The red lines are imaginary

Prior to the election, I think we were all aware that Joe Biden was an ineffectual waffler on Middle East issues. He would wag his finger and then do nothing but wobble along the status quo line. I had this wishful hope that Harris was just going along out of loyalty to her president — unfortunately, we’ll never find out if she would have changed the country’s course if she’d gotten out from under Joe’s feeble thumb. All we can know for sure was that Biden stood by doing nothing while children were murdered in Palestine.

Now ProPublica lists all the cowardice behind the Biden administration’s Israel policy. He kept saying one thing, and doing nothing.

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

“Don’t you dare bomb that Palestinian town!” Israel, without hesitation, bombs the town. “Oh, OK, here’s a billion dollars worth of bombs to replenish your supply.” Over and over again. The article talks a lot about all these “red lines” the US was drawing in the conflict, and how US credibility was constantly diminished because Israel didn’t care and knew they’d get all the money they wanted, no matter how far over the line they crossed.

The article doesn’t end on an optimistic note.

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

Who in the world cares what red line the US draws anymore?

Biden was a weak president, but don’t expect Trump will be any better. He’s going to bluster and lie louder is all.