Rights advocates in the United States are urging President Joe Biden to end his administration’s “complicity” in Israeli rights abuses after key members of Israel’s government backed the idea of pushing Palestinians out of Gaza.
Far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich said this week that Israel should “encourage emigration” from the coastal enclave, home to an estimated 2.3 million Palestinians.
“If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after [the war ends] will be totally different,” Smotrich said on Sunday, calling for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians.
A day later, Ben-Gvir, who oversees national security, made a similar appeal, saying it was “a correct, just, moral and humane solution”, Israeli media outlets reported.
While it’s nice to hear that Biden is ‘under pressure’ about this, I wish it took something less than obvious genocide and a near-global consensus that these are crimes against humanity for any sort of media to register it.
I honestly don’t understand why Biden is so hawkish on this; it’s not like giving Israel carte blanche will get him support from Republicans, and doing it really does appear to divide the left enough to hurt him politically.
Biden is hawkish on Israel because he remembers a version of Israel that doesn’t exist anymore. The stalwart of the Middle East is a shell of itself and it doesn’t want the rest of the world finding out. I know his age is a meme at this point but it’s worth pointing out here
It also explains why he treats the GOP the way he does, he’s remembering a much older Senate.
To be fair, he has had a surprising amount of success dealing with the GOP over the last few years.