Biden administration officials are laying the groundwork with other Israeli leaders in anticipation of a post-Netanyahu government.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken dialed up pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday over the future of the Gaza Strip, laying bare the Biden administration’s growing frustrations with the Israeli prime minister’s rejection of a proposal last week.

“There’s a profound opportunity for regionalization in the Middle East, in the greater Middle East that we have not had before,” Blinken said during an interview at the World Economic Forum’s summit in Davos, Switzerland. “The challenge is realizing it.”

Asked if Netanyahu is the prime minister for seizing this opportunity, Blinken said, “These are decisions for Israelis to make,” adding, “This is an inflection point."

Blinken’s comments, made during an interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, come just a week after a trip to the Middle East to try to get Israel and Arab leaders to agree on a path forward for Gaza once the war with Hamas ends.

The Biden administration and Netanyahu’s divisions over Israel’s handling of its war with Hamas, as well as the Israeli leader’s refusal to consider U.S. proposals for a post-war Gaza, have only become more pronounced since Blinken’s visit to Israel, according to multiple senior administration officials.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The percentage of ultra-ortodox voters in Israel (who are the ones with the more racist, Jewish Supremacist, viewpoints) keeps growing because the have a lot more children than the western-style Israelis (the ones that we keep being shown as the typical Israeli to make Westerners side with what de facto is a lot more a Theocracy than a modern Western-style country) and the trend shows no signal of turning (as shown by the continued increase in the Far-Right’s vote over the years) so the problem is not at all this specific leader but it’s actually Israeli voters.

    Biden is just doing some theatre so see if he can find a way to deflect the blame for supporting the genocidal Fascists in a country were they keep on getting voted in and all polls show there is more than 2/3 support for what they’re doing. This is just part of spinning it as “we’re doing it to support the poor old Israelis and it’s only this guy who is ‘abusing’ it” all the while sending shipments of bombs over ther in the full knowledge that “this guy” is going to have tem dropped on civilians in Gaza. In other words, it’s the usual hypocrisy and spin of the guys who loudly problaim they’re “anti-racist” all the while sending bombs to help an etnic group genocide a different etnic group they’ve oppressed for decades to steal their land.