His inability to deter Israel’s slaughter of noncombatant Palestinians makes the U.S. complicit
By Herbert Rothschild
If you can discern internal coherence in the Biden administration’s behavior toward Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, I urge you to write up your observations and submit them as an op-ed to Ashland.news. Because I cannot. The best I can do is to see it as a failed effort to walk a political tightrope.
What is most apparent is its unflagging support of the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. vetoed the U.N. Security Council call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby denigrated South Africa’s charge of Israeli genocide before the World Court (“We find this submission meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”). Most important, the flow of U.S. arms never stops.
What the administration of President Joe Biden has tried to make equally apparent is its concern for noncombatants in Gaza, which includes almost the entire population of more than 2 million people. Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps urging Israel in public and private to adhere to rules of international warfare and minimize civilian casualties. But because Israel ignores those calls without suffering any ill consequences, they carry no weight with world opinion.
A more substantial expression of concern for Gazan civilians has been U.S. pressure on Israel and Egypt to allow humanitarian aid to cross the border. It’s fair to say, I think, that without such pressure there would have been no aid at all. The larger question, however, is why the Biden administration hasn’t condemned the Israeli embargo wholesale.
Immediately after Oct. 7, the Times of Israel reported that Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, had ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
Israel may claim that its mass bombing is intended solely to destroy Hamas, but that can’t be the justification for starving the general population of Gaza. From the outset, Gallant declared the real motive for it: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Further undermining our effort to convey to the world our genuine regard for Palestinian life is our suspension of financial support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. On Jan. 26 the Israeli government charged that 12 of the more than 13,000 Palestinians who work for UNRWA may have taken part in the Oct. 7 attack. UNRWA promptly suspended those 12 employees and began an independent investigation into the allegations. Nonetheless, the Biden administration and 16 other Western nations immediately halted their funding of UNRWA. Further, in both the House and Senate bills that would fund more arms for Israel, there are prohibitions against funding UNRWA. Since it’s the only relief agency capable of distributing the small amount of supplies Israel allows to enter Gaza and the U.S. has been its largest single funder, we are hastening the humanitarian catastrophe.
Then there is the matter of our government’s call for the establishment of two states at the end of this conflict. In this case, not just with deeds but with words, Netanyahu in effect told the Biden administration to go screw itself. And why shouldn’t he have dismissed this call as mere political theater? Israel has been building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since shortly after they fell under its control during the 1967 war, and the pace has intensified under Netanyahu. The goal wasn’t disguised: It was to “change the facts on the ground” so that there could be no territory for a Palestinian state. Yet, the U.S. has never supported enforcement of U.N. resolutions condemning the settlements as illegal under international law, although, to his credit, President Barack Obama authorized our U.N. delegate to vote for the 2016 version, thereby evoking the hostility of Netanyahu and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Some apologists for Israel blame Netanyahu for what they regard as Israel’s unhappy swerve to the right. That may be true of his domestic policies, but his claim to all of the land that the god of Hebrew scriptures supposedly gave to Jews is not a departure from abiding intentions and practices. The only change has been his forthrightness, even enshrining the claim in the Basic Law passed by the Knesset on July 19, 2018.
If Biden and his foreign policy staff don’t know who they’re dealing with, they are fools, and I don’t assume they are. Netanyahu’s government will not be deterred from its goal of ethnic cleansing by anything less than withdrawal of U.S. military and diplomatic support. Palestinians will never again control Gaza. Indeed, there may be few of them left even to inhabit it.
The wider world is outraged by our complicity in what is, if not genocide (a word too loosely used, as I argued when Biden accused Russia of genocide in Ukraine), then certainly the indiscriminate slaughter of noncombatants on a massive scale. A large and growing number of people in the U.S. are also outraged, especially the young people who helped secure Biden’s victory in 2020.
As Nov. 5 approaches, what Biden and his advisers may finally be forced to acknowledge is that sometimes you can’t get away with anything less than acting on principle.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
