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Headline: Words Over Deeds: Why Biden Isn’t Pressuring Israel

Mr. Miller has impressive credentials:

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Between 1978 and 2003, Miller served at the State Department as an historian, analyst, negotiator, and advisor to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the senior advisor for Arab-Israeli negotiations. He also served as the deputy special Middle East coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations, senior member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and in the office of the historian. He has received the department’s Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards.

Miller is a member of the  Council on Foreign Relations, and formerly served as resident scholar at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has been a featured presenter at the World Economic Forum and leading U.S. universities. Between 2003 and 2006 he served as president of Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence. From 2006 to 2019, Miller was a public policy scholar; vice president for new initiatives, and director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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https://carnegieendowment.org/experts/1744

The opening paragraph of Miller’s essay posses a kind of literary flavor born of practice.

One could be forgiven for thinking that President Biden’s tough words on the Israel-Hamas war in his State of the Union address and his MSNBC interview on Saturday was the beginning of a much more critical U.S. policy toward Israel. After all, the president called for at least a temporary cease-fire, laying out, in his most emotional terms to date, the losses and suffering of the people of Gaza and delivered an unmistakably sharp signal that Israel must make the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza a priority. Those calls came on the heels of Vice President Kamala Harris’s high-profile meeting with Benny Gantz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rival and likely successor — a snub to Mr. Netanyahu who has been denied a White House visit.

The Reader needn’t fear there are Comic Moments in Millers analysis:

Early in his career, it was easy for an impressionable young senator who made his first visit to Israel at age 30 to connect with the saga of Israel’s struggle for independence and its fight for survival in a hostile neighborhood. In the years since, Mr. Biden has repeatedly recalled his father’s references to the Holocaust and the dangers of silence in the face of evil. No other president describes himself repeatedly as a Zionist; no other occupant of the White House has asserted that if there were no Israel, “We’d have to invent one.”

Joe Biden has always been a reliable loud-mouthed bully:

The Technocrat, Mr. Miller and his allies, operate within the bounds of political respectability : while the brazen Joe Biden, in his salad days, lectured his betters with the abandon of the Corrupt, the Powerful!

Reader, my patience with Mr. Miller wanes , so I will quote his last two paragraphs. I have highlighted the final paragraph. It is shit !

Perhaps most important, Mr. Biden needs Mr. Netanyahu to agree to a hostage deal and an extended cease-fire with Hamas. Without that agreement, Mr. Biden cannot hope to de-escalate the war, increase humanitarian aid in a meaningful way, put an end to the devastating images out of Gaza and have a chance to pursue a broader peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

As the war enters its sixth month, Mr. Biden finds himself in an investment trap that’s difficult to escape. He is increasingly frustrated and angry with Mr. Netanyahu. And yet he’s still in love with Israel. How to stand up to the first without damaging the second is proving to be an excruciatingly difficult challenge for a president whose regard for Israel runs deep in his emotional and political DNA and whose re-election campaign may depend upon which way he turns.

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