Paul Ronzheimer, the deputy editor-in-chief of BILD and a senior journalist reporting for Axel Springer, the parent company of POLITICO, had two separate reports in the latter last evening attacking the Israeli prime minister. Which is striking, given the firm’s rather staunch pro-Israel stance.
“Netanyahu vows to defy Biden’s ‘red line’ on Rafah.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he intends to press ahead with an invasion of the city of Rafah on the southern border of the Gaza Strip in defiance of United States President Joe Biden, who has warned such an offensive would be a “red line.”
Amid signs of increasing frustration with Netanyahu, the U.S. president told MSNBC on Saturday that he opposed an escalation of the conflict into Rafah, and that he could not accept “30,000 more Palestinians dead.”
Relief organizations have warned that an attack on Rafah on the border with Egypt — now a refuge for about half of Gaza’s 2.3 million population — would result in widespread civilian casualties. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it would be “a humanitarian catastrophe.”
When asked on Sunday whether Israeli forces would move into Rafah, Netanyahu replied: “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn’t happen again. Never happens again.” The prime minister was referring to the murderous Hamas raid that killed more than 1,160 people in Israel and triggered the war.
Without naming them, Netanyahu claimed he had the tacit support of several Arab leaders for driving ahead with the onslaught against Hamas.
“They understand that, and even agree with it quietly,” he said in an interview with Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company. “They understand Hamas is part of the Iranian terror axis.”
[…]
Israel’s prime minister also doubled down on his rejection of the possibility of a Palestinian state — a topic that pits Israel against most of the rest of the world.
“The positions that I espouse are supported by the overwhelming majority of Israelis who say to you after October 7: ‘We don’t want to see a Palestinian state,’” he said.
Netanyahu also directly addressed criticism from Biden, who has said the Israeli leader is “hurting Israel more than helping Israel.”
Netanyahu hit back, saying while he didn’t know “exactly what the president meant,” if Biden was saying he was contravening the wishes or interests of Israel, he was “wrong on both counts.”
“[The Israeli people] also support my position that says that we should resoundingly reject the attempt to ram down our throats a Palestinian state. That is something that they agree on,” Netanyahu said.
When asked about the European view that there cannot be peace without a two-state solution, Netanyahu replied: “Yeah, they would say it. But they don’t understand that the reason we don’t have peace is not because the Palestinians don’t have a state. It’s because the Jews have a state. And in fact, the Palestinians have not brought themselves to recognize and accept the Jewish state.”
Even in the case of what he described as a change of Palestinian “leadership” and “culture,” Netanyahu still insisted Israel should have full security control of all Arab territory west of the River Jordan.
Still, Israel’s leader was careful in his criticism of his American counterpart, and even more circumspect when asked whether he would prefer Republican candidate Donald Trump. “The last thing I want to do is enter the American political arena,” he said.
For Biden it’s becoming increasingly important not to alienate the left wing of the Democratic Party in the run-up to the U.S. election in November. At the same time, polling indicates Israel continues to enjoy widespread support among U.S. voters.
“Netanyahu denies Palestinians are starving“
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied people are starving in Gaza and blamed Hamas for the lack of humanitarian aid entering the occupied territory.
Hunger and malnutrition are widespread in the Gaza Strip. The United Nations warns that famine is imminent, with the organization’s expert on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, accusing Israel of starving Gazans deliberately. Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s has said people in Gaza are closer to dying than to living.
Responding to these claims, Netanyahu said: “We don’t have that kind of information. That’s not the information we have. And we monitor it closely.”
“More importantly, it’s not our policy. Our policies are to put in as much humanitarian aid as we could,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company.
The U.N. has determined that one in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza are suffering acute malnutrition and emaciation. The World Health Organization has also said children are starving to death in northern Gaza.
[…]
Netanyahu said he had suggested a maritime route for aid from Cyprus in a conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden two weeks after the war began, countering assertions Israel has resisted sea-borne aid.
Asked why more aid isn’t reaching Gaza by land, Netanyahu said: “Hamas is coming at gunpoint and stealing the food.
“Humanitarian deaths and starvation is, for us, it’s a tragedy. For them, it’s a strategy. They think that this will help them place more pressure on Israel to stop the war, leave them in place so they can repeat the October 7 massacre.”
Oddly, the link to the Axel Springer interview is actually to the first of the two POLITICO reports.
Aside from the clickbait headlines, there’s no obvious reason to gin up two reports from one interview. Still, they draw attention to the obvious tensions between Netanyahu—and Israel’s Gaza policy writ large—and the Biden administration’s preferences and big parts of American and Western public opinion. Netanyahu is, to say the least, not a likable fellow and he doesn’t bother to sugar coat his policies for the latter audience.
At the end of the day, he prioritizes Israeli security and, frankly, his own continuance in power, over all other considerations. To a large degree, that’s understandable. Still, while Hamas is surely doing its best to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties—just as it did Israeli civilian casualties on October 7—the world is naturally going to blame Israel for the sheer scale of them. This is especially the case given that unclear connection between the havoc being wreaked in Gaza and the ostensible war aim of rooting out Hamas for good.
