Israel-Palestine war: Don’t be fooled. Biden is fully signed up to genocide in Gaza
15 November 2023
The White House
needs a cover story to obscure its complicity. In desperation, it is
once again resurrecting the long-dead two-state solution
US President Joe Biden disembarks Air Force One on 9 November 2023 (AFP)
The White House faces a dilemma. It has the power to stop the
death and destruction in Gaza in its tracks, at any time of its choosing. But it chooses not to.
The US is determined to back its client state to the hilt, giving Israel licence to wreck the tiny coastal enclave, seemingly whatever the cost in Palestinian lives.
But the optics - and that is all that concerns Washington - are disastrous.
TV images have shown hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their destroyed homes, on a scale unseen since Israel’s earlier mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967.
Even the western media is struggling to obscure the veritable
mountain of crushed and bleeding bodies in Gaza. The known death toll
has now surpassed 11,000, with thousands more buried under rubble. Those who survive face a genocidal policy, starving them of food, water and power.
By the weekend, Israel’s declared war on Hamas had shifted into an
open war on Gaza’s hospitals. Medicins San Frontieres reported that
al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City had been bombed repeatedly and its power
cut off, with horrific scenes
of premature babies dying after their incubators had
stopped functioning. Staff who tried to evacuate, as Israel had ordered
them to, were shot at. Similar scenes unfolded at al-Rantisi hospital.
Western publics are growing increasingly incensed. Protest marches have attracted numbers not seen since the mass demonstrations against the Iraq war 20 years ago.
Western allies are finding it harder to obscure and justify their
complicity in what are indisputable Israeli crimes against humanity.
French President Emmanuel Macron broke ranks at the weekend. His message
was summed up bluntly by the BBC: “Macron calls on Israel to stop killing Gaza's women and babies.”
In private, US allies in the Middle East are pleading with the US to use its leverage to restrain Israel.
Meanwhile, Washington is only too aware of how quickly Israel’s regional opponents could get dragged in, dangerously expanding and escalating the conflict.
Its immediate response
has been desperate, and preposterous, stop-gaps to ease the criticism,
including from 500 administration staff who submitted a letter to Biden
on Tuesday protesting the White House’s blanket support for Israel.
Those measures have included the president calling for "less intrusive action" from Israel towards the hospitals, shortly before Israeli forces were reported storming
al-Shifa, and rumours that Tony Blair, the former British prime
minister who joined the US attack on Iraq in 2003 in violation of
international law, might serve as the West’s "humanitarian coordinator" in Gaza.
Never-ending occupation
But what the Biden administration really needs is a cover story to
justify the fact that it is continuing to supply the weapons and funding
needed by Israel to carry out its crimes in broad daylight.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken set out his stall last week at
the G7 summit. The goal is to shift the focus away from Israel’s
genocidal policies in Gaza, and Washington’s backing for them, to a
purely theoretical discussion about what might happen after the fighting
ends.
Outlining his post-war “vision” for Gaza, Blinken said:
“It’s also clear that Israel cannot occupy Gaza. Now, the reality is
that there may be a need for some transition period at the end of the
conflict… We don’t see a reoccupation and what I’ve heard from Israeli
leaders is that they have no intent to reoccupy Gaza.”
James Cleverley, Britain’s former
foreign secretary, echoed his US counterpart, insisting power would in
Gaza be handed to “a peace-loving Palestinian leadership”.
Both appear to favour the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas taking over Gaza - or what’s left of it.
This bad-faith manoeuvre is off the charts, even by the pair’s usual
mendacious standards. Both the US and Britain want us to believe, at
least while Palestinians are being massacred day after day, that they
are serious about reviving the long-cold cadaver of the two-state
solution.
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The layers of deceit are so plentiful they need to be peeled away one by one.
The first glaring deception is Washington’s insistence that Israel
avoid “reoccupying” Gaza. Blinken wants us to believe that the strip’s
occupation ended long ago, when Israel dismantled its Jewish colonies in
2005 and pulled out the soldiers who protected the settlers.
But if Gaza was not actually occupied before Israel’s current ground
invasion, how does Washington explain the Israeli blockade of the tiny
enclave for the past 16 years? How did Israel manage to seal off Gaza’s
land borders, block access to Gaza’s territorial waters, and patrol
Gaza’s skies 24/7?
The reality is that Gaza has not experienced a day free of Israeli
occupation since 1967. All that Israel did 18 years ago when it pulled
out its Jewish settlers, was to run the occupation more remotely,
exploiting new developments in weapons and surveillance technologies.
Israel developed and refined a very sophisticated, arm’s length
occupation, using Israeli teenagers with joysticks at distant sites to
play God with the lives of 2.3 million imprisoned Palestinians.
Israel is not in danger of “reoccupying” Gaza. It never stopped occupying it.
Make-believe confrontation
Another deceit is the impression Blinken is intentionally creating
that the US is preparing for a confrontation with Israel over Gaza’s
future.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he is in no
mood to sit down with Palestinian leaders, even of the “peace-loving”
kind. At the weekend, he once again declared that Israel would take
“security control” of the enclave as soon as Hamas was gone.
“There will be no Hamas,” he told Israelis
on Saturday evening. “There will be no civilian authority that educates
their children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to destroy the state
of Israel.”
He added that Israeli troops would be able to “go in [to Gaza] whenever we want in order to kill terrorists”.
Certainly, Israeli military commanders seem to be taking this message to heart, vowing that they are back in Gaza for good.
But the suggestion that Israel and Washington are not on the same
page is pure trickery. The “row” is entirely confected, designed to make
it look like the Biden administration, in pushing for negotiations, is
taking the Palestinians’ side against Israel. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
The pretence is a boon to both sides. The US wants to look like one
day - after all Gaza’s homes are destroyed and its people ethnically
cleansed - it will drag Netanyahu to the negotiating table kicking and
screaming.
An embattled Netanyahu, meanwhile, is able to score popularity points
with the Israeli right by posturing defiantly against the Biden
administration.
It is pure theatre. The confrontation will never materialise. The US “vision” is nothing more than make-believe.
The no-state solution
The truth is that Washington formally abandoned the so-called
two-state solution years ago, aware that Israel would never allow even
the most circumscribed of Palestinian states.
Over the past three decades, Israel has gone from the pretence -
maintained during the Oslo process - that it might one day concede a
sham, demilitarised Palestinian state, cut off from the rest of the
Middle East, to outright rejection of Palestinian statehood on any terms
at all.
Back in July, before Hamas’ 7 October attack, Netanyahu was widely
reported to have told a closed Israeli parliamentary meeting that
Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state “must be eliminated”.
Will the same Israel that refused to countenance a state under Abbas,
the Palestinian leader who called security coordination with Israel “sacred”, really be ready to hand over the keys to the kingdom after its latest rampage?
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Remember, it was Netanyahu who explained to
his ruling Likud party in 2019 that “bolstering Hamas and transferring
money to Hamas” were the best way for Israel to “thwart the
establishment of a Palestinian state”.
This was not some rogue position. It was shared across the military and security establishments.
The strategy was achieved through Israeli policies designed to
permanently split, physically and politically, the two main territorial
components of any future Palestinian state: the West Bank and Gaza.
Movement between the two was made all but impossible, and Israel
cultivated different, antagonistic local leaderships for each territory
so neither could claim to represent the Palestinian people.
At the July parliamentary meeting, Netanyahu also insisted it was a vital Israeli interest that the PA be propped up in the West Bank.
At the same time, the necessary capital of a Palestinian state,
Jerusalem, has been physically sealed off from both territories, and
stripped of any Palestinian political representation.
As the Biden administration knows only too well, Israel would never allow a “moderate” Palestinian leadership to become established in Gaza, uniting it with the West Bank and strengthening the case for a sovereign Palestinian state.
The goal is transparent: to expel Gaza’s population into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai
But talk of a revived two-state solution does serve as a useful
distraction from the actual solution Israel is implementing in plain
view.
Israeli actions tell that story. The bombing into rubble not only of
Gaza’s homes but of the civilian infrastructure - hospitals, schools,
United Nations compounds, bakeries, mosques and churches - needed to
support one of the most overcrowded places on earth.
The population in Gaza’s north has been forcibly dislocated to create
an even smaller, even more overcrowded holding pen in southern Gaza,
ensuring the enclave is “a place where no human being can exist”, as Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, phrased it.
The goal is transparent: to expel Gaza’s population into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.
And given Israel’s previous form, the only reasonable conclusion to
draw is that Gaza’s refugee families - some of them about to be exiled
by Israel for a second or third time - will never be allowed to return
to the ruins.
The Biden administration can pretend to be resurrecting a
non-existent two-state solution. But the reality is that Israel has had
just such an expulsion plan - called the Greater Gaza Plan - on the
drawing board for decades.
According to reports, Washington has been signed up to the creation of a Palestinian enclave in Sinai since at least 2007.
Powerless Abbas
Assuming anything of Gaza survives the current onslaught, Blinken’s
next deceit is the suggestion that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority
are able or willing to take Hamas’ place.
There is, of course, the small matter of how Abbas could rule a
population with which he has so discredited himself in the past by
endlessly accommodating Israel’s crimes. After all, his Fatah party was
ousted from Gaza in 2006 after it was defeated in Palestinian
legislative elections.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) meets Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah on 5 November
2023 (AFP)
But Abbas is losing even more credibility with Palestinians
as he sits passively through the horrors unfolding in Gaza. As former
British ambassador Craig Murray has noted, with Palestine a member of
the UN, Abbas could invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel.
That, in turn, would require a ruling from the International Court of
Justice. It would put Israel, the US and the UK firmly on the back
foot. But Abbas has once again sacrificed his people to avoid angering
the US.
Even more preposterous is the idea that Israel would ever let the
Palestinian Authority rule Gaza when that same PA is not allowed to be
in charge of the West Bank.
Abbas has no control of any kind over the 62 per cent of the West
Bank that the Oslo Accords placed - temporarily - under full Israeli
rule, enforced by the Israeli army
Abbas has no control of any kind over the 62 per cent of the West
Bank that the Oslo Accords placed - temporarily - under full Israeli
rule, enforced by the Israeli army and Jewish settler militias. What was
intended by Oslo to be temporary was long ago made permanent by Israel.
In another quarter of the West Bank, the PA is nothing more than a
glorified local authority, running the schools and emptying the bins.
And in the remaining fifth of the territory, chiefly the built-up
areas, Abbas has extremely circumscribed powers. The PA does not have
control over borders, internal movement, airspace, electronic
frequencies, currency, or the population register.
Abbas has no more than a police force in these cities, one that acts
as a local security contractor for the Israeli military. When the
Israeli army decides to do the job itself, and bursts into a West Bank
city unannounced, Abbas’ forces shrink into the shadows.
The idea that Abbas can take charge of Gaza when he is powerless in his “stronghold” of the West Bank is a fairytale.
No eradicating Hamas
But perhaps the most fraudulent of the White House deceptions is the
assumption that Hamas - and by extension, all Palestinian resistance -
can be eradicated from Gaza.
Palestinian fighters are not some alien force that invaded the
enclave. They are not occupiers, even though that is the way they are
portrayed by every western government and media outlet.
They emerged organically out of a population that has endured decades
of military abuse and oppression from Israel. Hamas is the legacy of
that suffering.
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Israel’s genocidal policies - unless it intends to wipe out every
Palestinian in Gaza - will not moderate that impulse for resistance.
Israel will simply inflame more anger and resentment, and a stronger
motive for vengeance.
Even were Hamas to be wiped out, another, probably more desperate and vicious resistance group would surface to take its place.
Most of the Palestinian children now being bombed and terrorised,
made homeless along with their families, and witnessing loved ones being
killed, will not grow up over the next few years to become young peace
ambassadors.
Their birthright will be the gun and the rocket. Their ambition will be to avenge their families and restore their honour.
Israel and the US know all this, too. History is crammed full of such
lessons taught to greedy, arrogant colonisers and occupiers.
But their goal, whatever they claim, is not a solution or a
resolution. It is permanent war. It is perpetuating the “cycle of
violence”. It is greasing the tank treads of the West’s profitable war
machine by spawning the very enemies that western publics are told they
need protecting from.
Whether Palestinians are returned to the Stone Age in Gaza,
as Israeli military commanders have long desired, or expelled to live
in refugee camps in Sinai, they will not accept a fate in which they are
treated as “human animals”.
Their fight will go on. And Israel and Washington will have to keep
inventing new, ever more fanciful stories to try to persuade us that the
West’s hands are clean.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.