The Israel-hating far-left has put Old Joe Biden on notice: betray Israel, or lose our votes. Votes, and all the perks that go with seeming to get more of them than the other fellow, are what The Big Guy lives (if you can call his somnabulent incoherent state living at this point) for, so the Biden regime has been assiduously working to abandon the Jewish state without anybody noticing. In their latest betrayal of Israel, Biden and his henchmen got substantial help from the establishment media, which for a Democrat administration is always happy to play the role of the guy with the shovel who follows behind the circus elephant.
The betrayal unfolded on Friday, when the Biden regime, according to the Associated Press, “restored a U.S. legal finding dating back nearly 50 years that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are ‘illegitimate’ under international law.” See? The Biden regime is conservative at heart! All it did was restore a fifty-year-old policy that the source and summit of all evil in the modern world, Donald Trump, had reversed: “Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. believes settlements are inconsistent with Israel’s obligations, reversing a determination made by his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, in the Biden administration’s latest shift away from the pro-Israel policies pursued by former President Donald Trump.”
The New York Times likewise cast the Biden regime’s declaration that the Israeli settlements were illegal as a restoration of long-settled U.S. policy that had been disrupted during the aberrant reign of the Orange Upstart: “During a trip to Argentina on Friday, Mr. Blinken called the settlements ‘inconsistent with international law,’ a break with policy set under the Trump administration and a return to the decades-long U.S. position.” There they go again, spinning a tale of a safe and sane Biden administration reversing the unwise and ill-considered policies of Old Joe’s aberration of a predecessor.
The only problem with this scenario is that, as is so often the case with the establishment media narrative, it’s not true. The indefatigable pro-Israel researcher Elder of Ziyon notes that while Jimmy Carter claimed that the Israeli settlements violated the Geneva Conventions, which meant that they were indeed illegal, this was by no means settled U.S. policy after Mr. Peanut began his seemingly endless post-presidency. Ronald Reagan “said when he was campaigning for President and in an interview two weeks after he took office that the settlements are not illegal. Later in his presidency, he said that settlements are an ‘obstacle to peace,’" but that is not remotely the same thing as saying that they’re illegal or illegitimate.
The presidents after Reagan, says Elder of Ziyon, were not happy with the settlements. George H.W. Bush “was strongly against settlement construction but did not call them illegal.” Bill Clinton cribbed Reagan’s phrase, saying that they were an "obstacle to peace," but even Monica’s dude was “softer on expansion of existing settlements.” George W. Bush “called for a settlement freeze but did not characterize them as illegal or even an obstacle to peace.”
In fact, the first administration after Jimmy Carter’s to claim outright that the Israeli settlements were illegal was that of Barack Hussein Obama, and of course, since the Biden regime is made up of multitudes of old Obama hands, it’s no surprise that this particular manifestation of Obama’s deep hostility to Israel would become Biden regime policy.
It’s also no surprise that the establishment media, since it is a propaganda arm of the hard left, would attempt to portray Old Joe’s new stance as the same old thing, the product of the cooler, sharper, more dispassionate heads who ran the State Department in earlier generations.
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Another problem with all this, however, is that the settlements aren’t illegal at all. The West Bank, contrary to popular belief, is not “Palestinian territory.” There is no Palestinian territory, as there never was a Palestinian state, and there is no occupation. The West Bank was part of the territory that the League of Nations set aside after World War I for the creation of a Jewish National Home. That Jewish National Home is Israel, and there is no other nation on earth that has any claim to sovereignty over the territory where the settlements are located.
Antony Blinken, however, will never tell you that, and neither will his accomplices at AP and the New York Times.
