Joe Biden praised Senate Leader Chuck Schumer's speech on the Senate floor excoriating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday as a "good speech" but stopped short of calling for new elections in Israel as Schumer did.
"I'm not going to elaborate on the speech," Biden said. "He made a good speech, and I think he expressed serious concern shared not only by him, but by many Americans."
Schumer's incendiary speech bordered on election interference. Schumer said "it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7." Who is he to say that?
“Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage and work toward a two-state solution," Schumer said.
That's because Netanyahu's coalition was elected with the full knowledge of the Israeli people that Netanyahu does not support a two-state solution and won't support it as long as Hamas is running the Palestinian state.
Some observers believe Schumer's outburst and Biden's agreement with it is nothing unusual.
“It is an urban legend that we don’t intervene in Israeli politics and they don’t try to intervene in ours,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Miller has worked as a negotiator for both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“We do intercede and they do intercede in ours.”
In 2015, Netanyahu spoke before a joint session of Congress and urged the lawmakers to vote against the Iran nuclear deal. This was after the Obama administration snubbed the Israeli leader by not inviting him to Congress.
In practice, keeping out of allies’ elections has been more of a professed American value than enshrined protocol. U.S. leaders have frequently demonstrated a “varsity versus junior varsity” approach to how overtly they noodle in the internal politics of friends, says Edward Frantz, a University of Indianapolis historian. The bigger the ally’s economy, the less likely American leaders are to meddle openly in its elections.\
“American politicians want to have it both ways,” Frantz said. “There are moments when American leaders want to and need to speak out and have their say. But there is reason to stay close to the lines on elections. You don’t want foreign governments to interfere in our own internal politics, either.”
The domestic reaction to election "interference" depends on what party controls the White House. The left almost started a revolution over U.S. interference in Vietnam but had no qualms calling for the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua.
The Schumer speech dripped with hypocrisy.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell reacted to Schumer by saying it was “hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Schumer’s call for new elections was “inappropriate.” Even Benny Gantz, a political rival of Netanyahu and member of Israel’s war cabinet, said Schumer’s remarks were “counterproductive.”
What made Schumer's remarks even worse was that they were delivered in the midst of Israel's war with a genocidal enemy. The Senator's speech gave comfort to Hamas who is not only fighting Israel, but also holding one hundred innocent civilians as hostage.
As I wrote yesterday, the speech was purely political, designed to patch up the Biden coalition that was bleeding support in the liberal Jewish community, and the Muslim community. Whatever success the speech had domestically, it fell flat in Israel.
John Kirby, the White House's spokesman for the National Security, said that when Biden praised Schumer's floor speech as a "good speech," he was speaking to "the passion with which Leader Schumer made that speech." He added that Biden knows Schumer's remarks "resonate with many Americans."
Just as long as it "resonates" with the right Americans.
