Joe Biden Finally Pressures Israel Into Releasing Aid for Gaza

After 180 days, 13,000+ children killed and 32,000+ Gazans dead in total, Joe Biden finally decided to be president and threatened to condition military aid to Israel, doing something tangible for the first time to help the Palestinians currently being murdered by Israeli and American weaponry.

White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson released a statement detailing the news:

We welcome the steps announced by the Israeli government tonight at the President’s request following his call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. These steps, including a commitment to open the Ashdod port for the direct delivery of assistance into Gaza, to open the Erez crossing for a new route for assistance to reach north Gaza, and to significantly increase deliveries from Jordan directly into Gaza, must now be fully and rapidly implemented.

So to every partisan Dem who has been credulously asking “what do you expect Joe Biden to do?” in response to the mounting pressure from the left (and George W. Bush administration advisors who think he’s a weak, heartless bastard), this. Joe Biden just proved everyone wrong who was claiming his hands were tied. They were not, it was a simply a question of his will to do what is right.

This is literally the bare minimum. This kind of pressure is what Ronald Reagan put on the Israelis. This is not some grand gesture that marks some big achievement by the Biden administration, but an acknowledgement that their policy to date has been an abject failure and looks like it may cost Joe Biden a second presidential term. If this shift in policy were spurred by true moralistic outrage, they would have done this before we reached five-digit child death tolls.

Joe Biden has governed during this crisis like he is not the ruler of a superpower. He let Benjamin Netanyahu dog-walk him and run his State Department every day since October 7th, and now a significant chunk of his party hates “Genocide Joe” forever for it. He is a weak and ineffectual president.

Joe Biden is simply not good at governance (his former Chief-of-Staff Ron Klain was though!). He wouldn’t be the first Congressperson to faceplant upon being met with a real day job and he certainly won’t be the last. Taking this long to pressure Israel into doing the bare minimum to just begin to try to avoid a famine that could kill hundreds of thousands is not something he should be commended for.

If your kid started a fire in your living room, would you praise them for standing around doing nothing for hours before grabbing one bucket of water?

It’s also an incredibly telling feature of elite Democratic culture that the largest mass murder of children in recent history didn’t move the needle for this administration and its backers one iota, but killing seven aid workers for their favorite celebrity chef did.

No matter what Biden and his flacks say, his actions are clear as day: some lives mean more to this administration than others. That Biden released another weapons shipment to Israel the same day they murdered foreign aid workers indicates that this primarily is not a substantive pivot, but a political one.

Never forget that Biden spent weeks questioning the Palestinian death toll and watching dead and disfigured children come across his desk and none of it prompted any action. It was only when Israel attacked people who are connected to Biden’s class that he decided to get off his ass and be president.

It’s still early and just opening key enclaves in the north does not mean that aid will automatically get to starving Gazans, especially with Israel’s long and well-established history of attacking aid workers. Biden is threatening to condition future Israeli support on how Israel treats Palestinian civilians going forward, but he has long since proven that his words are meaningless and hollow. Actions are his only way to convince us that he actually cares about Palestinian lives, and so far, his actions have clearly demonstrated that he does not.

The fact that Biden sent his political team and not his policy team to meet with Arab American leaders in Michigan over their concerns around Gaza demonstrates how he and his advisors view this issue. It is simply not a moral calling for the White House, just a political liability.

Biden finally reaching the very low bar that Republican presidents have met in the past with Israel does not mean that he has substantively changed his mind, simply that he is aware of how poor his reelection prospects currently look. Let’s hope this actually does signal a shift in American and Israeli policy, but it’s on Biden now to convince the international community that he isn’t the world-historic monster he has so far proven himself to be.