Yousef Munayyer writes:

Last September, I found myself trying to understand something about President Biden’s behavior that just didn’t make sense to me. Why did it seem like he was bending over backward for Benjamin Netanyahu, even when Biden’s domestic political interests and America’s national interests were not being served by Netanyahu’s decisions?

I concluded at the time that the only possible explanation was that Biden was personally being ideologically driven by a commitment to Zionism. All of this was before October 7, and the U.S. support for Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians that followed, somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 as of this writing, which came with “no red lines.”

At the end of last summer, the initial question arose as I watched Washington offer Netanyahu a series of inexplicable gifts. Any semblance of an effort to advance Palestinian self-determination had been tabled indefinitely. The White House was also racing toward a Saudi-Israel normalization deal that could offer Mohammed bin Salman, whom Biden had once promised to make a pariah, an unprecedented defense pact and nuclear technology as a payoff for recognizing Israel. Moreover, the United States was hurrying along Israel’s entry into the coveted U.S. visa-waiver program even as Israel refused to meet the reciprocity criteria required of all Palestinian American citizens. This was something no previous administration, not even Donald Trump’s, was willing to do. [Continue reading…]