Whitewashing the Murder of Shireen Abu Akleh

Daniel Larison

July 8, 2022

Ensuring that client governments can do whatever they want with impunity matters more to Washington than the lives of American citizens and residents.

Gideon Levy condemns the State Department’s whitewashing of the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh:

"It’s difficult to imagine a more clumsy, unprofessional, ridiculous and even insulting mobilization in the service of Israeli propaganda. Once again it has been proven that America is willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to protect its precious darling; to conceal all its crimes, to make itself an object of ridicule, to disregard moral, legal and professional standards – all to cover up for Israel. America is telling Israel: Keep on killing journalists, as far as we’re concerned it’s fine. We will always say you didn’t mean to, that tragic circumstances killed Abu Akleh and not soldiers in the Duvdevan counterterrorism unit."

The administration probably thought that their whitewashing statement would lay the issue to rest ahead of Biden’s visit to Israel next week. If anything, it has made sure that the murder and Israeli forces’ responsibility for it will loom over the trip the entire time that the president is there. The State Department released its statement on Independence Day, probably in the hopes that the holiday weekend would help them to bury the news, but the cynicism of using the Fourth of July to provide cover for the killing of an American citizen is hard to miss. The Abu Akleh family released their own statement in response. It should be read in its entirety, but here are the key sentences:

"The truth is that the Israeli military killed Shireen according to policies that view all Palestinians—civilian, press, or otherwise—as legitimate targets, and we were expecting that an American investigation would focus on finding the responsible parties and holding them accountable, not parsing over barely-relevant details and then assuming good faith on behalf of a recalcitrant and hostile occupying power. In other words, all available evidence suggests that a US citizen was the subject of an extrajudicial killing by a foreign government that receives billions of dollars in American military aid each year to perpetuate a prolonged and entrenched military occupation of millions of Palestinians."

The journalists covering Biden’s visit should ask him about her murder at every opportunity. They should press him to explain why his administration has offered such a weak and pitiful response to the killing of an American journalist by the forces of a foreign government. I don’t expect him to have any good answers, but he should be forced to talk about it and he should be held to account for his administration’s abysmal handling of the case.

Secretary Blinken previously said that the administration was waiting on the facts when most of the facts had already been well-established, and now Biden’s State Department has shown that they aren’t all that concerned to get to the bottom of the matter. Which Israeli soldier fired the fatal shot and why? How could a sniper “unintentionally” shoot a journalist wearing clear identification that she was a member of the press? The Biden administration doesn’t want to ask these questions, and I suspect that’s because they can already guess at what the answers would be and they don’t want to know.

It is outrageous that our government would be more concerned to shield a client state from scrutiny than it is to get justice for one of its own citizens, but that is what this administration is doing. The administration probably doesn’t want to investigate further because they know that might require them to demand accountability for the murder and they desperately want to avoid having to do that. Ensuring that client governments can do whatever they want with impunity matters more to Washington than the lives of American citizens and residents. The disgraceful official responses to the Khashoggi and Abu Akleh murders have made that very clear.