Even fierce Israel defender Donald Trump is fed up with the conflict: “You have to finish up your war... you’re losing a lot of support.”
The fractured relationship between United States President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now official, as is Israel’s isolation on the international stage.: abstaining from casting a vote on whether it supports an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas.
Now the US has laid down its veto, formalising a rift between Biden and Netanyahu that has been apparent for months. In December, Biden warned Israel that it was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza; in February he described Israel’s military campaign as “over the top”.
“We understood also to be the government of Israel’s position,” US State Department spokesman Matt Miller said, referring to recent efforts to secure another release of Israeli hostages in exchange for a break in the fighting. “The US has backed down from its consistent stance in the Security Council since the beginning of the war,” Netanyahu’s office said.
These efforts have so far been failing. After US Secretary of State Antony Blinken travelled to Israel last week on a mission to avert a Rafah incursion, Netanyahu insisted that “we have no way to defeat Hamas without entering Rafah”. Tuesday’s abstention may have been significant, but it was not unprecedented. In 2016 the Obama administration abstained from voting on a resolution demanding a halt to the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a move seen as dramatic at the time. The vote deterred Israel not a bit: settlement building has continued, and even accelerated, since the resolution passed.
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