WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — Former US President Joe Biden says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly promised to do more to protect civilians in Gaza, only for fresh attacks to follow that killed more of them, in a memoir that also mounts a long defence of his 2024 re-election bid.
“I had been calling on Israel to take precautions to reduce civilian suffering since the beginning of the conflict,” Biden writes in Promise Me, America, according to excerpts released on Friday. He says he raised the issue privately in many conversations with Netanyahu, who acknowledged the damage that rising casualties were doing to Israel’s image and to American support for the war.
“But a familiar pattern established itself: He would promise to do more, and then another aggressive action would follow, killing more civilians,” Biden writes. “When we called them on it, the Israelis always had an explanation or excuse, but the result was the same. Bibi had no qualms about making promises he had no power — or intention — to keep.”
Biden, whose relationship with Netanyahu goes back decades, writes that he grew fed up with him. “While I understood that he was working under severe pressures, I was frustrated by his failure to think like a statesman and safeguard Israel’s long-term interests, not just his own short-term political needs,” he writes.
A defence of 2024
The 480-page book is due out on November 17. Much of what has been released so far is a rebuttal of critics of his 2024 campaign, which he abandoned weeks after a disastrous debate against Donald Trump. “The difference in 2024 was not that I had a bad debate. Lots of presidents had bad debates,” he writes. “The difference was that every other president was given the chance to redeem themselves in a second debate.”
He also rejects special counsel Robert Hur’s 2024 description of his memory, noting that Hur interviewed him on October 8 and 9, 2023, straight after the Hamas attack on Israel. “I had been up all night dealing with the aftershocks of a profound change to the global order. Go ask the Israeli leadership if they thought they were dealing with a diminished president that day,” he writes.
Biden, 83, is being treated for advanced prostate cancer that has spread to his bones and has said he will cut back on in-person promotion of the book. He said in an interview this week that he would not have run again had he known he was ill. “I don’t think an 80-year-old man with cancer should run for election,” he said.
The memoir adds to accounts by former Biden officials of strained dealings with Netanyahu during the war. Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East coordinator, wrote in his book Brink, published last month, of Biden confronting Netanyahu after an Israeli strike killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza in April 2024. Former Vice President Kamala Harris wrote in her memoir, 107 Days, that Netanyahu wanted Trump back in the White House.
Netanyahu, now heading a caretaker government after Israel’s October 27 election, is pressing Trump to resume the war on Iran, and his Mossad chief was in Washington on Friday for talks. In Gaza, the UN said this week that the deaths of displaced Palestinians in a winter storm were “preventable”.
