Biden no longer considers Netanyahu one of us
Weighing his words as if he were placing them on a precision scale, the US president has issued an unappealable condemnatory sentence in political terms: "The Israeli prime minister is doing more harm than good to Israel".
Total disagreement
He made the statement during an interview with MSNBC on Saturday night. Joe Biden has long been a vocal critic of the Israeli leader's handling of the war in Gaza, but never before has he gone so far as to censure him.
Of course, Biden is by no means disavowing the iron alliance the US maintains with Israel, but all the reports he gathers from his ministers and advisors lead him to conclude that the accelerating loss of the aura and international prestige Israel has achieved throughout its history is also seriously shaking its main and staunch ally.
Biden insisted that 'Netanyahu has the right to defend Israel and therefore to continue to attack Hamas, but he should pay more attention to the number of lives lost because of the decisions [he] has made'. The 31,000 dead and more than 70,000 wounded Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to Hamas-controlled health ministry figures, are a galling testament to the proportionality of the Israeli response to the savage massacre of 7 October.
Nor has Biden ever been a great fan of Netanyahu himself, whose stated goal is the complete destruction of Hamas, tacitly implying that he will achieve that goal by any means and at any cost. The prime minister himself hints in all his speeches that this will be his legacy: to leave a much more secure Israel, once Gaza has been annihilated as a sanctuary for Hamas, whose never-changed founding charter makes the destruction of the state of Israel a priority. Of course, Netanyahu was not at all pleased that Benny Gantz, his main opponent but now a member of the War Cabinet, toured Washington for talks that will no doubt have touched on the post-war period, perhaps then with him instead of Netanyahu in power.
Turning to Biden, the US president considered a "red line" the Israeli military's (IDF) planned massive offensive against Rafah, the last redoubt in southern Gaza where 1.5 million Palestinians are crammed into appalling conditions. However, he immediately added that "the United States will never abandon Israel, because defending it is extremely important", implicitly making it clear that even if the enclave, which borders Egypt, were to be completely annihilated, Washington's crucial arms supply to the Israeli army would not be stopped, directly alluding to Iron Dome, which defends the country from missile attacks, whether by Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah, the vast majority of which are supplied by Iran.
Coinciding with the Biden interview in Istanbul, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, reaffirmed Turkey's support for Hamas leaders. Erdogan, who presides over NATO's second-largest military power, was adamant that Hamas is a terrorist organisation. No one," he said, "will get us to call Hamas that, with whose leaders we talk openly about everything".
Erdogan's speech came at the Foundation for the Dissemination of Knowledge in Istanbul, where he launched a brutal attack on the Israeli prime minister: "Benjamin Netanyahu's government is the Nazi government of our time", pointing out that he will be held accountable for his responsibility for the exactions committed during the military offensive in Gaza. Erdogan thus accepts the serious accusations about the IDF's behaviour in bombing the displaced Gazan population, in addition to the almost complete destruction of buildings and infrastructure in the Strip.
The virulence of this verbal attack rules out Erdogan as a mediator in this conflict, a role to which the Turkish president aspired as a major international player, just as he is still trying to play in the war in Ukraine.