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Facts, fictions, and fabrications regarding Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’

In his State of the Union address, delivered on March 7, US President Joe Biden signaled an apparent shift in American policy toward the Gaza War—though so far, it has to be said, this has proved largely cosmetic.

Asked afterward by an MSNBC interviewer whether Israel’s threatened invasion of Rafah, where 1.5 million desperate Palestinians have taken refuge, would constitute a “red line,” Biden answered:

It is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical, so there’s no red line where I’m going to cut off all weapons so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them.

He then added:

But there’s redlines that if he [Benjamin Netanyahu] crosses them … They cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after … there’s other ways to deal with the trauma caused by Hamas.

At the time, some interpreted this as a hint that Biden might condition the future supply of specifically offensive weapons on Israel’s reining in its assault.

Netanyahu’s response was defiant. “We’ll go there [Rafah],” he assured a Politico interviewer (and has repeated many times since):

We’re not going to leave them [Hamas]. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn’t happen again. Never happens again.

A week later, stung among other things by Canada’s decision to suspend future arms sales to Israel, Netanyahu challenged “our friends in the international community”:

Is your memory so short? So quickly you forgot about October 7, the worst massacre committed against Jews since the Holocaust? So quickly you are ready to deny Israel the right to defend itself against the monsters of Hamas?

And so we return, as we always return, to October 7.  (more...)

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