Joe Biden has expended a lot of effort to avoid taking Benjamin Netanyahu at his word.
The Israeli prime minister has spent his political life opposing a Palestinian state and acting accordingly. And although Biden has trotted out a rote commitment to the two-state solution when confronted with a crisis in the Middle East, there was barely a murmur from the White House as Netanyahu’s far-right government ramped up creeping colonisation of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and hardened its domination of the Palestinians who live there.