The US and Israel on Gaza: Biden and Netanyahu Think the Same

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ongoing Israeli retaliation, is there anything different in the U.S. government’s response this time around?

The question must be answered in context. Ever since the 1967 War, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands has actually been a U.S.-Israeli occupation, with the U.S. government not just fully complicit with the occupation but also the principal backer of Israel’s continued settler-colonialism economically, politically, diplomatically, and most importantly, militarily.

Given this context, nothing much has changed in the U.S. response, except it has gotten scarily worse. In any number of ways, the U.S. government has double-downed on its support for the Israeli apartheid regime and pretended that the oppression of the Palestinian people is not even a factor in its calculations.

The first statements out of the White House of President Joe Biden articulated full-throated support for Israel and condemnation of the Hamas attack as “pure unadulterated evil,” casting Hamas not just as a terrorist organization but as a group “whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.”

Raising the spectre of antisemitism–as if the armed Palestinian resistance was based purely on ethnic and religious hatred and not on dispossession, occupation, theft of lands, the 16-year long siege of Gaza, and denial of fundamental human rights–was an entirely new twist for a U.S. administration and probably reflective of the Christian Zionist views held by Biden…

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[Politics Today, October 20, 2023]