Israel’s assault on Gaza has recommenced and
the United States has remained steadfast in its backing. But there are
signs the Biden administration is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
This week saw a welcome break in Israel’s constant destruction of the Gaza Strip, but it was only a pause, not a ceasefire, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made sure everyone knew. Israel’s assault on Gaza has recommenced, and the United States, and President Joe Biden in particular, have remained steadfast in their backing.
Biden referred to Israel’s initial bombing attack, prior to its ground invasion, as “indiscriminate,”
and that was a phrase his people didn’t walk back. It’s always
difficult to know whether to read more into Biden’s words since he so
frequently doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying, but the comments from
not only the President but others in the administration
show that they are feeling the domestic pressure from their
constituents and the international pressure from their allies to try to
restrain Israel from such massive civilian casualties as it has created
since October 7.
But what does any of this mean on the ground now that Israel has
started up its military operation again? This is not clear. National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told a television news program
that the U.S. fully supported Israel resuming its operations but that
it must do so only “after civilians have been accounted for, have the
opportunity to be in safety, have access to humanitarian assistance and
to be out of the way of any military operation that is conducted.”
But what can that possibly mean in southern Gaza? Some 80% of Gaza’s residents
have fled to the south, packing the residents of what was already one
of the most densely overpopulated places in the world into half of the
Gaza Strip.
In addition, there is a massive humanitarian crisis that the meager
amount of aid that has been allowed barely begins to address. As the World Health Organization has noted,
“[There are] no medicines, no vaccination activities, no access to safe
water and hygiene and no food.” These shortages will become more acute
as Israel pursues its next phase. The people who die as a result of
these factors will not be included in the war dead by most official
counts. How can civilians possibly be safe even in an alternative
reality where Israel was trying to avoid civilian casualties?
The answer, of course, is that they cannot be. But the Biden
administration wants to create the illusion that they are doing
something to limit the number of civilian casualties. There are a few
factors in that effort.
The first is Israel itself. The fact that Biden’s comment about
“indiscriminate bombing,” a small truth among his massive pile of
deceptions, was not walked back lays some groundwork for an American
claim of restraining Israel. If we think back to the early days of
Israel’s bombing campaign, we recall that Gideon Sa’ar of the National
Unity — one of the opposition figures brought into the government for
the purposes of legitimizing the management of the war on Gaza — said that Gaza “must be smaller at the end of the war.”
This tracks with Israel’s behavior over the seven weeks of its
campaign. It has rendered the north uninhabitable for the foreseeable
future, even by the already diminished standards of the besieged Gaza
Strip. During that time, Israel has reported the killing of only a handful of leading Hamas figures. Indeed, during the bombing portion, they were clearly targeting civilian sites.
The ground operation has been slow going, and it is clear to anyone
paying attention that, despite the massive death and devastation, Israel
has not come close to “wiping Hamas off the face of the Earth,” as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed
it would. We are nowhere close to the end. However, in recent weeks, it
has become clear that the Biden administration is becoming increasingly
uncomfortable with the manner of Israel’s assault.
Plausible deniability for Biden
Biden’s Special Envoy for Middle Eastern Humanitarian Affairs David Satterfield introduced what he called a new “deconfliction mechanism”
for Gaza last week. This, he says, is a new system to make sure that
Israel knows where humanitarian aid workers are so they will not
continue to be killed at the highest rate of any conflict in the United Nations’ history.
This is addressing a problem that doesn’t exist. UN and other relief
organizations have been coordinating with Israel for decades about their
activities in Gaza and where they are working. Israel has not been attacking
UN sites, hospitals, schools, mosques, and humanitarian aid facilities
and vehicles by mistake. Instead, they have argued that Hamas and other
militant groups are using them as cover and they are therefore fair
game.
International law, of course, does not give Israel the right to
launch such attacks if the sites are full of civilians, even if it
believes militants are using them for combat purposes outside of extreme
cases of self-defense. Moreover, Israel has generally been unable to
provide anything but the flimsiest and most suspect of evidence to
support their often outrageous claims.
But this “deconfliction mechanism” allows the Biden administration to
claim it is working to protect innocent lives in Gaza while it
continues its support of Israeli actions. The duplicity of this move is
evidenced by the fact that Biden continues to refrain from criticizing
Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza’s medical and humanitarian
infrastructure. If that’s not a red line, then the “deconfliction
mechanism,” an already redundant idea, is utterly meaningless.
It can’t be stressed enough that what we have in the south of Gaza
now is an intense concentration of people so densely packed in that it
would be impossible to launch even the most careful military operation
without enormous civilian casualties. There simply is no room to create
the sort of “safe zone” the U.S. is claiming Israel will magically
conjure.
But the theater continues. One U.S. official, speaking anonymously, said, “ You cannot have the scale of displacement that took place in the north replicated in the south.”
That’s true, of course. There’s nowhere for them to go. Egypt is not
going to allow masses of Gazans through the Rafah crossing — which
couldn’t accommodate this kind of flight in any case. There’s little
left in the north to flee to, and Israeli forces would be in the way.
So, every bullet that misses its intended target, every loose piece of
flying shrapnel or debris, has a good chance of hitting a civilian. It
is not credible that Biden administration officials, from the President
on down, don’t know this.
So when Sullivan talks about
giving Palestinians in the south of Gaza the opportunity to “get out of
the way” of an Israeli military operation, he knows he is speaking
gibberish. It wasn’t possible for Palestinians to do that when the 2.2
million people in Gaza were packed into the full area of the Strip.
They’re now jammed into half that space.
On Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken once again told Netanyahu to protect civilians.
But Biden, despite reportedly telling Netanyahu he mustn’t operate in
the south as he did in the north, also made it abundantly clear that he
will continue to rebuff any suggestion of material pressure on Israel or
any reduction in practical support for its war effort. That refusal to
use material pressure is the bottom line, and Netanyahu knows that very
well.
There is only one way to avoid this horrific outcome, and that is
through a permanent ceasefire. But Biden is preparing for that as well
by raising the specter of the two-state solution
again. For thirty years, this has been the U.S. and Israel’s preferred
method for ensuring that Palestinians do not realize rights to which all
of us are entitled. Biden’s dream of a return to the status quo ante,
where he can again ignore the question of Palestine and focus on making
deals between apartheid Israel and Arab Gulf dictatorships, is almost as
dangerous as the free rein he’s given to the most radical right-wing
government in Israel’s history.
It is crucial to seize this moment and focus it on Palestinian
rights, the realization of which is the only way out of this nightmare
of death, destruction, and traumatization that entrenches hostilities.
There is only way out, and that is the restructuring of the apartheid
state into an actual democracy, the support of full and equal rights for
all who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and
the construction of the political structures that can sustain and
nurture those rights for everyone. That is the only path forward, though
it can take many different forms. It can even be two states if that’s
what Israelis and Palestinians still want at that point. The form of the
future will be for Palestinians and Israelis to decide. Those of us
outside, especially those of us near the centers of power, need only
make it possible.