January 22, 2024
I found it shocking that the New
York Times published on January 17th no less than three opinion pieces by
Jewish authors, unbalanced by a single Palestinian or principled critical
voice. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli former peace negotiator, yet for many
years a critic of what I would call the maximalist Zionist approach to ending
the Israel/Palestine struggle over territory and statehood. In this latest
piece Levy fails to use the word ‘genocide,’ yet helpfully pronounces as dead
the two-state solution long rejected by Israeli leadership but to this day
embraced by US policymakers as a PR tactic to suggest that Washington is not a
blind follower of Israel. I have no quibble with the Levy opinion piece. It
deserved to be published, but was very much overshadowed by its two companion
contribution by NY Times regulars.
Levy argues that the US should
abandon this zombie peace diplomacy and adopt a more modest approach that
limits its role to advocating the protection of Palestinian human rights for
all those living beneath the current Israeli existential one-state version of
‘the river to the sea.’ Levy is persuasive in taking account of Israel’s
“categorical rejection of Palestinian statehood” referencing Netanyahu
pre-October 7th defiant assertion that ‘the Jewish people have an exclusive and
inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.’” This aggressive
approach to the endgame of the conflict falls outside the comfort zone of many
liberal Zionists and is obviously distasteful to Levy.
The Levy piece was a reasonable
expression of opinion largely at odds with the Biden approach but as juxtaposed
to adjoining pieces by Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman it contributed to an
impression of extreme bias. The Stephens piece was so extreme, in my view, as
should have made it unpublishable in any responsible media platform, and yet
the NY Times gave it prominent billing on its Opinion Page. I suspect, even
though ardently pro-Israeli, it would have been summarily rejected if submitted
by someone unconnected with the newspaper rather than by one of its regular
opinion writers. Its title accurately foretells its tone and essential message:
“The Genocide Charge Against Israel is a Moral Obscenity.” Stephen’s vitriolic
prose is directed at the South African initiative at the International Court of
Justice, which was based on a scrupulous legal argument setting forth in a 95
page carefully crafted document supporting its application for Provisional
Measures to stop the ongoing ‘genocide’ until the tribunal decides the
substantive allegation on its merits. Stephens’ piece even had the audacity to
normalize the dehumanizing language used by the Israeli leadership in
describing the ferocity of their violence in Gaza. Stephens seems willing to
endorse the position that the alleged and presumed barbarism of the Hamas
attack of October 7 allowed Israel to engage in whatever violence would serve
their security without being subject to legal scrutiny or UN authority. At this
point Israel has killed at least 23,000 Palestinians, without counting the
7,000 missing persons thought to be buried in the rubble. This total of 30,000
fatalities of mostly innocent, long-abused civilians, is the equivalent of over
5,000,000 if a similar proportion of deaths were to occur in a country with a
population of a size similar to that of the US, and the worst may yet to come
for the Palestinians. Beyond the death toll are other severe crimes of humanity
that are also features of the overall genocide: forced evacuation; induced starvation
and disease; destruction of homes, hospitals, holy places, schools, and UN
buildings.
In Stephens’ view this decimation of
the people of Gaza is not indicative of genocide but should be viewed as the
normal side-effects of a war that is a legal instance of self-defense. Given
the weaponry used against sheltering civilians in sites protected under
international law, what I find obscene is the heartlessness of Stephens’
gushing carte blanche vindication of Israel’s behavior coupled with the
contempt he bestows on those who stand up for the protection of Palestinian
rights and the repudiation of what has all the appearance of genocide as
specified in the Convention.
Indeed, Stephens argues that China’s
abuse of the Uyghurs or the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia or Soviet Gulag
conditions is the real stuff of genocide, and yet went unpunished, while Israel
is being maliciously singled out for these delegitimating charges of genocide
solely because in his warped judgment the perpetrators are Jewish. It is a
shameful line of argument put forward in a slick tone of tribal superiority and
legal indifference. There is much room for debate surrounding these events in
Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, but to characterize South African
recourse to the preeminent judicial body in the world, known for its respectful
attitude toward state sovereignty as a ‘a moral obscenity’ is a further
illustration of Stephen’s inciteful extremism that feeds the repressive
impulses of such Israeli powerhouse lobbies as AIPAC. It ventures beyond the pale of responsible
editorial filters, sure to be present if a Palestinian author wrote, with
greater justification, that Israel’s defense of its behavior before this very
court amounted to ‘a moral obscenity.’ Not only would such a hypothetical
article be rejected, but any future submission by such an intemperate author
would probably be rejected without being read.
The third opinion piece was written
by the newspaper’s chief pontificator, Thomas Friedman. It recounts part of an
interview Friedman. conducted with Antony Blinken a day earlier at a public
session of the Davos World Economic
Forum. Friedman was far more civil than Stephens (not a high bar), but more
subtly as provocatively aligned with the Israeli narrative, and as always,
self-important and pretending to write from above the fray. Friedman started
his piece by contextualizing Israeli behavior sympathetically as reflective of
the extreme trauma experienced by Israelis as a result of the Hamas attack,
without a word of sympathetic empathy for the Palestinian outburst of
resistance after 50 years of abusive occupation and 15 years of a punitive
total blockade. Against this background, Blinken was portrayed as a tireless
representative of the US Government doing his diplomatic best to limit the
magnitude of devastation in Gaza and support the delivery of urgently needed
humanitarian aid. In the interview Blinken declared that he was heartbroken by
the tragic ordeal being experienced by the Palestinians, and yet Friedman not
bring himself to question this high US official and unconditional supporter of
Israel even gently as to why given these grim realities he continues to endorse
the support for Israel’s military operation at the UN and through military
assistance knowingly contributing to a continuation of this onslaught.
Friedman offers no reference to
Blinken’s earlier extravagant official assurances of direct US combat
participation if Israel so requests. Friedman failed to pose even a softball
question about Blinken’s attitude toward Israel’s dehumanizing statements, tactics,
or evident ethnic cleansing goals. Blinken had seemed for most of the 100+ days
of Israeli violence entirely comfortable to be carrying out his role as
enabler-in-chief of the Israeli ongoing genocide. Such a role entails legal
accountability for serious, ongoing complicity crimes, and not the celebration
of a man doing a professional duty that brought him personal grief. It is
illuminating to appreciate that to slow the velocity of genocide, even if such
a mitigating intention is conceded, is still genocide.
What makes this show of media bias
particularly disturbing is the refusal to consider that most non-Westerners
have little doubt about the true nature of Israel’s guilt in relation to the
commission of this ‘crime of crimes.’ This perception has nothing to do with
the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, and everything to do with the stark
clarity of Israel’s formal intentions and the manifest nature of its militarist
extremism that is entering its fourth month. A further damning fact is that
this is the most transparent genocide in all of human history as nightly TV
brings its daily occurrence before the eyes of virtually the whole world. The horror of previous genocides, including
the Holocaust, has been largely disclosed after the fact, and even then these
human tragedies were largely interpreted
by way of abstraction and statistics, as well as through the grim tales told by
survivors or in the form of reconstructions done long after the bloody
realities by documentary films, investigative journalism, and scholarly
inquiry.
My emphasis on this single day’s
selection of opinion pieces is not merely to allege NY Times bias, but to raise
the tricky questions of self-censorship and media independence of deference to
government policy especially in the context of war/peace issues. As shocking as
I found the Stephens’ rant, more shocking was the failure of the NY Times and
most national media to report on the extraordinary protest activity around the
country in recent weeks, including a demonstration in Washington on Martin Luther
King Day of 400,000 pro-ceasefire protesters. Surely, this such an outpouring
of citizen didn’t deserve to be dismissed as not newsworthy. Especially in this
era where social media reinforces the post-truth ethos of right-wing politics,
the future of democracy under threat, would benefit from more responsible
managerial standards on the part of the most trustworthy media, and especially
with regard to controversial foreign policy, more debate, and less deference to
Pentagon, State Department, and White House viewpoints.
I have no intention to make the NY
Times a scapegoat. Its response to the Gaza genocide is indicative of a
systemic problem with media reportage. For instance, watchers of CNN deserve
more independent critical voices, and less official rationalization from
government spokespersons, or retired military officers and intelligence
bureaucrats. It is dangerous enough to endure deep state manipulations from
within the bureaucracies but to have such views infuse media integrity is to
resign the country to an autocratic future.
Why Does the Media
Consider ‘Ceasefire’ a Dirty Word?
In the weeks leading up to President
Joe Biden’s announcement that U.S. forces and a group of allies launched a
series of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, major media outlets were
acutely aware of the risk that Israel’s war on Gaza could grow into a wider
regional conflict.
Yet, in the breadth of stories that
covered the Biden administration’s desire and efforts to avoid such an
escalation, mainstream media rarely mentioned the clearest non-military pathway
to easing regional tensions: helping to broker a ceasefire between Israel and
Hamas.
The Houthi leadership in Yemen has
said their attacks will not cease until Israel’s “crimes in Gaza stop and food,
medicines and fuel are allowed to reach its besieged population” according to
Houthi spokesman Mohammed al-Bukhaiti in December. Who can tell if that’s true,
but evidence suggests that the attacks in the Red Sea and in Iraq and Syria all
but stopped during an earlier brokered “pause” in Gaza in November.
But this is never discussed. In the
first weeks of January, major media outlets maintained that the Biden
administration was grappling with how best to manage the conflict and ensure
that it did not extend beyond Gaza. Between October 7 and January 14, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal ran over 60
articles that focused on some aspect of the threat of escalation in the Middle
East. At least 14 of them focused on the Biden administration’s decision-making
process.
“Attacks Heighten Fears of a Wider
War for the Middle East and U.S.,” reported the New York Times.
“Tensions in the Middle East are
rising beyond Israel. Here’s where,” said the Washington Post.
“U.S. Steps Up Diplomatic Push to
Avert Broader Middle East War,” added the Wall Street Journal.
Even following the Jan. 13 strikes
in Yemen, media reports contended that the Biden administration was committed
to avoiding escalation. “Mr. Biden and his top aides have been loath to take
steps that could draw the United States into a wider war in the region,
according to the New York Times.
But of those 14 articles, only five
mention the demands of U.S. adversaries in the region, namely that Israel allow
food and medicine into Gaza and end its bombing campaign. In most cases, the
articles only briefly note that the Houthi attacks were being carried out “in
solidarity” with suffering Gazans. But nowhere in the series of stories about
the potential crisis was the pursuit of a ceasefire mentioned as an option.
Instead, the articles mostly framed
the options as maintaining the status quo or pursuing a military solution.
“Senior officials said they must
decide whether to strike Houthi missile and drone sites in Yemen, or wait to
see whether the Houthis back off after the sinking of three of their fast boats
and the deaths of their fighters,” reported the New York Times on December 31,
after a U.S. helicopter sunk three Houthi boats in the Red Sea.
“Mr. Biden and his top aides have
sought since the Oct. 7 attacks to contain the conflict between Israel and
Hamas to the Gaza Strip,” reads the New York Times’ January 3 story on the
Biden team’s efforts. “The Pentagon dispatched two aircraft carriers and
doubled the number of American warplanes to the Middle East to deter Iran and
its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq from widening the war.”
If there were critics of the Biden
administration, they always preferred a more aggressive path. “Critics of the
administration’s approach have called the retaliatory strikes insufficient,”
said the Washington Post on November 8, following U.S. strikes in Syria.
Meanwhile, the reports ignored
experts who have been pointing to ceasefire as an option for weeks.
In making an argument for Washington
to take the lead in pushing for an end to violence in November 2023, three
fellows at the Century Foundation offered that a ceasefire would “reduce
tensions regionally, lessening the risk—currently increasing daily—of a broader
war that draws in the United States.”
A few hours before the strikes in
Yemen on Jan. 11, RAND Corporation researcher Alex Stark made the case that
pushing for an end to the war in Gaza was the most effective way for Washington
to de-escalate tensions with the Houthis.
“Like it or not, the Houthis have
linked their aggression to Israel’s operations in Gaza and have won domestic
and regional support for doing so,” she wrote in Foreign Affairs. “Finding a
sustainable, long-term approach to both conflicts will be critical to
de-escalating tensions across the region and getting the Houthis to call off
their attacks on commercial vessels.”
Following the U.S. operations, the
New York Times did note that countries like Qatar and Oman “had warned the
United States that bombing the Houthis could be a mistake, fearing that it
would do little to deter them and would deepen regional tensions. They have
argued that focusing on reaching a cease-fire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’
stated impetus for the attacks.”
Experts have said that the inability
to link Houthi aggression with the ongoing war is a strategic miscalculation.
“That refusal to see the linkage between Gaza and the Red Sea means we also
fail to see the overriding security-strategic imperative here: to avoid a
further escalation regionally, and to move towards possibilities that are
de-escalatory,” wrote the Carnegie Endowment’s H. A. Hellyer on X.
“[I]t’s about avoiding a situation
that gets out of control quickly and easily, and which could have the potential
to drag much of the region into a destructive war. We have a number of clear
good pathways in that regard, but we’ve rejected them.”
To be sure, it is unclear how the
Houthis or militias in Iraq and Syria would respond to a pause in hostilities
in Gaza. But the short-term humanitarian pauses in Gaza in mid-November led to
the only period of relative calm in the region since the outbreak of the war,
particularly in terms of attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria.
According to a tracker from The
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as of January 16, there have been
152 anti-U.S. strikes since October 18 in those two countries. None of them
took place between November 23, when the short-term ceasefire was announced,
and December 3, two days after the truce expired.
There was also a notable decrease in
Houthi attacks in the Red Sea during that timeframe, according to a timeline
compiled by the maritime risk intelligence firm Ambrey Analytics.
“During the ceasefire that was in
place in November their attacks dramatically decreased, providing a degree of
empirical evidence that the ceasefire had a strong likelihood of being an
effective option to stop the attacks,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice
president of the Quincy Institute. “The media never had to endorse this option.
And they could also rightfully be scrutinizing and be skeptical about it. But
by not mentioning it at all, they deprived the American public awareness that
the option even existed, leaving Americans with the false impression that the
only option was to do nothing or to escalate by bombing Yemen.”
Meanwhile, momentum in the push for
a ceasefire in official Washington also appears to have hit a snag after
Congress’s return from the holiday recess. In the weeks following the start of
Israel’s offensive, perhaps influenced by polls that showed strong public
support, the number of members who explicitly called for a ceasefire increased
steadily, reaching a total of 62 by December 21.
Since then, however, only one new
member has joined the calls.
Several lawmakers from both parties
did criticize the White House for not consulting Congress before bombing Yemen.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) took it
a step further, drawing the direct link between Washington’s unwillingness to
call for a ceasefire and the potential for escalation in the region. “This is
why I called for a ceasefire early. This is why I voted against war in Iraq,”
Lee wrote on X. “Violence only begets more violence. We need a ceasefire now to
prevent deadly, costly, catastrophic escalation of violence in the region.”
Four
Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse
Joe Biden relies
on advisors who believe in the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds”
of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.
Joe Biden’s
inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan
and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep
animus towards Islamic resistance movements.
They see Europe,
the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between
the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can
bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will.
They champion
the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to
regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and
perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.
In short, these
four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders,
such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded
into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military
debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
They are endowed
with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress,
to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq.
This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed
counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the
refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing
genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.
Biden has always
been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before
the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of
the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil
rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s.
He is a
Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to
oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal
funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states
to restrict abortions.
He attacked
President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.”
He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other
draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized
the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life
without parole.
He supported the
North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class
since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of
Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.
“As many of you
heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent
one. We’d have to invent one because…
you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an
audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli
Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C.
During the same
speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would
say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not
sustained, vibrant and free.”
The year before
Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister
and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and
others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war
— going back to the 1950s.
He described
Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the
history not of this nation, but of any nation.”
While
repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s
abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s
sanctions against Iran.
He has embraced
Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown
Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of
the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia
in Istanbul.
He has not
intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in
the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to
Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after
invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.
As a seven-term
senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel
donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite
the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice
president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and
“political.”
He has parroted
back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and
widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to
provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack.
He has twice
bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions,
including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign
in Gaza.
Israel has
killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in
every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the
housing.
The “safe
areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern
Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now
make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger
worldwide, according to the U.N.
Every person in
Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find
food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the
age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack
healthcare and adequate nutrition.
And it could all
end if the U.S. chose to intervene.
“All of our
missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and
bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick
told the Jewish News Syndicate.
“The minute they
turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone
understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Blinken was
Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on
the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion
of Iraq.
When he was
Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of
Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He
worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.
“Within the
Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of
sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine,
and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm
Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank.
When Blinken
landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on
Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state,
but also as a Jew.”
He attempted, on
Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian
refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked
outrage among Arab leaders.
Sullivan,
Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists,
Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including
the Israel lobby.
Sullivan was the
chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and
investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping
the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face
of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China,
including through the expansion of the U.S. military.
While not
focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee
jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military
Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry
benefits the domestic economy.
In a 7,000-word
essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7
attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of
understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.
“Although the
Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original
version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,”
adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in
Gaza.”
Sullivan ignores
Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state
solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct.
7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:
“At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,
last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address
to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and
Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring
aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint
infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its
Arab neighbors.”
McGurk, the
deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and
North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief
architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He
worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S.
ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.
He does not
speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge
of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s
interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition
Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad
Allawi.
McGurk was an
early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and
2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply
alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
In 2005, McGurk
transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director
for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director
for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009.
In 2015, he was
appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to
Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.
An article in
April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by
former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of
McGurk. Wood writes:
“A senior Western diplomat who served in
Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. ‘He is a
consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in
Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and
political challenge for him.’ One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called
him Machiavelli reincarnated. ‘It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter
ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.’
[….]
A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy
when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. ‘Brett only meets
people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who
speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of
Iraq? How did this happen?’
Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to
admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a
gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice
William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri
al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and
Iraq’s.
[….]
McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic
meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying
in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up.
Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.
Al-Maliki was the consequence of two
mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute.
The first mistake was the ’80 Percent Solution’ for ruling Iraq. The Sunni
Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the
population.
The theory was that you could run Iraq
with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites
with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the
religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.”
In a piece in
HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East
Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described
by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat
they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”
McGurk, like
others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after
Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it.
McGurk proposed
denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in
Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed.
Biden and his
three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by
most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it.
They have called
on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan
rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the Biden White House by Netanyahu.
The Biden White
House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being
lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the
Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought.
It believes the
key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a
top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the
HuffPost reported.
It is unable or
unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a
residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five
military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone
attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of
Hezbollah.
These Israeli
provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and
rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S.
personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.
The
Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends, a diplomatic
pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability, is
stupefying.
Israel’s
genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and
influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures
another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been
obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.
The policies
embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in
the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with
Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the
Biden White House dreams up.
Israel has no
intention of creating a viable Palestinian state.
Its goal is the
ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation
of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West
Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where
thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.
Those running
the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of
folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the
Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and
self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the
Middle East.
What the New York Times Gets Wrong About Lemkin's Work on
Genocide
Words
matter, but the paper of record has ignored our letter of clarification about
historical misrepresentation and the important role of the Armenian genocide in
the thinking of the man who coined the term.
On
January 11, 2024, the New York Times published an article by Isabel Kershner
and John Eligon titled “At World Court, Israel to Confront Accusations of
Genocide.” From the standpoint of critical media literacy and ethical
journalistic practices, the article exhibits framing biases, historical and
contextual omissions, and overly simplistic reasoning that attempts to explain
why “Israel has categorically rejected the allegations being brought this week
in the International Court of Justice by South Africa.” We assert that this
editorial spin does a disservice to journalism and adds to a faulty record that
enables human rights violators.
The
overall tone is in lockstep with corporate media’s bias toward Israel—a bias
credibly substantiated by the likes of the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention
of Genocide, The Intercept, The Guardian, Mint Press News, and Common Dreams.
While multiple aspects of the article are troublesome, the third sentence
provoked our immediate response letter to the Editor of the New York Times.
That sentence is as follows.
“Genocide,
the term first employed by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent in 1944 to
describe the Nazis’ systematic murder of about six million Jews and others
based on their ethnicity, is among the most serious crimes of which a country
can be accused.”
Days
later, echoing a similar mischaracterization of Raphael Lemkin’s work, USA
Todaypublished a piece by Noa Tisby titled, “Is Israel guilty of genocide in
Gaza? Why the accusation at the UN is unfounded” (January 16). Tisby’s article,
like that of Kershner and Eligon, amended the breadth and depth of Lemkin’s
work to accommodate a particular narrative.
Considering
the New York Times’ reputation as a leading U.S. paper of record, the need for
public correction therein took precedence over the op-ed in USA Today. Hence,
our letter:
As two Armenian Americans
who grew up in the shadow of the 20th century’s first genocide, an attorney and
a media expert respectively, we found critical context lacking in “At World
Court, Israel to Confront Accusations of Genocide,” by Isabel Kershner and John
Eligon (January 11). Any discussion of genocide and Raphael Lemkin is grossly
incomplete without citing how the Armenian genocide informed the Polish-Jewish
lawyer’s noble work.
Lemkin (b.1900), while a
university student in the 1920s, learned of the Ottoman Turk's coordinated mass
slaughter of Armenians that culminated in 1915. The extermination of Armenians
informed Lemkin's life mission to establish international laws and treaties
making genocide a punishable offense. In 1944, Lemkin finally named that crime
genocide.
This article implies that
Lemkin advocated solely for the Jewish cause. A humanitarian first, Lemkin
sought to establish protections for all people. For example, he worked with
Algerians who sought to hold accountable their colonizers for crimes against humanity.
The Armenian Genocide
impelled Lemkin to action. Absent this historical context, the article
reinforces the Israeli government's illogical claim that Jewish people are the
sole victims of genocide. South Africa’s charge that the Israeli government is
engaging in genocide reflects Lemkin’s commitment to the denunciation of the
crime irrespective of ethnicity.
The
New York Times ignored our letter.
Oversimplifying
Lemkin’s endeavors does a shameful disservice to his legacy. Such a
decontextualized presentation edits out the foundation of his body of work and
contracts the character of his mission. It ignores the events that prompted and
preoccupied his thinking on international discourse toward establishing laws
against the crime that he came to term “genocide.” Lemkin was horrified that
the Ottoman Turkish government could kill its own citizens—albeit “dhimmi,” or
second-class citizens—with impunity. His application of the term genocide to
the Ottoman Turk’s systematic mass slaughter of the Armenians predated the
Holocaust. Years later, as a formidable advisor to prosecutors at the Nuremberg
Trials, Lemkin drew conclusive parallels to the Nazis’ genocidal massacre of
Europe’s Jewish citizens.
Editing
the Armenian Genocide from Lemkin’s life work has contemporary and historical
implications. In light of increasing attacks by a radicalized right-wing
contingency in Israel on Jerusalem’s Armenians, deleting the Armenians from
current reporting sets a dangerous tone for Armenians living under current
threat. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has featured articles on
Armenphobia and on the Armenians’ right to exist, and has issued statements of
concern over recent attacks on the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem’s
Armenians, or “East Jerusalemites” as they are designated by the Israeli
government, like other Palestinians, live in a system that privileges Israel’s
Jewish population. Hostilities from Jewish fundamentalists toward Armenians in
Jerusalem are nothing new. However, the level and frequency of aggressions have
intensified thanks to Netanyahu’s far-right government which has energized and
normalized them. With attention concentrated on Gaza, Israeli extremists are
free to act without fear of consequences. The Lemkin Institute explained that
this can be “viewed as another attempt by Israeli extremists to create a
homogenized Jewish ethnostate in the Palestinian territories.”
The
New York Times article’s abridged version of Lemkin’s work emboldens those who
continue to deny that the 1915 Armenian Genocide occurred. To selectively
invoke Lemkin’s work on genocide as a defense against the charges brought
against Israel banks on the idea that public memory is short. A well-worn quote
reported by A.P. Berlin bureau chief, Louis Lochner, from a speech given by
Hitler to his military generals before the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland
rhetorically asked, “Who today, after all, remembers the annihilation of the
Armenians?” With hot wars blazing and existential alarms blasting, we not only
remember the Armenians but uphold this New York Times article as a cautionary
tale that words matter.
Catastrophic
Displacement Crisis in Gaza is a New Phase in More than a Century of Expulsions
by Israel
As a scholar of war, migration, and
refugee resettlement—but more importantly as a human being—I have watched the
death and mass displacement caused by the Israeli assault on Gaza with mounting
horror. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 25,000 people and
injured another 61,000, the majority civilians. Nearly two million people in
Gaza, eighty-five percent of the population, have been driven from their homes
by Israeli bombing.
The current crisis in Gaza is part
of a long history of expulsion and displacement of Palestinians. Since the
1880s, Zionist Jewish settlers, pre-state militias, and later the Israeli
military have engaged in the project of maximizing land under their control
while minimizing the number of Palestinians in that territory. Dispossession of
millions of Palestinians is foundational to the creation of the State of Israel
and its continued expansion into more Palestinian territory.
Individual Stories Trace Larger
Phenomena
As part of my ongoing research with
immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, in 2021 I interviewed a woman
pseudonymously called Mariam from Gaza. At the time of our conversation, she
was seeking asylum in Canada. Her personal history is one of millions that
speaks to the ongoing processes of violent displacement that have shaped
Palestinian life for more than 100 years. Mariam told me:
I lived my whole life as a refugee.
… I’ve always had this feeling of displacement, that anywhere I lived was
temporary, even as a child. … I went to a [United Nations Refugee Works
Administration] school, which was for refugees. And I learned about the story
of how my grandparents lost their homes and how despite living in Gaza, and my
parents building their lives there, I didn’t feel like that’s where I belonged.
… And right now, I view myself as a refugee because there’s a true urgency. And
a real sense of not being safe if I went back home.
Mariam is a third-generation
refugee. Her mother and father were born in Gaza after their parents were
forced to flee their homes during the 1948 Nakba. Mariam’s grandparents were
among the 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed by pre-state Zionist militias
from what became Israel. Those refugees’ homes were expropriated, many of their
towns and villages were destroyed, and
they were denied the right to ever return. In the war, Israel took control of
78% of historic Palestine and the remaining 22% came under control of Egypt
(Gaza) and Jordan (the West Bank and East Jerusalem).
Decades-Long Israeli Military
Occupation
After the Six-Day War in 1967,
Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. This marks the
beginning of an ongoing 56-year illegal military occupation. During the war,
Israel expelled 300,000 more Palestinians from the captured territory. Many of
those fleeing Israeli bombing since October 7 have been displaced multiple
times over. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population are refugees and their
descendants who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 and 1967.
In the decades since the occupation
began, Palestinians in the occupied territories have faced forced removal from
their homes; constant attacks on their property and livelihoods; expropriation
and creeping annexation of their land by the Israeli government; and attempts
to erase all vestiges of Palestinian history, culture, and society from the
physical landscape.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem,
there are now hundreds of thousands of extremist settlers, supported by the
Israeli military, engaged in the continued project of violent dispossession and
annexation. Settler violence has intensified since October 7. Israel withdrew
its settlers from Gaza in 2005; however, it maintains an “illegal air, sea and
land blockade.”
Unprecedented Crisis in Gaza
Now in her early 30s, Mariam lived
much of her life in Gaza under siege. She told me that she had lived under
constant Israeli surveillance. She also had a persistent fear of being caught
in one of the repeated Israeli bombing campaigns that have killed thousands of
Palestinians in Gaza since 2008. The scale and scope of the current Israeli
onslaught are far greater than any previous assault.
Not only have the majority of Gazans
been forced from their homes, but Israeli bombardment has destroyed 70% of the
houses in Gaza as well as hundreds of medical facilities, schools,
universities, government buildings, and religious sites. This means that the
majority of Palestinians in Gaza have no homes to go back to and the basic
infrastructure of civil society has been decimated. Academic and legal experts
and the South African government’s petition to the International Court of
Justice have persuasively argued that Israel is committing genocide.
Open Calls for Ethnic Cleansing
Calls for the permanent expulsion of
most or all of the Palestinians in Gaza have become common since October 7. On
January 17, 2024, for example, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir
repeated his position that Israel must “occupy Gaza” and give “encouragement”
to Palestinians to leave. The long-serving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu opposes Palestinian self-determination and has long advocated ethnic
cleansing. In 1989, for example, Netanyahu stated: “Israel should have
exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China [Tiananmen Square],
when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions
among the Arabs of the territories.” These are far from fringe opinions. When
polled in 2016, 48% of Jewish Israelis agreed with the statement “Arabs should
be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Throughout the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, Israel is actively carrying out that program.
Immediate Ceasefire, Long-Term
Justice
I close by returning to Mariam. She
told me: “Home for me is where I feel
safe. … [I]f I could go home [to Gaza] and feel safe, that would be my home. …
If I could feel like I could build a life and be secure and safe, that would be
my home, but I haven’t felt that anywhere. So, I guess, I’m yet to know where
home is.” Mariam already could not find safety in Gaza in 2021. The situation
in 2024 is exponentially worse. Because of the catastrophic situation in Gaza,
Israel must be pushed for an immediate ceasefire. Gazans desperately need the
bombing to stop, access to medical care, food, water, and shelter. After that,
it is critical to hold all perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and
other crimes against humanity accountable.
As I noted at the outset,
displacement is at the core of the injustices inflicted on Palestinians. The
only way to guarantee safety, security, peace, and justice for Mariam, her
family and millions of other Palestinians is to finally address the harms of
expulsion and dispossession at the foundation of the State of Israel. It is up
to those who have been harmed to determine the most appropriate way to do this.
It may include reparation, reconciliation, and finally upholding the
well-established right of return that has been denied to millions of
Palestinians for decades.
Smells Like Genocide
If it looks like genocide, sounds
like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it’s genocide. The
International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is
what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The
Republic of South Africa filed the complaint, which is ironic because Israel
was a staunch ally of South Africa’s former apartheid regime.
The official complaint is welcome,
but thanks to social media, each of us already has ample evidence from a large
variety of sources showing Israel’s assault on the Gazans. Just watch the
abundant video evidence that has accumulated since October 7, when Hamas
fighters and perhaps other Gazans committed unspeakable atrocities against
Israeli civilians after breaking through the fence that has kept them in an
open-air prison for many years.
Since that horrible day, the Israeli
Defense Force has brutally and indiscriminately pounded the 2.3 million people,
about half of whom are children, who live in that 25×5-mile, densely populated
strip. The conservatively estimated death toll – there must be many victims
under the rubble – now stands at over 23,000, about half of whom are kids.
Hundreds of thousands of residences have been destroyed or damaged. People have
been displaced. Infrastructure and medical facilities have been rendered
inoperable. Gaza resembles nearly Hiroshima after the U.S. government dropped
the atomic bomb.
Moreover, one need not advocate
strictly limited government (or no government at all) to be appalled at the
U.S. government’s complicity in that genocide, a word I do not use casually and
have, I think, never written before.
The
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted after the Nazi nightmare,
formally defines as genocide several “acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
(My emphasis.) Those acts are:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Israel argues that it is not killing
Gazans indiscriminately because they are members of a particular ethnic or
religious group; rather it tries to minimize collateral damage while rooting
out lethal Hamas and its infrastructure. But is that credible? So many babies,
toddlers, elderly, and seriously ill have been killed or maimed, so many homes,
hospitals, and sanitation facilities destroyed.
South Africa’s 84-page application
to the ICJ is a well-documented comprehensive paper and bill of indictment
against the state of Israel’s conduct. In great detail and with much
background, it enumerates both the Israeli government’s genocidal actions and
the many public statements made by Israeli civilian and military officials that
declare in no uncertain terms their intention to do what is defined as genocide
under the international convention.
Israel is a signatory to that convention, as is the United States.
At this stage, South Africa is
requesting an immediate provisional order for a cessation of Israel’s onslaught
while the merits of its case are considered.
South Africa’s application states:
South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by
all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other
nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No
armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious – even an attack
involving atrocity crimes – can, however, provide any possible justification
for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide …, whether as a matter of law or morality.
[My emphasis.]
Note the condemnation of Hamas for
its atrocities. It goes on:
The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are
genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction
of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group,
that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip…. The acts in
question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and
mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring
about their physical destruction.
This threat to the Palestinians has
not passed, says the application, so a provisional cease-and-desist order is
imperative right now:
…Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in
genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those acts include
killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately
inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical
destruction as a group. Repeated statements by Israeli State representatives,
including at the highest levels, by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, and
Minister of Defence, express genocidal intent. That intent is also properly to
be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza,
having regard inter alia to Israel’s failure to provide or ensure essential
food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the
besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink
of famine. It is also clear from the nature, scope and extent of Israel’s
military attacks on Gaza, which have involved the sustained bombardment over
more than 11 weeks of one of the most densely populated places in the world,
forcing the evacuation of 1.9 million people or 85% of the population of Gaza
from their homes and herding them into ever smaller areas, without adequate
shelter, in which they continue to be attacked, killed and harmed.
As of the filing in late December,
Israel has now killed in excess of 21,110 named Palestinians, including
over 7,729 children – with over 7,780 others missing, presumed dead under the
rubble – and has injured over 55,243 other Palestinians, causing them severe
bodily and mental harm. Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza,
including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of
355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land,
bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries,
cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical
infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity
networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and
healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to
rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of
life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.
And no end is in sight. The Israeli
government has said the attack will go on for months, even a year. The Israeli
ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, said on television that “every school,
every mosque, and every second house has an access to a tunnel… and of course
ammunition.” When asked if that meant all of Gaza should be destroyed, she
responded, “Do you have another solution how to destroy the underground tunnel
city?”
That was just the latest in the many
official Israeli statements – from the prime minister and president on down –
indicating that the target of the onslaught is the entire population of Gaza,
whether by bombing or by systematic deprivation of food, water, fuel, and
medical supplies. (Even ambulances have been attacked.) Those statements are
documented in the South African application because they demonstrate the
Israeli government’s genocidal intention. As a South African representative
told the ICJ on Thursday, “The evidence of genocidal intent is not only
chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible.”
This death, injury, starvation,
dehydration, and utter destruction of homes and infrastructure is perpetrated
by a nation whose most devout supporters worldwide believe it has a holy
mission to be a “light to nations.” (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, and 60:3) Yet Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rallied his troops by invoking the biblical
story of the divinely commanded Israeli destruction of the Amalekite men,
women, and children. Before the ICJ, Israel tried to explain that invocation by
fully quoting Netanyahu, who told the troops, “The IDF is the most moral army
in the world, and IDF does everything to avoid harming the uninvolved….” The
point is that the Israeli leaders have said that no Gazans are uninvolved.
While the application was filed
against Israel, the U.S. government – for obvious reasons – should not regard
itself as off the hook: the genocide convention also prohibits “complicity in
genocide.” Moreover, a complaint has been filed in another court, the
International Criminal Court, against President Biden, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for their role in helping
Israel. Moreover, the prohibitions in the genocide convention have counterparts
in U.S. law.
The Biden administration opposes
South Africa’s application, though it admits it has not investigated the
matter. Revealingly perhaps, an Israeli government spokesman dismissed South
Africa as an “advocate for the devil.”
Biden’s ‘day after’ plan
for Gaza reflects ignorance and incompetence
In its haste to divert attention away
from its complicity in what is now a legal charge against Israel of genocide in
Gaza, the United States administration under Joe Biden is working hard to
promote its plan for the so-called “day after.” That is the day when Israel’s
work in Gaza is finally done, either because there is finally some global
pressure to make it stop, or it achieves its genocidal goals.
As with virtually all of Biden’s
foreign policy from the start of his administration, especially in the Middle
East, the ideas generated by this “day after” thinking are rooted in American
hubris and ignorance of the people they are dealing with, and are, therefore,
doomed to failure.
One of Biden’s top advisers, Brett
McGurk, has been promoting a plan that continues the futile ideas that the
Biden administration was pushing before the events of October 7. McGurk is
recommending that the United States tie funding for reconstruction in Gaza to a
normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia and that this include a
“political horizon” toward a Palestinian state.
If all this sounds distressingly
familiar, that’s because it is. This is the same failed policy that Biden has
been chasing since his first day in office, a policy that has consistently
moved farther away from reality, not closer. It is a notion that, as one U.S.
official told the Huffington Post, is “delusionally optimistic.”
More than that, it is the very
definition of insanity: repeatedly trying the same thing and expecting a
different result. Yet, in this case, it might be that the plot’s success or
failure is irrelevant. McGurk is reported to have told people that he is recommending
that the plan, if accepted, be sold as a foreign policy triumph for Biden and
that he do a victory tour throughout the Mideast to boost his election chances.
That tour would take place in the months after an agreement on normalization
was reached.
That simply substitutes one delusion
for another. It not only ignores the fact that none of the parties, except
possibly the Saudis, are in a position to accept such a deal, but also assumes
that within a few months of its acceptance, the situation in both Gaza and the
region would look so different that Biden could have his own “mission
accomplished” moment, regardless of whether it might, like George W. Bush’s,
turn out to be a tragic joke.
This isn’t just McGurk pushing his own
policy idea; it clearly has Biden’s buy-in. At the World Economic Forum,
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made it clear that the normalization
plan is the central piece in Biden’s thinking about the future of Palestine and
Israel.
“We determined the best approach was
to work towards a package deal that involved normalization between Israel and
key Arab states, together with meaningful progress and a political horizon for
the Palestinian people,” Sullivan told the audience at Davos.
Sullivan’s delusion would not last
long.
The scope of Biden’s ignorance
Sullivan — who, just before October 7,
said that the Middle East was “quieter than it has been in two decades” — once
again demonstrated his and Biden’s complete obliviousness to conditions in the
region. Even before Sullivan mentioned this plan, the Israeli Prime Minister
had already told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he rejected it.
A report in the Times of Israel soon
after Sullivan’s speech confirmed what anyone with any knowledge of Israel
already knew: that Netanyahu would never accept a Palestinian state, least of
all just a few months after launching his genocidal campaign against Gaza. It’s
not just that the right flank in his government would bring down the
government. The idea of a Palestinian state is doctrinally rejected by
Netanyahu’s own Likud party, and the rest of his coalition.
Moreover, in the wake of October 7 and
the non-stop drumbeat of anti-Palestinian hate flooding from Israeli news
media, even the Israeli opposition that might officially stick to a two-state
solution — such as Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party or Benny Gantz’s Blue and White
faction, both of whom met with Blinken last week — are not going to endorse a
Palestinian state now, or for some time after the destruction of Gaza ends.
Indeed, the opposition, including the
National Unity Bloc that Gantz’s party is part of includes the New Hope Party,
which is as fundamentally opposed to a Palestinian state as the Likud. There is
no currently visible Israeli constituency significant enough to realistically
hope for a two-state scenario.
It should be a major cause for concern
for any American, and, indeed, much of the world, that Biden, Blinken,
Sullivan, and the rest of this administration are this ignorant of Israel, let
alone of the Palestinians or the rest of the region.
The United States has a long history
of misunderstanding the Mideast, but this level of ignorance and willful
blindness far surpass anything we’ve seen before. Worse, the fact that Blinken
already knew that Netanyahu had flatly rejected any hint of a Palestinian
state, but that Sullivan somehow didn’t get the memo, reflects a level of
incompetence that should terrify us all in these volatile times.
If the Biden administration is
misreading Israel this badly, it should come as no surprise that they are doing
even worse in the Arab world, including Palestine.
Biden’s alternative reality Palestine
It is always dangerous when
politicians start to believe their own propaganda. Sullivan demonstrated this
when referring to Israeli-Saudi normalization, he said, “… it was our progress
toward that goal that Hamas sought to destroy on October 7, when they came
across the border into Israel, viciously massacred 1,200 people, took more than
200 hostages, and then turned and fled…”
The narrative Biden pushed out almost
immediately after October 7 was that Hamas was “afraid of peace” — the peace
that normalization would, he argued, bring to both Israelis and Palestinians.
The narrative turns reality on its head.
Potential normalization very likely
was a significant factor in Hamas’ decision to launch the October 7 attack. But
it was not fear of peace that was behind that thinking. Rather, it was the fact
that, diplomatically, Israeli-Saudi normalization is one of, if not the very
last card the Palestinians have to play. For years, Israel and the U.S. have
shoved Palestine out of sight and further from the center of Middle East
diplomacy, with the Abraham Accords representing the most significant blow.
Relations with the Saudis are the last big prize Israel wants to secure, and
that gives the Palestinians some small degree of leverage, as the Saudis are,
in contrast to the United Arab Emirates, for example, reluctant to be seen as
abandoning the Palestinian cause.
The misreading of Palestine goes much
deeper than that, however. McGurk’s plan envisions a “reformed” Palestinian
Authority (PA) taking “control” of both the West Bank and Gaza. By “reformed,”
they mean a PA that is no longer headed by Mahmoud Abbas, but by someone just
as pliant and submissive, but whose stock with the Palestinian public has not
yet been thoroughly depleted by routine humiliations by Washington and Israel.
Little else would change, other than
perhaps an agreement by whomever the U.S. and Israel designate as Abbas 2.0 to
halt payments to the families of Palestinians killed or imprisoned for violent
resistance against Israel. The leadership would be imposed on the Palestinian
people. Does this really sound like a plan the Palestinian public will accept,
especially after the slaughter in Gaza?
The Saudis, of course, remain the one
party that comes out ahead in all of this. They can afford to wait until
conditions are ripe for normalization. They couldn’t care less about Biden’s
electoral concerns nor Netanyahu’s legal and political crises. They have
already made it clear that they will demand significant gifts from the United
States in terms of military benefits and nuclear technology if they are to
agree to normalization. The lack of discussion of this point in recent days
strongly indicates that Riyadh is satisfied that, if the deal is closed, they
will get much of what they’ve demanded.
The destruction of Gaza has
reconfigured the Saudi demands only slightly. Given that a recent poll shows
that an astounding 96% of Saudis believe that not only should their government
refuse normalization with Israel, but the rest of the Arab world should cut any
ties they have with Israel as well, the Saudi leadership made clearer demands
of a commitment to a Palestinian state. Speaking at Davos, Saudi Foreign
Minister Prince Faisal Bin Farhan said that “regional peace means peace for
Israel,” but “that can only happen with a Palestinian state.”
What the U.S. has failed to understand
all along is that the Saudis have plenty of time. They have no need to rush
normalization. It can come in five years, ten years, or more.
Blinken claims to have secured a
promise from Netanyahu that he will not launch a full-scale attack against
Lebanon, and, in yet another sign of his incompetence, he apparently took the
Israeli premier at his word. Again, this should be a matter of grave concern to
all of us. That kind of credulity in a leading American decision-maker puts the
whole world at risk.
To date, more than 24,000 Palestinians
have paid the ultimate price for Biden’s murderous bigotry and gross
incompetence, characteristics he shares with the top embers of his team working
in the Mideast, including Blinken, McGurk, and Sullivan, as they all repeatedly
demonstrate. That figure is likely quite low, given the unknown number of
people buried in the rubble in Gaza.
Israelis, too, have paid a terrible
price for the racism of their country, the corrupt and murderous nature of
their leadership, and American policy that indulges the worst of Israeli fears
and bigotry while offering nothing to allow Palestinians their inalienable
rights, which is the only way ever to realize security for all the people
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Yemenis, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Syrians
also continue to pay the price for the racism and incompetence of Joe Biden and
his accomplices. These tragedies must end, and we in the United States must
lead the demand for that change.
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