January
13, 2024
we
must join the majority of the world’s nations in building pressure on Biden and
Netanyahu to declare a ceasefire, to deluge Gaza with the food, water,
medicines, and fuel essential for life. We must do this with everything we've
got and we must do it now.
Little Amal, a 3.5 metre-tall giant puppet
representing a ten-year-old Syrian refugee child, joins tens of
thousands of protesters marching through central London in solidarity
with the Palestinian people and to demand an immediate ceasefire to end
the war on Gaza in London, United Kingdom on January 13, 2024.
The
genocide must end. We must not sleepwalk into a catastrophic regional Middle
East War. The decimation of Gaza continues because the United States refuses to
demand a ceasefire and provides weapons that have transformed Gaza from an
open-air ghetto prison into a compacted zone of death and despair. And if it is
possible to think in still worse terms, we should be sobered by the insanity of
battling Yemen's Houthis with Tomahawk cruise missiles. That’s the kind of
thinking that triggered First World War.
Even
as we were shocked by and condemn the brutal massacre of nearly 1,200 Israelis
on October 7 as the abominations they were, we and most of the world’s nations
recoil in horror at what is widely understood as the IDF’s genocidal assault
against civilians in Gaza and by the escalating settler violence and land
seizures in the occupied West Bank.
An
estimated 23,000 Gazans, the vast majority children and women, have been killed
in Gaza. That’s roughly 20 times the number of Israelis killed in October. If
we translate that proportionately into U.S. numbers, it’s the equivalent of
more than three million U.S. people. 70% of Gazan homes have been destroyed,
with 85% of Gazans displaced. The UN Humanitarian chief describes Gaza as
uninhabitable with water, food, and fuel still in desperately short supply.
Many hospitals are no longer functionin and hundreds of thousands of people—not
“human animals”—face death from famine, thirst, disease, and lack of medical
care.
Yet
the war goes on. Even as the Israeli military broadcasts that it is moving into
a new and more surgical phase of the war, massive bombings continue. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledges that the war will continue for nine months
to a year. And powerful currents in his government are pressing to “thin”—that
is, ethnically cleanse—Gaza’s two million people. Another, and even greater,
Nakba than what happened in 1948.
And
as we see from the escalating attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea,
from Hezbollah-Israeli exchanges along the border with Lebanon, bombings in
Syria and Lebanon, and targeted assassinations in Lebanon and Iraq, the danger
remains that the war could explode into a regional cataclysm.
As
Richard Falk, the former U.N. Rapporteur or Palestinian Human Rights chillingly
warns, faced with an unwinnable war in Gaza, a war he cannot politically afford
to end without victory, Netanyahu’s only option may be to trigger a war with
Iran in order to drag U.S. forces more directly into the conflict.
Beyond
its immediate role in making the extended war possible, President Joe Biden’s
embrace of Netanyahu is also having broader and longer-term international
ramifications. The US, as we have seen in UN votes, is increasingly isolated as
the hypocrisy and double standards of its claims to defend human rights and the
rule of law are laid bare for all the world to see. This, in turn, accelerates
the relative decline of the U.S./Western empire and the emergence of a still
very fluid, and thus uncertain and dangerous, multi-polar world system.
There
is also the tragic domestic fallout here in the U.S. In 1948, Hannah Arendt,
the German-Jewish refugee philosopher, herself a non-state Zionist, warned that
justified or not, Jews around the world would be judged by how Israelis treated
their Arab neighbors. The savaging of Gaza, which now compounds the abomination
of apartheid, not only marks Israel as a pariah nation, but it also compounds
the historic currents of antisemitism.
These
are very hard times. The need for a ceasefire and a credible process toward
just Israeli-Palestinian and Middle East peace based on common security are
urgent necessities. And we are not powerless.
Senator
Bernie Sanders, bless him, has wisely introduced Resolution 502B(c) which can
provide the crack in Congress that can let the light in and shatter the
congressional consensus for complicity in genocide. The resolution requires a
State Department study on Israeli violations of human rights. That in turn
should require halting all U.S. arms transfers to Israel. The resolution may
not pass, but the debate itself can begin to crack the obscene and murderous
consensus.
Beyond
that initiative, we must join the majority of the world’s nations in building
pressure on Biden and Netanyahu to declare a ceasefire, to deluge Gaza with the
food, water, medicines, and fuel essential for life. We must also launch the
common security diplomacy that leads to peaceful, just, and respectful
Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. Please, if you can, join demonstrations and
vigils. Write those letters to Congress and the editor of your local paper.
Perform nonviolent civil disobedience. It is time to have those difficult
conversations with family, friends, and co-workers. Turning our heads away in
silence is not an option. Peace, justice, and coexistence have always been
possible.
Could Israel’s Gaza Atrocity Spiral into a Red Sea War and Sink
Biden’s Reelection?
Joe
Biden and his administration believe that they can support the extremist
Israeli government in its genocidal assault on the innocent noncombatant
Palestinians of Gaza without a political cost at home. They also believe that
they can manage the conflict, so that it does not spiral into a wider Middle
East war.
These
assumptions may be deeply flawed. The Houthi or Helpers of God government of
northern Yemen can likely go on harassing container ships attempting to ply the
waters of the Red Sea. Biden is bombing them, but the Saudis bombed them for 7
years and finally gave up on accomplishing anything that way. Yemen is among
the poorest countries in the world, and can’t be crippled by destroying
infrastructure, since they don’t have much of it. Little unmanned aerial
vehicles can be hidden and it is difficult to take out the launchers. An
Israeli general once complained that he wished Hezbollah in Lebanon had larger
rockets, since those would be easier to find and destroy.
Both
the Houthi drone strikes on container ships and the Biden response in
bombarding Yemen have spooked the shipping industry. Around 10% of world trade
goes through the Suez Canal on some 17,000 ships per year. On the order of 12%
of world energy supplies also are shipped through the Red Sea. So after two
days of US and UK aerial strikes on Yemen, which elicited further Houthi
threats, oil prices at one point hit $80 on London’s Brent exchange on Friday.
If
the conflict with the Houthis heats up further, Americans could feel it at the
pump. Biden should ask Jimmy Carter whether Americans forgive a president who
gets involved in fruitless Middle East conflicts and causes their gasoline
prices to soar.
One
thing Biden could do is halt the Israeli destruction of all of Gaza, which
anyway can’t destroy Hamas. The Houthis would likely settle down if the Gaza
war wound down. Shooting missiles at them will just stir them up.
Moreover,
Biden’s position on Gaza is deeply unpopular in his own party, and particularly
among young people– a swing vote in recent years. A UC Berkeley Opinion poll
reported by David Lauter and Jaweed Kalim at the LA Times finds that 55% of
voters under 30 say that Israel should announce a ceasefire even if it means
that Hamas remains significant in Gaza. Only 18% disagree.
In
contrast, a slight majority of voters over 65 believe that Israel should fight
on until Hamas is taken down entirely, though about a third of elderly voters
disagree.
According
to the Pew Research Center, Barack Obama got 66% of the youth vote in 2008, and
60% of it in 2012. He outperformed Mitt Romney by 24% among those under 30.
The
Center writes, “In Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania, Obama also failed
to win a majority of voters 30 and older. Yet he swept all four battleground
states, in part because he won majorities of 60% or more among young voters.
Just as critically, young people made up as large a share of the overall
electorate as they did in 2008, according to the national exit poll (19% in
2012, 18% in 2008).”
So
Obama benefited from the under-30 vote in two absolutely essential ways. First,
they came out to vote in large numbers, and mostly voted for him. Second, they
provided the margin of victory in four swing states where Obama did not win 51%
of the over-30 vote.
Candidates
should not underestimate the possibility of youth apathy. Famously, the
under-30 set declined to go to the polls in big numbers in 2004. They had
largely turned on Bush because of the Iraq War, but they weren’t brought out to
vote by enthusiasm for John Kerry. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, a
Democrat, lamented, “The little bastards screwed us again.”
The
youth aren’t enthusiastic about Biden. At all. And the campaign to wipe Gaza
off the map is one reason. In backing the odious Binyamin Netanyahu, Itamar
Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich in their creepy annihilation of tens of
thousands of Palestinian women, children and noncombatant men, Biden doesn’t
only risk becoming unpopular with the under-30 crowd but risks reducing their
enthusiasm to vote. The young voters see the horrors of the Israeli campaign on
Tiktok and YouTube in a way that the older set does not, since US corporate
news is corrupt and distinctly pro-Israel.
The
Biden team believes that the voters have nowhere to go because his opponent
will be Trump. Hillary Clinton benefited from fear of Trump among youths, who
voted in 2016 in numbers similar to 2012. But her percentage of the under-30
vote fell to 55%. It was only a 5% fall from Obama in 2012, but in a race where
she lost some swing states by tiny margins, this youth deficit may have
contributed to her defeat. The Trump boogey man was not enough– she needed to
elicit the enthusiasm of the youth.
Is
the administration really so convinced that they can’t be Kerry-ized or
Carterized? Doing and saying deeply unpopular things that anger key parts of
your base just because you think the rival candidate is unelectable is a hell
of a gamble. Ask Mrs. Clinton.
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