Stephen Zunes writes:

President Joe Biden’s continued support for Israel’s far-right government, including his refusal to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to the U.S. cease-fire proposal for Gaza put forward in May and his failure to demand an end to Israel’s ever-widening warfare, has not only led to the loss of countless civilian lives — it could also lead to the election of Donald Trump.

In her interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, Kamala Harris skirted a number of direct questions regarding U.S. support for Netanyahu, yet another sign of both her discomfort with Biden’s hard-line support for Israel’s far-right government and her inability to openly break with his policy.

Biden is putting his vice president in the same bind in which President Lyndon Johnson put the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who personally wanted to end the Vietnam War but had to continue to defend it. Like Washington’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and now Lebanon, the U.S. war in Vietnam was unpopular, particularly with Democratic-leaning voters. Another similarity is that Vietnam was not seen as a “single issue,” but rather as a fundamental moral question, one that led millions of liberal and leftist voters to refuse to support the Democratic ticket, resulting in Richard Nixon’s narrow victory.

The growing conflict between Israel and Iran, on top of Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon, bolsters Trump’s message to undecided conservative swing voters that the alleged “weakness” of the Biden-Harris administration has resulted in a world of chaos, while simultaneously feeding Green Party arguments that the administration’s militarism is the cause of endless wars and is facilitating the wholesale slaughter of civilians by a far-right government. [Continue reading…]