Just a couple of days ago I was praying at the exact spot where Christ was born in Bethlehem—in the Church of the Nativity, which the Palestinian Christian community built around the spot. As I prayed my Rosary, I could hear members of that very same ancient community upstairs, celebrating the Divine Liturgy.
The days I spent there were awe-inspiring and otherworldly, and I felt especially privileged to celebrate Trump’s Israel–Hamas peace deal with Bethlehem’s Christians. To these people, it means everything, and I’m still in contact with many Palestinians both Christian and non-Christian who alike feel great and unexpected hope after months of living under the threat of annihilation by the actions of the corrupt and unpopular Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If anything could jar me after such an experience, it was the interview clip of President Joe Biden I came across on social media on one of my last days in Bethlehem. In remarks on MSNBC, Biden came right out and said everything I and other advocates for Palestinians had been trying to call the world’s attention to for well over a year.
“When I went to Israel,” Biden said of his visit days after the October 7 attack, “I said, ‘But Bibi,’ I said, ‘You can’t be carpet-bombing these communities.’” That in itself was the most explicit acknowledgment of war crimes on the part of Israel’s military that we’ve ever heard from a sitting American president.
But it got weirder.
“And [Netanyahu] said to me,” Biden continued, “‘But you did carpet-bomb’—not his exact words, but, ‘You carpet-bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people. Because you had to in order to win a war.’”
Biden recounted his weak counterargument to Netanyahu, noting that the crimes he cited as justification for his actions in Gaza were examples of “why we came up with the UN,” with its international laws against war crimes.
The incredulous interviewer then interjected to ask Biden: “So [Netanyahu] was comparing 21st-century war tactics and battle tactics with World War II?”
“Well,” Biden said, “what he was really doing is…he was going after me for saying ‘You can’t indiscriminately bomb civilian areas.’” Biden also recounted that Netanyahu had “made the legitimate argument…his perspective, he said ‘Look, these are the guys that killed my people. These are the guys that are all over in these tunnels.…Only way to get to them is take out the places under which…they got to the tunnels.’”
It seems unbelievable, but see the video above. It’s all right there. Biden, with less than a week left in office, openly justified the mass killing of innocent civilians. In doing so, he cited two of the darkest days in American history—American war crimes that I wrote about in my 2014 book The Race to Save Our Century—as if they were proud moments to model our future on.
And what’s even more alarming, Biden also revealed that, in a never-before-publicized private conversation with Netanyahu, the Israeli leader deliberately engaged in war crimes with a chilling degree of forethought—laying plans for the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians as early as a few days after October 7, 2023.
I recently wrote a pair of essays arguing, first, that Gaza saved America, and that the Trump movement saved Gaza back.
It was thanks to the Trump campaign’s courageous decision to speak out against Israel’s indefensible actions in Gaza that a historic coalition of Arab-Americans and peace-loving Amish Americans delivered what was probably a decisive number of votes in all-important states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Gaza’s plight, in that sense, helped stave off another ruinous presidency doing the bidding of a ruling class that has no regard for the common good.
And Trump made good on the promises that brought out the peace vote—sending an envoy that reportedly brokered an Israel-Hamas peace deal within hours that Biden officials hadn’t even come close to reaching in four years, in part by playing tough with Netanyahu and making clear to him that his days of holding sway over Washington are coming to an end.
And Trump’s inauguration speech this week was in such a sharp contrast to the cynicism and cruelty of Biden’s MSNBC comments that I almost suspect Trump designed his remarks as an explicit repudiation of his predecessor’s.
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“We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders—or, more importantly, its own people,” Trump said in his speech. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end, and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Trump later said. And—disregarding his teleprompter for a moment as if to emphasize a point particularly close to his heart—he added: “That’s what I wanna be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”
And when Trump promised that America “will be a nation like no other,” it was telling which attribute he placed first in the list of those he considers great. America, he said, will be a nation full of “compassion, courage, and exceptionalism.” Our “power,” he said, “will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.”
