GOP blames Biden for violence in Israel that Trump was supposed to fix

Congressional Republicans are rushing to blame President Joe Biden for the latest uptick in violence in the Middle East.

They appear to be forgetting that Donald Trump claimed in 2016 he would solve the conflict between Israel and its neighbors and that last year that he felt he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“What is going on in Israel right now is exactly what happens when the leadership of the United States is considered a worldwide joke. Hamas would not have dared to do this with President Trump in office,” tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado on Monday.

“Tel Aviv, Israel is under direct attack RIGHT NOW. Where is Joe Biden & what is he doing?” she added on Tuesday. “With every rocket that hits, the United States loses more and more respect in the world. This is a complete disgrace.”

“The Biden Administration threw money with no strings attached at the Palestinian Authority,” charged Florida Rep. Mike Waltz. “End Result? No accountability on Hamas and their terrorism they’re inflicting on Israel.”

“Hamas’ rocket attacks are a direct result of the Biden administration’s weak leadership, endangering our strongest ally Israel,” claimed Missouri Rep. Jason Smith.

“The United States stands with Israel,” said New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. “Joe Biden’s silence is deafening and inexcusable.

The accusations came following deadly clashes between Palestinians and Israelis.

On Monday, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas and others said they fired rockets from the Palestinian territory of Gaza into Jerusalem, following Palestinian clashes with Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that left hundreds injured. Israel’s military responded to the rocket attacks with airstrikes on northern Gaza, it said, reportedly killing at least 20 Palestinians.

More Hamas rockets and Israeli military air strikes followed on Tuesday, leaving more people dead.

Violence between Israelis and Palestinians goes back to the decades prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and has continued since, proving to be an intractable problem that has defied many attempts to solve it.

But Donald Trump claimed after his election victory in 2016 that he was going to solve the problem. That December, he announced that he would task his “very talented” son-in-law Jared Kushner to “do peace in the Middle East and other things.”

In December 2019, Trump told the Israeli American Council that Kushner was hard at work on ending the conflict. “If Jared Kushner can’t do it,” he told his audience, “it can’t be done.”

Trump and Kushner were able to negotiate a handful of peace agreements between Israel and some countries with which it had not actually been at war.

They did little to address tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. And contrary to Boebert’s assertion, Palestinians fired hundreds of rockets at Israel on numerous occasions during Trump’s lone term in office.

Still, Trump made a big to-do after a few supporters nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Last October, he complained at a campaign rally in Iowa that recent television news coverage had focused on massive flooding in the state rather than on his nomination for the award:

I was nominated for three Nobel Peace Prizes, different subjects. … I told our first lady, “Darling, we’re going to have the greatest publicity we’ve ever had tonight. I got nominated for the Nobel Prize. Do you know what that is, darling? Let’s go home.’ So I leave for the first time in a long time early. I get home, I turn on the television and they talked about your floods in Iowa. How is Iowa doing? The crops. How is this happening? How are they doing in Florida? Three or four stories, one after another. Where is my Nobel Peace Prize?!

At other rallies, Trump grumbled that his nomination got less attention than President Barack Obama’s 2009 win.

On Tuesday, Trump put out a statement falsely suggesting he had created peace and Biden had screwed it up:

When I was in office we were known as the Peace Presidency, because Israel’s adversaries knew that the United States stood strongly with Israel and there would be swift retribution if Israel was attacked. Under Biden, the world is getting more violent and more unstable because Biden’s weakness and lack of support for Israel is leading to new attacks on our allies.

The Biden administration on Tuesday condemned the Hamas rocket attacks and promised to do everything possible to deescalate the violence.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.