Gilbert Achcar: US president Joe Biden’s crime against humanity

First published in Arabic at Al-Quds al-Arabi. Translation from Gilbert Achcar's blog.

Since he announced his decision to stop running for a second presidential term, Joe Biden has become a “lame duck” – an expression that commonly refers in the United States to an elected official who has reached the final months of their term without any extension prospect. The expression means that the official’s influence has become limited, as everybody knows that they will not remain in office for long. However, a person in such a situation in a presidential political system in which the president is elected by popular vote (indirectly in the US case), is also, in contrast, more free-handed than a president campaigning for an additional term, who must therefore ensure that he (no she, yet) does not lose votes as a result of positions or measures he may take.

The truth is that Biden has so far shown that he is closer to the second case than to the first with regard to the genocidal war that Israel continues to carry out in the Gaza Strip. The US president’s behaviour towards Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has clearly retreated from the semi-critical approach he had begun to adopt after realizing how costly his total complicity in the Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people is electorally, especially among traditional Democratic Party voters, as it is even resented within the party itself. The current onslaught on Gaza is the first war waged by the State of Israel with the full participation (and not just defensive support) of the United States, without which an onslaught of such destructive and deadly intensity would not have been possible in the first place.

Ever since Biden faced the consequences of his support to the Zionist genocidal war, including the pressures exerted on him by a wing of his own party to at least make an effort to stop the onslaught that reached a horrific level from its first weeks, we saw his administration adjust its position and allow the UN Security Council to issue a call for a ceasefire, after having prevented this for months (see my article “How Biden Mutated into a Dove”, 11 June 2024). We also saw the Biden administration make some effort to reach a “ceasefire” – in fact, a cessation of the genocidal war that the Zionist state is waging unilaterally and without any noteworthy “exchange of fire” (despite the usual media exaggeration and boasting in the camp opposing Israel, following a bad habit established by the Arab nationalist regimes in the 1960s). The Biden administration, with help from Egypt and Qatar, has been making strenuous efforts to reach an agreement to stop the “fighting” (more accurately to stop the killing and genocide) and exchange captives between the Zionist government and Hamas.

That was until Biden succumbed to pressures from within his party, as well as from his party’s supporters and major funders, urging him to announce that he would stop seeking a second presidential term. Since then, that is, since he was freed from having to take into account the pressures related to the Gaza war that he was subjected to electorally and partisanly, his position regressed to the collusion of the “proud Irish-American Zionist” with the “proud Jewish Zionist”, as Netanyahu put it during his farewell visit to the frail US president. The regression of Biden’s position was evident in the way he reacted to Israel’s recent assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Commenting on the assassination, the US president merely said that it “doesn’t help” the ongoing efforts to reach an agreement between the Netanyahu government and the Hamas leadership – a very euphemistic statement indeed. The assassination of the head of the Palestinian movement’s political bureau is in fact a major stab in the back of those efforts, which the Biden administration had prioritized in its recent regional diplomatic activity. Ismail Haniyeh was the administration’s main interlocutor, and the latter was betting on pressures exerted upon him so that he pressures in turn Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, in order to achieve the desired truce.

Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran had an even more serious impact than its impact on the negotiations regarding the war on Gaza, as it constituted a highly dangerous escalation in the confrontation between the Zionist state and the Iranian regime. It will necessarily lead to a response from Tehran that could trigger, even if unintentionally, a spiral potentially leading to a large-scale regional military confrontation. In other words, by giving his green light to carry out the assassination, Netanyahu risked involving the United States in a potential war that could be worse than all the wars that Washington has fought in the Middle East to date. Instead of reprimanding his “proud Jewish Zionist” ally, Biden once again demonstrated his “ironclad commitment” to defending Israel by instructing his administration to rush to send military reinforcements to the region in order to protect the Zionist state. As for the administration’s pretence of continuing its efforts to reach an agreement, it is totally hypocritical, since it knows full well that the assassination killed that prospect and that Netanyahu’s goal was precisely to kill it. Biden acted as if he had prior knowledge of the assassination plot and did not object to it, but rather supported it.

Indeed, the US president revealed that his “ironclad commitment” is actually unconditional, to the point that it remains valid even when Israel’s behaviour contradicts the US government’s interests – its material interests (the high cost of a potential war, especially since Washington is already facing great difficulties in continuing to support the Ukrainian government in confronting the Russian invasion) as well as its political interests (the United States’ image in a large part of the world and among a large part of humanity). Joe Biden will alas not stand in the dock before the International Criminal Court – that much is sure. There is no doubt, however, that the court of history, which is the fairest of criminal courts, will include his name prominently on the list of perpetrators of crimes against humanity.