As the death toll continued to climb in Lebanon amid Israel’s attacks on the country this week, President Joe Biden suggested in an address to the UN that Israel’s bombing campaign is legitimate, even as other officials in the chamber have warned that Israel’s massacres amount to war crimes.
In his final address to the UN General Assembly as the U.S. president on Tuesday, Biden boasted about working for peace and deescalation through his administration, walking through historic conflicts that he claimed he opposed.
He struck an almost anti-war tone as he bragged about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and, ironically, opposing South African apartheid in his younger years. He also spoke extensively about the U.S.’s use of the UN charter to support Ukraine and the need for global powers to end Russia’s invasion. He then called for world order, saying that “the center has held” and that global chaos has been averted, referencing a famous William Butler Yeats poem.
“There will always be forces that pull our countries apart, and the world apart. Aggression, extremism, chaos and cynicism. A desire to retreat from the world and go it alone. Our task, our task, is to make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart,” Biden said. “My fellow leaders, I truly believe we’re at another inflection point in world history. That the choices we make today will determine our future for decades to come.”
But Biden suspended his dovish talk when he spoke about the Middle East and Israel’s massacres — for which the U.S. has undermined humanitarian standards at every turn. While Biden dubiously claimed that his administration is working steadfastly to achieve peace in the Middle East, he invoked the October 7 attack led by Hamas forces — which officials have raised repeatedly in the past year to provide justification for Israel’s genocide.
“The world must not flinch from the horrors of October 7. Any country would have the right and responsibility to ensure that such an attack can never happen again,” he said.
He then spared a brief remark for the people of Gaza, saying “they didn’t ask for this war that Hamas started” — abdicating Israel of any responsibility for its decades of ethnic cleansing and apartheid — and went on to vilify Hezbollah, seemingly in an attempt to justify Israel’s attacks against Lebanon.
“Since October 7, we’ve also been determined to prevent a wider war that engulfs the entire region. Hezbollah, unprovoked, joined the October 7 attack, launching rockets into Israel,” Biden said. He said nothing of the thousands of dead and wounded by Israel’s attacks, and repeated a line similar to Israel’s stated war goals of allowing people displaced by missile fire across the Israel-Lebanon border to return.
Though the president claimed his administration is working toward peace and preventing a wider war, his administration has in fact been providing Israel nearly all of the diplomatic and military tools it needs to carry out its genocide in Gaza, as well as its attacks on the occupied West Bank and Lebanon. Just this week, the Pentagon announced that it’s sending more troops to the Middle East in light of Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon.
Further, Biden’s remarks about Lebanon suggest that the administration is supportive of Israel’s recent attacks, which have killed at least 558 people so far and wounded over 1,800.
Biden’s speech came just after that of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whose tone was vastly different. Guterres, like other UN experts and world leaders, warned that the center, in fact, has not held — that, by contrast, world order is on the verge of collapse due to international powers greenlighting Israel’s atrocities.
“The level of impunity in the world is politically indefensible and morally intolerable,” Guterres said.
The UN chief did not directly name the U.S. as a major part of the collapse of international humanitarian norms. But the U.S., under Biden, has continually worked to delegitimize humanitarian law and snub the institutions that enforce it, all in the name of feeding Israel’s slaughter.
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