Senator Tim Kaine, a former vice-presidential nominee and leading foreign policy voice in the Democratic party, has said Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu “played” him during the early months of the war in Gaza but “that ain’t going to happen any more”.
In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Kaine accused the prime minister of making Israel “dramatically less safe” and hurting its longstanding relationship with the US, and said the US president had come to realise the limits of his influence.
The Democratic senator for Virginia is best known nationally as Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election, a race they lost to Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence. The Biden ally is a member of the Senate foreign relations and armed services committees.
*played him" - what bullshit. They played themselves.
Politicians unthinkinly ran to Israel side and gave them a blank cheque of support saying they had a “right to defend themselves”. It rapidly became a standard rebuttal to any criticism of the west’s approach to Israel and its gaza war.
Biden and other politicians know who Netanyahu is, they’ve dealt with him for many years. They didn’t care - they got swept up in a right wing tide of outrage and pro war sentiment. They did it to benefit themselves believing this was some kind of 9-11 moment or Ukraine moment.
Instead they’ve got all in on a crazy war against a terrorist organisation where the only losers are the innocent by standards stuck in Gaza. Add to that right wing rhetoric in Israel around long term plans to remove Palestinians from the gaza strip and begin Jewish settlements. This is at best a callous war where the immense collateral damage on palistinians is totally disregarded and at worst looking more and more like ethnic cleansing.
And worst of all, in the US American politicians seem united on supporting an ethnic war in the middle east but divided on repelling a dictators invasion of a European country.
This isn’t about Netanyahu. This is about the extremely weak leadership of Joe Biden, weak leaders across Europe and the rest of the world and the broken state of the US political system.