President Joe Biden lobbed explosive accusations at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a shocking interview with Time magazine.

Biden refused to dismiss the abhorrent claim that Netanyahu was purposefully prolonging the war against Hamas for his own “political self-preservation,” by responding that there is “every reason for people to draw that conclusion.”

The insinuation that the Israeli government would deliberately put its own people in harm’s way for mere political gain reeks of the ancient prejudice frequently leveraged throughout history to justify violence and oppression against the Jewish people

GOP leaders slammed the President’s remarks as unacceptable even from a virulent Israel critic. Senator Ted Cruz led the charge by blasting Biden’s “disgusting lie” and calling on all Democrats to immediately denounce the “slander” in a post on X.

Only after major backlash did Biden attempt to walk back his words. When asked during a press briefing on Tuesday whether Netanyahu was “playing politics with the war”, he answered, “I don’t think so. He’s trying to work out a serious problem he has.”

For a president overseeing the steady resurgence of antisemitic violence across the nation, fueling such virulent hatred against the world’s leading Jewish democracy crosses a red line. 

At the very minimum, Biden owes Netanyahu and the Israeli public a full-throated apology and an explicit retraction of his embrace of antisemitic conspiracies. Such obnoxious prejudice can no longer be regarded as an innocent gaffe in a long career of verbal missteps.