Weekly Briefing: ‘Well, you dropped the atom bomb,’ Netanyahu tells Biden

The insanity of Israeli’s actions in Gaza were exposed for all to see – all those in the world who don’t value Palestinian lives – when its army killed three half naked men waving a white flag and then discovered they were Israeli hostages. A tragedy, no doubt. But that tragedy has unfolded for Palestinians thousands and thousands of times over.

“Israel has been unable to achieve even one of the goals that it publicly set for itself at the outset of the war,” Tareq Hajjaj writes at our site.

And this week even Joe Biden seemed to be having enough. He warned donors in Washington, including a former AIPAC president, that Israel is “starting to lose… support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”

Biden then told the donors that Netanyahu justified the bombing by likening it to Hiroshima and the carpet bombing of Germany. Yes, you heard that right:

It was pointed out to me — I’m being very blunt with you all — it was pointed out to me that — by Bibi — that “Well, you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”

Biden says he responded, “Yeah, that’s why all these institutions were set up after World War Two to see to it that it didn’t happen again.”

Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group said on BBC that “increasingly,” Biden’s team is telling him to play hardball and “throw Netanyahu under the bus” — by going directly to the Israeli public and saying, Netanyahu is not serving Israel’s security interests. It’s time for him to go.

That was on BBC mind you. Our own media are in the grip of anti-Palestinian hysteria. The New York Times runs one article after another about Jewish fears of antisemitism due to the protests of the Israeli genocide. These articles invariably state that much of anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

In one Times article, Jonathan Weisman stated that “Jew hatred” is “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions”—then gave as evidence what “pro-Palestinian protesters did last week outside an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia.”

This is pure McCarthyite fiction. The Israeli-American restaurant owner had raised $100,000 for an organization that supports the Israeli military. It’s fine to target his restaurants with nonviolent protests.

The same McCarthyite fiction as University of Pennsylvania megadonor Marc Rowan, a Zionist, who fresh from forcing the school’s president to step down over the Orwellian “antisemitism” question in Congress, promoted rules to keep antisemitism from taking root in campus culture – aimed at stopping Palestinian advocacy.

Or the same hateful McCarthyism as the Long Island community that turned on a local man for questioning Israel’s conduct and stripped him of his — Santa Claus gig for the chamber of commerce! Ken Dorph made the terrible mistake of challenging American Jewish Committee advocates for Israel at a local temple– and 11 members of the temple wrote in that they didn’t feel safe with the 70-year-old in a red Santa outfit.

This is insane because everyone sees that these Zionist individuals and organizations are defending a genocide, and wielding the antisemitism charge against people who oppose the slaughter of civilians. And the liberal media are playing the useful-idiot role here. Celebrating the supposed revival of liberal Zionism, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp can’t ever say the truth about Zionism—it’s generally racist, and wed to apartheid. Just as Ezra Klein of the Times upholds Israeli Labor Zionist Nimrod Novik as an idealist — even as Novik calls for “separation” and a “strong Jewish majority” in Israel.

Letting Zionists occupy the moral high ground on the bigotry issue is not just wrong on facts, but a disaster politically. Even Biden seems to sense it.

Thanks for reading,

Phil Weiss

with a h/t to Donald Johnson