Donald Trump is very fond of citing “bumbles” when or where President Joe Biden physically stumbles or stutters or blunders in a speech. Even better for Trump is when Joe Biden bungles a major decision. This is because with 94 legal indictments, Donald buttresses up his self-proclaimed record of outstanding personal, business, and political decision making. In sum, the Donald is drawing down fast on his ability to murder someone on 5th Avenue in New York City and not lose a single voter – so he
So on October 21st 2023 in Tel Aviv President Joe Biden committed a massive bumble in the form of a diplomatic faux pas. Embracing hardcore, ironclad buddy Benjamin Netanyahu, President Biden said “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”
Now this has one empathetic meaning for Joe Biden and another, diametrically different meaning for Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-rightist, West Bank Settler Cabinet thugs. They are the poison in the Netanyahu’s Cabinet working feverishly to bulldoze all Palestinians out of the West Bank as they work with Netanyahu to guarantee there will be no 2-state solution as Israel becomes Judea with any lingering Palestinians totally subservient to their Israeli overlords. It is also the carte-blanche permission to bomb and kill anyone remotely identified as a Hamas target or terrorist.
The irony is that Netanyahu and his cohorts miss completely the seminal words of Moshe Dayan from 67 years ago at an epitaph for an Israeli soldier fallen at the Israel-Gaza border “Let us not today cast blame on his murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.”
Since the Oslo Negotiations, Benjamin Netanyahu has worked to complete David Ben Gurion’s Zionist vision of Israel taking complete hold of Judea(its 3000 year old God-given homeland) with treacherous cunning. So now with alarming regularity, Netanyahu rejects Biden and Blinken calls for fewer civilian deaths, insists with a War Cabinet echo approval of many months of war ahead and emphatically reserves all rights to determine what and how long there will be Israeli presence in Gaza, and what Israeli efforts will be made for a real 2-state solution beyond none-at-all.
Meanwhile Biden and Blinken find themselves at the short end of the stick as the Washington Post reports that 1million Palestinians have been forced into deep South Gaza with minimal shelter and facilities, rapid and constantly changing “messages on where to stay outside while the NYTimes reports that the IDF has been using it heaviest bombs in South Gaza. And now Israel is using dumb bombs in more than half its strikes. And the Washington Post has done an investigative report on the IDF demolition of AlShifa and other North Gaza hospitals with serious questions that will vanish with the Gaza street rubble.
Thus it has become more notable that Biden’s ironclad support for Israel and Netanyahu has serious consequences.
1 – AS the war drags on Israeli democratic prestige[even Israeli opinion] sours and US political influence plummets;
2 – The Great Biden concern, risk of wider Middle-east conflict grows;
3 -The IDF, suffering losses and having been “surprised” by Oct 7, has lost all restraint;
4 –The Biden MidEast Bumble provides precious Foreign Policy and Decision-making ammunition for Donald Trump.
Yes, Biden has been dealt a vicious set of wicked problems, but only Joe can take credit for his bungled band of ironclad buddies – what a ditch.