It appears President Biden is moving to sell out Israel, with a possible UN Security Council resolution calling for a “temporary” cease-fire (which would surely become permanent) and opposition to an Israeli attack on Rafah, the last major Hamas stronghold.
But then Tuesday the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire, which our garbage media are shamefully describing as “widely supported” without reporting that within the UN “diplomatic community,” antisemitism is “widely supported.”
What the hell is going on?
A closer look at the Biden resolution draft reveals equivocations, calling for a cease-fire “as soon as practicable” and linking it to hostage releases, which “would help to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.”
Clearly Biden wants to have it both ways, posturing as someone who supports Israel while working for a “diplomatic” solution.
Do Biden’s people, let alone the rest of the world, really think this mealymouthed resolution would be taken seriously?
The first thing to understand about Joe Biden is he stands for nothing — except the advancement of Joe Biden (and his family’s finances, it seems).
Unlike Ted Kennedy, who was fanatical about universal health care and civil rights, Biden in his long career has never stood for any great cause or fought for any big issue.
The only major piece of legislation he championed in his long Senate career was the 1994 crime bill, and he has repudiated it.
How has he managed to prosper in national politics for more than 50 years, becoming vice president and then president?
The second thing to understand about Biden is his political superpower throughout his career has been to perceive the shifting center of Democratic Party opinion and move with it.
Thus he went from being a moderate civil-rights skeptic and abortion opponent in the 1970s (along with Al Gore, Richard Gephardt and many other leading Democrats of the time) to a progressive race-baiter and pro-abortion fanatic in recent years.
When the Democratic Party’s ideological center shifts, he’s always shifted instantly with it.
He is the ultimate political chameleon or shape-shifter.
In 1986 he declared he’d vote to support Robert Bork for the Supreme Court if President Ronald Reagan nominated him, but not even a year later, after leftist activist groups declared a jihad against Bork, Biden did an instant 180-degree turn and distorted the judicial confirmation process to defeat him.
Biden is single-handedly responsible for our poisoned judicial politics ever since.
Few political figures have done more to stain American politics since Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the 1857 Dred Scott decision.
The problem for Biden is his superpower of following his shifting party’s center works fine for a senator but doesn’t work for a president.
The fury of progressive activists in the Democratic Party has always been Biden’s kryptonite.
The party is badly split on Israel and the Gaza war.
Older Democrats mostly support Israel, but younger Democrats, many of them hopped up by the antisemitic ideologies of college-campus hothouses, support an unconditional cease-fire, when they are not actually pro-Hamas.
The irresolute Biden, facing a tough re-election and paralyzed by progressive kryptonite, is trying to have both ways.
Biden has never been a stout supporter of Israel.
His clashes with Israeli leaders date back to the 1980s at least, when he sparred publicly and privately with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that relations between Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are at “the breaking point”: “Biden abruptly ended their Christmas-week call following a tense exchange about civilian casualties,” it said.
“Biden, who was so angry that he was almost shouting in the Dec. 28 call, according to officials, declared the conversation ‘over’ and hung up.”
The final piece of evidence of Biden’s bad faith is the persistent talk of creating a Palestinian state — the mythical “two-state” solution — to help end the war against Hamas.
Supposedly several European nations are considering recognizing a Palestinian state if one can be cobbled together, though this would not happen if America firmly opposed it.
But the US foreign-policy establishment does not firmly oppose it — a Palestinian state remains a talisman for the foreign-policy elite, despite overwhelming evidence any Palestinian state would be a terrorist state.
If a Palestinian state is the ultimate outcome of the current conflict, it will mean Israel was defeated by the Oct. 7 attack, even if Israel kills every Hamas fighter.
Even in his present debilitated state, President Biden surely knows this, but his political self-interest, as always, will determine his decisions.
Steven F. Hayward is the Gaylord visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.