From the Liveblog of
Monday, March 4, 2024
Biden: Critics of US support for Israel need to better internalize Oct. 7 massacre
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
US President Joe Biden says critics of his support for Israel during the Gaza war should better internalize what Hamas perpetrated on October 7.
“I don’t want to see any Palestinians killed. I think that it’s contrary to what we believe as Americans,” he tells The New Yorker in a January interview published today.
“[But] I think they have to give this just a little bit of time, understanding what would happen if they came into their state or their neighborhood and saw what happened with Hamas.”
“The pressure on the [Israeli] leadership to move with every ounce of capacity against Hamas is real. But it doesn’t mean it should be continued. It doesn’t mean it’s right. And so, I think you’re going to see—I’m praying you’re going to see—a significant downturn in the use of force.”
That downturn doesn’t seem to have come in the weeks since the interview, during which Biden also recalled how he urged Israel not to be guided by rage in its response to the October 7 attacks.
“I understand the anger and the rage… But you can’t let the rage consume you to the point where you lose the moral high ground,” he tells The New Yorker, echoing comments he made in a speech while visiting Israel less than two weeks after October 7.
During that visit, Biden tells The New Yorker, he preached caution to Israel’s war cabinet, whose members responded by pointing to how the US carpet-bombed Germany during World War II.
“That’s why we ended up with the United Nations and all these rules about not doing that again,” Biden says he told the war cabinet in response.
The New Yorker says Biden is “not counting on an epiphany from Netanyahu, [but]… is betting that an offer of Saudi normalization would be so popular with Israeli leaders that Netanyahu would have no choice but to engage it.”
