IT would be easy to assume from the words spoken by US President Joe Biden during his March 7 State of the Union address, and by US Vice-President Kamala Harris in Alabama earlier in the week, that there has been a shift in the official US stance toward Israel’s continued genocidal war in Gaza.

While former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was still telling a Berlin audience late last month that “Israel has a right to defend itself” (before being roundly heckled), Biden, in his March 7 address to Congress and the US people, said only that “Israel has a right to go after Hamas.”

Harris, speaking in Selma, Alabama, the site of the brutal attack on civil rights protesters 59 years ago, said: “There must be an immediate ceasefire for at least six weeks.”