Buried in one of the recent spate of stories about how President Joe Biden is really, really upset with Benjamin Netanyahu when no one’s looking — part of a newly urgent press campaign by the White House to distance the president from his own increasingly unpopular policy on the brutal Gaza war — was a telling line: “Yet, even as Biden has escalated his rhetoric, he is not yet prepared to make significant policy changes, officials said. He and his aides continue to believe his approach of unequivocally supporting Israel is the right one.”

Besides comically negating the fourteen paragraphs that came before it emphasizing Biden’s supposed unhappiness with Israel’s conduct in the war, the line corroborates what has been, from time to time, explicitly stated in reporting on Gaza: that Biden is and has been consciously and deliberately helping Israel carry out what the International Court of Justice has now ruled is plausibly a genocide.

A January 8 report in Politico based on conversations with US officials, for instance, stated that while some in the administration thought the White House needed to stay friendly with Israel to influence its actions, “another factor” was driving Biden’s policy of enabling Netanyahu: the administration “agrees with the idea that Hamas must be uprooted and degraded as much as possible.”