Former national security adviser John Bolton is accusing President Joe Biden of hurting U.S. ties to Israel after Biden’s threat to withhold weapons over a possible Rafah invasion.
Bolton, a staunch foreign policy hawk, said on New York billionaire John Catsimatidis’s radio show Sunday that the missive from Biden marked a “break” between the two long-time allies.
“This is the kind of break between the U.S. and Israel that is just unprecedented, to put this sort of pressure on an American ally like that in the middle of what they see as an existential threat,” Bolton said, according to the Hill.
Bolton also predicted that Biden’s reasoning for the shift is to appeal to those on the hard-left of the Democratic Party, who his campaign fears could end up staying home and not voting in November over Biden’s Middle East agenda.
Bolton, who also briefly served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, argued that the “break” could have broader foreign policy repercussions and noted that adversaries like China and Russia are closely watching developments.
“I mean, if we won’t come to Israel’s support, what are we going to do … if Russia or China threatened countries along their borders that are not so close to the United States?” Bolton said. “I mean, people have to wonder … if we’re not going to follow through on our commitments to Israel, who will we follow through on?”
U.S. and Israeli officials have openly disagreed about the ethics of Israel conducting a major military operation in Rafah, which is a southern city in Gaza where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, as well as Hamas militants, have sought refuge.
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Biden has threatened to pull weapons transfers to Israel over plans for an incursion into Rafah.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem,” Biden said in a CNN interview.
