never forget March 9, 2010, when, a few hours into Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel, and after the VP had vowed solid US support for Israel’s security, a spokesman for Netanyahu’s Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in eastern Jerusalem. The outraged Biden called it, “Precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”
MAKING LEMONADE IN GAZA
Since the October 7 massacre, Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been trying to turn those lemons into a lemonade for the idea of a two-state solution. I’m not very proud of this metaphor, what can I say, but here’s another one: Biden and Blinken have been trying to eat their cake and keep it, too, committing enormous military resources to support Israel’s war effort in Gaza while trying at every turn to limit it and slow it down. Their latest one-two punch has been the threat to cut military aid under the Leahy Law which forbids aiding regimes that violate human rights; and the administration’s obsession with “settler violence,” even though the best they could do to prove it was to dig up four names of settlers who are yet to be convicted of anything.
There’s no need to look for logic or consistency or even reality in those anti-Israel moves. They are decidedly not about Israel. They are about those pesky left-wing Democrats, including the African American community which is not going to pack the voting booths for Biden as they did in 2020. Martin describes a panicky reelection campaign, and although Americans by and large vote their wallets and not their views on foreign affairs, niche groups tend to ignore the economic stability provided by Biden and go with their gut about the suffering children of Gaza.
Vice President Kamala Harris is acutely aware of the potential risks, with few in the administration recognizing the danger to the extent she does, writes Martin. Whether at holiday gatherings or during a recent dinner at her residence attended by influential Black men, Harris has been conveying to supportive Democrats outside the White House that she acknowledges the political difficulty arising from Biden’s steadfast public backing of Israel. According to officials familiar with her remarks at these events, Harris has disclosed that she is privately advocating for the administration to demonstrate greater empathy for the challenges faced by “innocent Gazans.”
Pro-Hamas protesters have been heckling the vice president. Notably, her tour advocating for abortion rights has strategically omitted stops in activist-filled college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, which are typically considered key locations to energize core Democratic supporters. The crowds in those two cities will not cheer Kamala.
DEMOCRATS HATE BIBI
Martin is convinced Biden harbors a profound concern that Netanyahu wants to entangle the US in a broader conflict in the Middle East. Such a conflict would secure a continuous flow of American weapons to the region, prompt the deployment of troops, and alleviate international pressure on Israel to consent to a ceasefire in Gaza, thereby easing the pressures from his right-wing coalition partners.
Biden’s executive order that sanctioned those ghost violent settlers in Judea and Samaria was issued on the President’s first campaign visit to Michigan, where he shared with his guests at the National Prayer Breakfast his concerns for Muslim Americans who face a hate campaign, and offered his prayers for those “held hostage or under bombardment or displaced.”
One from column A, and two from column B.
Back to the B word, Martin writes that “it’s hard to overstate how contemptuous even staunchly pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers have become of Netanyahu.” He cited a House Democrat who told him in front of eight colleagues at a dinner, “It was unanimous that this Israel-Gaza war needed to end now and that Biden needed to stand up to Bibi.”
“This is a disaster politically,” this House Democrat, distinctly not a Squad member, continued. “The base is really [expletive] – and it’s not just the leftists. I have never seen such a depth of anguish as I’ve seen over this Gaza issue. Bibi is toxic among many Democratic voters and Biden must distance himself from him – yesterday.”
Meanwhile, uninformed young Democrats continue to support the people who would hang them from the nearest tree if they ever got close enough. They think in stock terms of white Jews oppressing dark-skinned Arabs. Their access to facts and to an understanding of reality in the Middle East is blocked by professors, reporters, and influencers with a clearly antisemitic agenda.
This is why, at a conference that was convened by the University of Southern California’s Center for the Political Future, as Martin describes it, one student took the microphone and told Biden’s man, Nevada Democrat John Anzalone, that Michigan Democrats are “not going to vote for Genocide Joe.”
And we all laughed when those Haredi rabbis filled up the stadiums demonstrating against the Internet…
