Biden warns Israel it is losing support over war

WASHINGTON President Joe Biden told Israel s leaders on Tuesday that they were losing international support for their war in the Gaza Strip, exposing a widening rift with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who rejected out of hand the American vision for a postwar resolution to the conflict.

Biden delivered the blunt assessment of America s closest ally in the Middle East during a fundraiser in Washington, where he described Netanyahu as the leader of the most conservative government in Israel s history, which doesn t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution to the country s long-running dispute with Palestinians.

The president said that Israel had support from Europe and much of the world as well as the United States, but he added that they re starting to lose that support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.

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The president s remarks came hours after Netanyahu pledged to defy weeks of American pressure to put the Palestinian Authority in charge of Gaza once the fighting ends. Netanyahu ruled out any role there for the group, which now governs Palestinian society in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Until Tuesday, the United States had largely backed Israel both in action and in rhetoric supporting the assault on Gaza, fending off calls for a cease-fire at the United Nations and authorizing the sale of thousands of tank shells to the Israelis.

via www.yahoo.com

This strikes me as a mistake for Biden, probably inspired by his foreign policy team, many of them Obamaists. Whether Israel can keep going without US support, I don’t know, but if they can, they should. This is not just about civilian casualties in Gaza, but about the defeat of Iran’s ambitions in the region, which include the destruction of Israel. I know it doesn’t look like it, but this is the first shot in an Israel-Iran conflict which Israel cannot afford to lose.