U.S. President Joe Biden told MSNBC on Saturday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “hurting Israel more than he’s helping” in his conduct of the war in Gaza against Hamas terrorists.
The president’s extraordinary statement — an unprecedented attack on the leader of a democratic nation and ally at war — came as the president faces a backlash from Arab- and Muslim-American voters in key swing states who are angry about U.S. support for Israel.
Biden claimed that Netanyahu was endangering global support for Israel by continuing to fight the war as Palestinian casualties mounted. He did not explain what the alternative would be — and, in fact, acknowledged that Hamas would rebuild and return to carry out more terror attacks if there were a permanent ceasefire.
Netanyahu’s policies on the war are backed by large majorities of Israelis as well as by large majorities of Americans, according to recent polls.
Biden’s animosity to Netanyahu is well-known; he refused to meet with Netanyahu for months after the Israeli leader was elected in November 2022.
In the interview, Biden stopped short of saying that he would restrict U.S. weapons sales to Israel, even though he also said that there were “red lines” that Israel should not cross. He said that Israel should not enter the city of Rafah, near the Egyptian border, to attack the last remaining Hamas battalions, until it has a plan for evacuating Palestinians who have fled there. (Netanyahu has said that telling Israel not to enter Rafah is the same as telling Israel to lose the war.)
The interview, with a fawning Jonathan Capehart (“That was one hell of a speech you gave!”), was Biden’s first since his State of the Union address on Thursday, in which he empathized with Israel but warned it about Palestinian civilians.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.