I'm done with these passive aggressive threats from Medhi Hasan and others. As I showed in this diary , President Biden has been trying to protect the Palestinian civilians and advocate for them. Joe Biden is president of the United States, not the Prime Minister of Israel. There has been strategy behind President Biden's approach:
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For some time, I have written that I suspected that part of President Biden's strategy in being so supportive publicly of Israel was to give him room and space to warn or even criticize Netanyahu in private. I had not read anything from the media suggesting this. It was my own read on the situation. Therefore, Prime Minister Netanyahu may feel like he has nothing to lose. He may feel that a major military conflict could lead Israeli citizens to back him as it becomes 'rally around the leader ' time. Consequently, I feel like if President Biden had not made the moves he did, then Netanyahu was likely to raze Gaza to the ground, to completely destroy it.
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However, that is likely to result in mass Palestinian civilian casualties. That likely would have caused the military conflict to widen. Iran would likely even further help the terrorist organizations that they sponsor, Hezbollah and Hamas, commit terrorist attacks. This would also have further enraged the Arab populations in various Arab nations, even those which have in recent history been allies of the United States.
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.However, by as journalists and experts below say, President Biden's forthright support for Israel and even being the first US president to visit Israel during a military conflict earned him support from and credibility with Israeli citizens. Equally important for this plan to work is an insistence that Israel abide by the Geneva convention, the rules of war, the rule of law, and prioritize avoiding mass Palestinian civilian casualties. This was crucial because President Biden backing away from Israel could not be seen to be out of the blue. Prior to this strong support for Israel, the loss of the backing of the United States and the federal government of the United States would not have been as great a loss. Now, due to the ground work President Biden laid down, I believe that Israeli citizens would be very upset with Prime Minister Netanyahu if his actions which led to mass Palestinian civilians caused President Biden and the United States to no longer support him and Israel because he rejected advice to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties.
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Now, he is in a position in which he has maximized the potential influence he could have upon Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. Thus, President Biden's cautions to Prime Minister Netanyahu to avoid any event that could result in mass Palestinian civilian casualties have the maximum chance of success.
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Katty Kay, "Yeah, the Brits have moved naval assets into the region as well. So they are very much in lock-step, the government is very much in lock-step, but there is some disconnect between the governments and the people, you have very big pro-Palestinian demonstrations in France, you have pro Palestinian demonstrations in London, and if you look at the domino effect of this, of any kind of big scale invasion of Gaza and even the atrocities that you know, the killings that we're seeing in the Southern part that we're seeing in the moment, I just cameback from London, it gets much more play in the European press than it does in the American press even, the Americans are trying to cover it too, but the dominoes will be that the Arab world gets impatient with the Israelis, loses faith with the Israelis, the Europeans lose with the Israelis, then the fear would be that the Americans do too if this ground invasion were to go on for a long time and we were to see night after night images of Palestinians being bombed in Gaza.
.Jonathon LeMire, " Yes certainly those images could further sway public opinion. Administration officials in Washington I have spoken with over the last couple of days they note that Israel has built this 300,000 plus reservist force near the border and there is only so long you can keep a group of that size there because there are economic impacts, logistical impacts, and at a certain point the order has to be given to go, but Israel right now is listening. US officials tell me they are very careful, they are not dictating military strategy, they want to make that very clear, a three star US Marine General over there now,other top officials as well advising Israel as to what the fight may hold ahead when they do go in and how difficult it will be and there is a sense here, senior Biden aides tell me that because the president has been so forthright with his support for Israel, going to Tel-Aviv, delivering speech after speech here in the United States backing the Israeli cause, he's bought some currency there and that Israel may be more inclined to listen to him , that they feel like he's bought in with him and therefore, they are more willing to listen to his message of take it slow. Be patient. Do the right thing. "
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Somebody could reason from what Medhi Hasan said and say since that vote is lost despite doing everything we could to help the Palestinians, it makes more sense to stop doing that and stop advocating for them. To be clear, I would never advocate for such a decision. That is a fact because it would be morally wrong. But somebody else might get angry and do such a thing. Of course I would disapprove of this completely. And what are these Muslims going to do when Donald Trump is president and goes after Muslims? He's already made it clear that he will go after anybody who is not an evangelical Christian who doesn't support him. It's not Joe Biden who would suffer from a Donald Trump win. It's all of us, especially members of marginalized communities, perhaps these Muslims who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but won't vote for him in 2024 most of all. Medhi has reasoned himself into a dead end here.
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How does Medhi not understand that President Biden is president of the United States and not the Prime Minister of Israel? Israel is a sovereign nation and President Biden can't force Prime Minister Netanyahu to do something he refuses to do. He is trying to use the influence he can to push Prime Minister Netanyahu to make choices that are better for the Palestinian civilians and Israel itself. Israel suffered a terrible terrorist attack. To tell Israel that they can't attempt to eradicate the military capability of Hamas to launch violent terrorist attacks from Gaza isn't realistic. It would mean losing the ear of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. Would we have agreed to not pursue justice and go after Al Qaeda after September 11? Yes, we learned some things about the wisdom of pursuing a ground offensive in a foreign country , but would we have agreed to not pursue eradicating the ability of Al Qaeda to launch terrorist attacks from Afghanistan? Would we have received orders from another nation to not pursue eliminating Al Qaeda's ability to use Afghanistan as a base from which they can plan and execute terrorist attacks well? I have this sneaking feeling that such an order would not have gone over very well with either voters here or with members of the federal government. Clearly, commencing a ground war against both Iraq and Afghanistan was a mistake. But those are foreign countries that don't share a border with us. And giving such an order, an order equivalent to ordering Israel , another country, to not pursue eliminating the military capability of Hamas to launch violent terrorist attacks from Gaza would not have gone over well.
Now, I want to also point out from the excellent abbreviated pundit diary by Dr. Greg Dworkin some of the good that President Biden has been doing:
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Yasmeen Abutaleb and John Hudson/ Washington Post
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said that after the United States dispatched three senior military officers in late October to advise the Israelis on strategy, they sent only about a third as many troops into Gaza as they had initially planned.
The White House also insists it has influenced Israel’s military tactics, pointing out that more than 100 aid trucks a day on average are getting into Gaza and that Israel is now allowing in some fuel. One
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NBC
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The final agreement — the outlines of which had been on the table for weeks — wouldn’t have been accepted by Netanyahu without enormous pressure from Biden, according to a senior Israeli government official.
“This deal was a Biden deal, not a Netanyahu deal,” the official said
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Medhi Hasan, " I have had the same conversation with all my Muslim friends and family members over Thanksgiving. Not a single one of them says they will vote for Biden again, having voted for him in 2020. Every single one of them says it's because of Gaza. Dems need to understand that the anger is very real. "
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Did he Win Every Argument here? Did he ? Did he try to share with them the fact that President Biden is the president of the United States, not the Prime Minister of Israel? Did he explain to them that Israel is a sovereign nation and that persuading Israel to not respond to a violent terrorist attack was a non-starter, an impossibility? Did he explain to them the consequences for them if Donald Trump is elected president again, as well as for everybody else? Is he just not quite as good at debating as he thinks? Or does he think that because of this, it's justifiable to enable Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election by not voting for President Biden's reelection? Did he win the arguments and get them to that position? The really shitty thing about what Medhi is doing here is to try and pretend that he would never support such decisions, but he is trying to justify them. He was afraid to say that he agrees with them because he probably knows how well that would land at MSNBC and that among members of the responsible press, he would be read the riot act because choosing to not vote for President Biden in the 2024 presidential election would be the height of irresponsibility and it can't be justified, especially not on the facts. As I noted above, he's reasoned himself into a dead end.