Pure Theater: The Biden–Netanyahu ’Fallout’ Over Rafah

Despite public disagreements between Washington and Tel Aviv over Gaza, ongoing US–Israel weapon supplies suggest that the discord is more media spectacle than policy shift.

With Israel appearing determined to launch a large-scale military operation in Rafah to reverse its current image of defeat in Gaza, another public confrontation – between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – intensified last week.

Biden claims to have halted the shipment of precision weapons to Israel to prevent a large operation in southern Gaza, where around 1.3 million displaced Palestinian civilians have sought shelter, while Netanyahu threatens to continue the war without Washington’s help.

In a CNN interview last week, the US president said, “I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem.”

To which Netanyahu responded that same evening, in a podcast discussion with American Jewish journalist Dan Senor, “If we have to stand alone, we will do so, because I’m the prime minister of Israel, the one and only Jewish state, and we will not go down.”

At first glance, the growing tensions between the two allies playing out in the political and media arenas seemed promising for those parties keen on ending the Palestinian bloodshed seven months after Tel Aviv launched its brutal assault on Gaza.

But the Israeli premier, who has often been caught on camera boasting about Israel’s control over the US political scene, may have won this round. Within just a few days, Biden’s warnings and threats all but dissipated.

It began with a flurry of American politicians hitting the TV circuit to lambast their sitting president for veering from Israel’s war agenda, with some US media outlets describing Biden’s decision as “encouraging antisemitism.”

US ambassador to Tel Aviv, Jack Lew, following the script of his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, confirmed on Sunday that “fundamentally, nothing has changed in the basic relationship” – that only one batch of US munitions was frozen, but everything else continues to flow “ordinarily.”

And Biden’s meek initiative ended decisively on Tuesday when his administration informed Congress that it is planning a $1 billion weapons transfer to Israel... Continue Reading⤵️

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