U.S. Threatens to Potentially Withold Weapons to Israel…After the Election

President Joe Biden has proven that his words on Israel’s genocide of Gaza are less than worthless at this point, as he has eased into a routine of getting dog-walked by Benjamin Netanyahu while acknowledging that is happening, then releasing anonymous quotes to his favored stenographers about how “frustrated” he is with Bibi all while redefining the term “ceasefire” away from how the rest of the world uses it. It’s not worth reporting anything his feckless administration says as substantive at this point because on this subject, their words mean less than Donald Trump’s perpetual firehose of nonsense.

What is worth noting however, is the framing of words from people with no credibility and the seeming admission that Biden is running a criminal administration.

As northern Gaza has gone without substantial food shipments for fifteen days and counting now, and back in May the head of the United Nations World Food Programme said it is experiencing a “full-blown famine,” the State Department and Pentagon are just now leveling its biggest threat yet, noting in a letter to Israeli officials that “failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these [aid] measures may have implications for U.S. policy under NSM-20 and relevant U.S. law.”

Translation: they “may” rise to the level of past Republican presidential administrations and withhold weapons sales to Israel in twenty-seven days if conditions in north Gaza do not improve.

The election is in twenty days.

This is the window into which the Biden administration and Democratic Party has viewed Israel’s genocide of Gaza: as a political issue to try to downplay during the election, not a humanitarian crisis. If the U.S. government believed that there was an urgent humanitarian crisis, like the United Nations and every international humanitarian organization as well as groups of American doctors and nurses who have served in Gaza have said, then their deadline would reflect the urgency of the situation. It doesn’t. If Biden thinks it does, he should try not eating for 43 days and see how that works out for him. There’s no reason to believe this is anything other than yet another empty threat to Israel to try to score domestic political points with a constituency they are potentially losing more of every day.

One of Biden’s favored stenographers who publishes a fairly routine “Biden is frustrated with Bibi” “report” every month or so, Axios‘s Barak Ravid, leaked this letter from the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense which cited “U.S. law and policy” in its threat to restrict weapons sales to Israel. This is a tacit admission of what human rights organizations like Amnesty International have been asserting all along: because Israel is in violation of international law, shipping weapons to them violates U.S. law. Joe Biden is a criminal in more ways than one.

I am a broken record on this but it’s because so many still wrongly assume that Biden and Harris’s cowardice and abandonment of the Palestinian people is in line with their electoral incentives on this subject, but it’s not (I blame the American mainstream media for becoming one of Netanyahu’s propaganda organs over the last year for this distorted perception of reality). Polls consistently show that majorities of Americans want the U.S. to stop sending weapons to Israel and generally oppose their conduct in this war.

There is even an apt historical example in Hubert Humphrey successfully separating himself from Lyndon Johnson’s failure in Vietnam on September 30th 1968, when the vice president running for president called for an end to his president’s war. All throughout August and September, Harris and Gallup polls had Humphrey at around 30 percent national support. By November he would be polling around 40 percent, and he lost the popular vote to Richard Nixon by less than a percentage point, 43.42 to 42.72 percent. What Biden is threatening to do after the election by all available evidence seems likely to help, not hurt, Harris’s chances of winning, if he were to do it today.

Given that the polls tightened as the Harris campaign eschewed the “weird” line of attack on the GOP that made the vibes so coconut-y earlier this year in order to become besties with other war criminals like Dick Cheney while Israel’s genocide of Gaza accelerated, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Biden and Harris’s political instincts on this issue are in line with their demonstrated moral ones: bankrupt. Northern Gaza was already in a “full-blown famine” before being intentionally starved by Israel for the last two-plus weeks, and a month from now, the United States may try to do something about it. What moral courage.