More Zionist than Zionists: Joe Biden’s legacy to be defined by Gaza genocide

By Maryam Qarehgozlou

The outgoing US president, Joe Biden, is expected to deliver a farewell address from the Oval Office on Wednesday – his fifth and last address – as he prepares to pass the baton to President-elect Donald Trump. 

Biden is likely to speak about his tumultuous tenure between 2021 and 2025 and reflect on his legacy.

The defining feature of Biden's legacy as the 46th American president has been his ironclad support for the Israeli regime amid the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, which was evident from billions of dollars worth of arms shipments to Tel Aviv despite massive outcry inside the US and across the world.

This support has only strengthened in the past 15 months despite rising Palestinian civilian casualties and widespread devastation resulting from the Israeli regime’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Since Israel launched its all-out war on Gaza 464 days ago on October 7, 2023, at least 46,500 Palestinians have been killed, with a significant number being women and children. At least 109,500 others have been wounded and many more remain trapped under the debris.

New research published by the Lancet medical journal - conducted by academics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Yale University and other institutions - estimates that the death toll in Gaza in the first nine months of the war was about 40 percent higher than numbers recorded.

The ongoing genocidal war has also destroyed hospitals, schools and refugee camps in Gaza, while the blockade of food and other essential supplies has further exacerbated the situation for people.

Humanitarian organizations have repeatedly voiced concerns over the dire situation, as famine-related deaths rise and essential services, such as healthcare and education, have come to a grinding halt.

Israel has been ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to take steps to halt its genocidal actions and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former military affairs minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza.

What has emboldened the apartheid regime and provided it impunity is the Biden administration's unwavering support through public statements and various political and diplomatic measures, effectively disregarding the Zionist entity’s ethnic cleansing and genocidal war crimes in Gaza.

US military aid to Israel

Israel figures on the list of “major non-NATO allies” of the United States and has for years had privileged access to the most advanced US military platforms and technologies.

Since World War II, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid, including military assistance, and is also a leading buyer of US weapons systems via traditional arms sales.

According to the USAFacts, a non-profit initiative providing access to US government data, the successive regimes in Tel Aviv have received about $317 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance from the US from 1951 to 2022.

The United States has provisionally agreed via a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) to provide the Israeli regime with $3.8 billion per year through 2028.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US accounted for 69 percent of Israel’s imports of major conventional arms between 2019 and 2023.

However, US aid and arms sales to Israel have come under heightened international scrutiny since the apartheid regime began its genocidal actions in Gaza 15 months ago, violating all international laws.

The Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, affiliated with Brown University, in a recent report, revealed that in just one year (October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024), the Biden administration spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to the Israeli regime and related US operations in the region.

The $22.76 billion figure comes from adding $17.9 billion in US military assistance to Israel ($14.1 billion in emergency military aid approved in April plus the usual annual military aid of $3.8 billion) and $4.86 billion in US military operations in the region, including against Yemeni resistance.

In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that there “are currently 600 active cases of potential military transfer or sales worth more than $23 billion between the US and Israel.”

Some of the cases cited in the report are due to deals made in past years, and without additional details, it is impossible to know how many of them will result in arms deliveries that might come soon enough to be used by the Israeli military in its Gaza war.

This means that the figure of $17.9 billion in US military assistance to the Israeli regime is a fraction of the full value of US support for this war, which will only be determined over time.

This lack of transparency was also revealed in a March article in The Washington Post, which noted that the Biden administration had made at least 100 arms deals with Israel since October 2023 that fell below the value that would have triggered the requirement to notify Congress of the details.

The deals included $14 million for major equipment and $50 million for other articles and services.

Moreover, in August the Biden administration approved another $20 billion in weapons transfers to Tel Aviv. The arms sale included Boeing-made F-15 fighter jets, Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs, 120mm tank ammunition and high explosive mortars and tactical vehicles.

At the time the Israeli military had killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, leveled entire neighborhoods and blocked shipments of humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip.

In November, the Biden administration provisionally approved a $680m arms package to the Israeli regime, even as the regime was wreaking havoc on two fronts in Lebanon and Gaza.

The delivery was reported to include hundreds of small-diameter bombs and thousands of joint direct attack munition kits (JDAMs). JDAMs convert “dumb” bombs into precision-guided weapons.

Israel had at the time killed close to 44,300 Palestinians in Gaza since the war began and more than 3,800 people in Lebanon.

A report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in November revealed that Israel’s carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip had destroyed 87 percent (411,000) of housing units were destroyed leaving 1.34 million in need of emergency shelter and essential household items.

On Saturday, US media reports revealed that the Biden administration had notified US Congress of a planned $8bn arms sale to the Israeli regime, as a parting gift from the outgoing president.

The weapons will include 500-pound (226kg) warheads, precision-guided munitions, artillery shells, missiles for jets and attack helicopters, and bomb fuses, along with air-to-air missiles to intercept projectiles, the reports said.

The move came just over a fortnight before Biden leaves office. There have been tens of other press accounts of arms deliveries to the Israeli regime since October 7, 2023.

Since the Israeli regime began its genocide, Washington has proved to be reluctant to exert its most meaningful leverage – withholding some of the billions of dollars in arms it provides to Israel.

According to activists, Biden has spent his presidency going against the will of the majority of Americans, international law and even US law to fan the flames of genocide in Gaza.

In fact, the US Leahy laws, under the Foreign Assistance Act, prohibit military assistance to forces engaged in gross violations of human rights. These violations, according to the US Department of State, include extrajudicial killings, torture, rape as a weapon of war and enforced disappearances.

Despite verification of Israel’s gross human rights violations by international rights organizations, firsthand witness accounts, and verified footage, the law has never been applied to the regime.

There is a special Israel Leahy Vetting Forum that looks at reports of abuse by Israeli occupation forces, but Israel is always given special treatment when it comes to Leahy complaints.

In May last year, the US paused a single consignment of 2,000 and 500-pound bombs as Israel was going ahead with a major ground operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

However, Biden immediately faced a backlash from both Republicans in Washington and from Netanyahu and has since lifted the suspension and never repeated it.

US diplomatic support for Israel

Biden has often described US support for Israel as “iron-clad” and has fervently legitimized and encouraged Israeli aggression and international law violations.

On October 7, he expressed his solidarity with Israel and affirmed its need to fight fire with fire. He even flew to the occupied territories and took part in Netanyahu’s war cabinet as a show of support.

Biden arrived in Tel Aviv on October 17, 2023, just hours after the Israeli regime bombed the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City and killed nearly 500 Palestinians.

Speaking at a news conference with Netanyahu, Biden unquestionably backed Israel’s narrative on the deadly blast, saying: “I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion of the hospital in Gaza yesterday, and based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”

The Israeli military had falsely claimed that the blast was the result of a rocket launched by the Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad misfiring. The group rejected the claims.

The outgoing US president has also been slammed for repeating debunked narratives. 

On October 11, four days after the Hamas-led operation, Biden addressed a group of Jewish community leaders in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building in Washington, DC.

“I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” he lied, repeating claims by Nicole Zedeck, a journalist for Israel’s i24 News, who reported that 40 babies had been decapitated, citing Israeli soldiers at the scene of the attacks at Kfar Aza.

The Israeli war cabinet was later forced to admit “it had no evidence to support the claim.”

White House also asserted that Biden had seen no such pictures, nor received any such confirmation, but he never retracted the claims. He even repeated them at a November 16 press conference in Woodside, California, after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burn — burning women and children alive,” he said.

President Biden has frequently echoed unsubstantiated Israeli claims that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals, as headquarters. By promoting this narrative, Biden has effectively permitted Israel to target facilities primarily serving displaced Palestinians as shelter.

Since October 7, the Biden administration has also vetoed three United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions that called for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Israeli aggression.

Despite consequent polls demonstrating growing public support for a ceasefire, and the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration stood firm in its position against a ceasefire.

Despite funneling billions of dollars into military support for Israel, the United States has slashed budgets for organizations responsible for aiding Palestinians.

The $1.2 trillion package of US spending bills which was passed in March eliminated US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – which provides vital services on the ground to Palestinians in Gaza and across West Asia – until March 2025.

The agency lost millions of dollars in international support, led by the US, following claims that some of its staff in the Gaza Strip were involved in the October 7 Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

This comes while the Israeli dossier on UNRWA employees’ involvement in the October 7 was found to contain no concrete evidence when reviewed by the UK’s Channel 4 and other news organizations.

The bill further withheld funds from the UN Human Rights Council for what it called “anti-Israel” actions and eliminated funding to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory which has a mandate to investigate war crimes.

In July, Netanyahu was warmly received by US lawmakers during his address to the US Congress. He was met with numerous standing ovations, showing bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress.

In response to the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, the US government has taken a hostile stance towards the World Court, threatening sanctions and condemning the warrants.

President Biden labeled the warrants “outrageous” and “anti-Semitic,” while the administration went as far as suggesting potential military action against the Hague and imposing sanctions on allies supporting the ICC.

In an act of open defiance, Gallant visited the White House in December for a meeting with a key Biden official—just weeks after the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest over crimes against humanity.

Analysts have characterized Biden as the most pro-Israel president in American history, pointing to his unwavering support for Israeli policies, even in the face of widespread international condemnation.

During his meeting with Netanyahu and his cabinet in Tel Aviv in October 2023, Biden said, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”

Human rights advocates argue that Biden’s legacy will be defined by his support for Israeli actions, especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Pro-Palestine protesters have frequently referred to Biden as “Genocide Joe” for his deep complicity in the Gaza genocide, criticizing his continued military and diplomatic support for the Israeli regime.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk