Why Has Biden Taken to Coddling Fascists?
The recent invitation to Israel's Netanyahu intensifies a worrying trend of befriending the world's most hateful leaders.
Photo of Israeli Defense Force soldier using Palestinian child as a human shield.
America’s support for Israel has long made a mockery of its genuine commitment to the spread of democracy. But it is all the worse now that President Biden has elevated the battle for democracy into an existential fight for the future of civilization and Israel is not just threatening the rights of its Palestinian minority but its Jewish core as well. Ask a left of center Israeli Jew, and they are likely to tell you that Israel is fighting the same fascism that threatened American democracy under Trump; ask a Palestinian forced to live under the boot of the world’s last apartheid state, and they are likely to tell you that Israel cannot be a democracy when half the people living under its control have no rights. So, why has President Biden just invited Netanyahu to the United States?
In beating Trump and rallying NATO to back Ukraine, Biden almost single handedly saved democracy globally. For if Trump had won, the United States would no longer be a democracy, and the alliance of democracies would have crumbled to pieces the moment Putin entered Ukraine. If NATO were in shambles, Putin would likely have done the same in Moldova and perhaps the Baltic states, and China would have likely seized the opportunity to take Taiwan. Meanwhile, fascism would have been on the ascendant globally, and that would have put every democracy at risk the world over. So, we should take a moment to reflect on all that President Biden has done to protect the freedom of future generations. Yet, in the past few months, he has transformed himself from the world’s foremost advocate of democracy into the principal source of legitimation for some of the world’s most fascist leaders.
Why is Biden now coddling fascists like India’s Modi, Israel’s Netanyahu, and Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad Bin Salmin?
Biden’s turn to fascists began with Bin Salmin, who came to office starving millions of children in Yemen through a blockade of the country and the obliteration of its infrastructure. The UN labeled Yemen “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” for several years running, and at one point the Saudi blockade, and the war it waged, threatened 18 million Yemenis with starvation. Bin Salmin made his mark by literally having a Washington Post journalist chopped to pieces amid the mass imprisonment of journalists and rights advocates in his own country. Thus, Biden promised on the campaign trail to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia and make the him a “pariah.” Yet, he wound up courting Bin Salmin’s friendship to keep his country from manipulating oil markets in favor of Putin and Trump, whose son in law was awarded billions in contracts for his family’s loyal support to the Saudi’s starvation of Yemen.
No country can afford to be fully moral in its foreign policy without great risk to its influence, and it is only the influence of the United States that allows it to sustain the alliance of democracies that is now up against the combined strength of Russia and China. Hence, Biden might have been forgiven for breaking his campaign promise. Besides, even he continued arming the Saudis, he cut off the offensive arms sales they needed to sustain their fight against Yemen, and he pushed them into winding down war. So, he might have claimed that keeping Saudi Arabia within the orbit of the United States was preventing it from becoming even worse. Yet, there are only so many exceptions you can make until the exception becomes the rule.
Hence, it was far more worrisome when Biden warmly welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House. Modi is a Hindu nationalist and a member of the organization responsible for the assassination of Gandhi. He helped inspire the murder of over 2,000 Muslims in the state he governed, thereby resulting in him being banned from the US. He placed the citizens of India’s only Muslim majority state, Kashmir, under prolonged house arrest as he broke it up into it up into centrally controlled administrative units. Over the last few years, he is generally seen as having broken the back of India’s democracy, leading Freedom House to downgrade it to “partially free”—and much of the world has come to label him India’s Trump. But Biden welcomed him to the White House with open arms in order to keep India from siding with Russia and China.
Again, he might have justified it under the reasoning that India is likely to revert back to its democratic norm in the future, that it remains a partial democracy, and that the alliances forged today could last for generations. But there are only so many leaders like Modi you can bring into an alliance of democracies without making a mockery of the values it espouses. And inviting Netanyahu to the United States is vastly more problematic, for Israel has nothing to offer the alliance of democracies, and they are a tiny state with nowhere to turn but the West, which could end their abuses in a heartbeat, if only they treated it like every other state. Israel is the only country since at least the time of Hitler and Stalin to have stolen land from each of its neighbors. They are the world’s last apartheid state, according to every major human rights organization in the world, including those in Israel. Roughly half the people living under their control for over the last half century enjoy neither civil nor political rights. And along with Russia and China, they are one of a tiny handful of states that are actively colonizing another people’s land.
Israel also happens to be a terrible ally. They recently developed the world’s most invasive spyware, which hacks phones and uses them to record the activities of their users, and then sold it to some of the world’s most dangerous dictators to spy on domestic opponents. Their strongest supporters helped fuel the Iraq War and tried to do the same with Iran, and they have recently banded together with Islamophobic fascists like Hungary’s Orban and India’s Modi. The West’s support for Ukraine looks racist in the eyes of the world when it excoriates Russia for doing to Ukraine what it has long backed Israel for doing to Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israel refuses to provide Ukraine with their Iron Dome technology, which would protect Ukrainians from Russian attacks—even though America helped build it and gives them an astonishing $3.8 billion in aid a year, a per capita level of aid equivalent to giving giving close to $140 billion in aid each year to the United States.
The Israel lobby routinely smears American politicians and journalists with the courage to call out their abuses as antisemites. They even did it to former President Jimmy Carter, who was celebrated in Israel for decades as a result of his negotiation of the Camp David Accords. Meanwhile, their prime minister had the gall to stand before Congress in an election year and excoriate a sitting American president in 2015. And virtually all of this has been supported by Israel’s major parties of both the left and right, as has their near genocidal destruction of Gaza, the world’s largest open air prison. Yet, this is to say nothing of the fact that Israel is now governed by what is widely regarded as the most extremist government in its history, in spite of having elected two former terrorists to head their state. And Israel’s democracy—which had always been vibrant for its Jewish citizens, while providing some means of access to Palestinian citizens of Israel proper—is now on the brink of destruction.
Compromise with powerful states like Saudi Arabia and India may be necessary to keep them from joining a growing alliance of authoritarian states, but as Obama recently pointed out, it does not have to be done uncritically, and there is no need to honor their leaders in the process. Meanwhile, there is no justification for backing the fascism of a tiny state like Israel, which undermines America at every turn, when they are thoroughly dependent on the West. There is no shortage of reasons to levy on Israel many of the same sanctions that have been placed on Russia. Instead, Biden has invited their most fascist leader to the United States at the very moment he is tearing down the last vestiges of Israeli democracy. It is a strange way to to support Ukraine, and even stranger way to support Israel, and the strangest way of all to wage to global battle for democracy.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny