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We don’t know what will happen next Tuesday but either way Joe Biden will be leaving the White House next year.
Barring a sudden, unexpected shift the country’s 46th president will
leave his successor with an ongoing genocide in Gaza, facilitated by the
United States government.
“I suspect that, similar to Vietnam, the moral clarity around the
genocide in Gaza and Biden’s facilitation of it will only become more
stark in the years and decades ahead,” author Branko Marcetic told
me earlier this month. “At that point, I can imagine a debate among
future historians and commentators over whether we should think of Biden
as akin to LBJ – a deeply flawed and weak man who did something evil
out of political insecurity – or as simply a frail, increasingly unfit
old man taken advantage of by unscrupulous advisors and Israeli
leadership.”
“I suspect the latter will become more of an attractive narrative for
his defenders once he leaves office and we have a better understanding
of the scale of what Israel has done to Gaza, and we’re already seeing
signs that Biden might prefer this narrative, too,” he added.
Many details tend to slip through the cracks with the passage of
time, but one hopes that future historians will examine a piece that
appeared in the Washington Post yesterday.
Journalists Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum reveal that the
Biden administration has received nearly 500 notices from human rights
organizations and eyewitnesses claiming the Israeli army has used U.S.
weaponry on civilians.
In other words, proof that Israel is committing war crimes with the military aid supplied to them by the United States.
The authors note that some of these include reports include “photo
documentation of U.S.-made bomb fragments at sites where scores of
children were killed.”
The State Department’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance
directs officials to complete “an investigation and recommend action
within two months of launching an inquiry, but not a single one of these
cases has reached the “action” stage.
“They’re ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities
to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to
the Netanyahu government,” Center for Civilians in Conflict policy
adviser John Ramming Chappell told the paper. “When it comes to the
Biden administration’s arms policies, everything looks good on paper but
has turned out meaningless in practice when it comes to Israel.”
The State Department’s Matthew Miller was asked about the Washington Post story this week and responded with the standard reply: the government is looking into it.
Here’s some of that exchange:
MR MILLER: So a few things about that. Number
one, I think it’s always important to reiterate that we have
consistently made clear to the Government of Israel our serious concerns
about this issue and their need to do more to minimize civilian deaths,
and it continues to be something that we engage with them on that we
make quite clear. Second thing I want to make clear is that, yes, we are
reviewing a number of incidents through the CHIRG and other processes
and procedures that we have set up, and I’m not going to get into those
ongoing reviews. But as you’ve heard us say, these are complicated
issues. They’re complicated factual issues; they’re complicated legal
issues.
And so we have not yet gotten to the point with any of them that
we have been able to make final determinations, but there are a number
of incidents, and that is part of the issue. We have a number of
different incidents that we have to look at just based on the nature of
this conflict and the scope and extent of this conflict, and the extent
of civilian harm. As you heard us say before – you’ve heard us when we
released the NSM-20 report. If you just look at the overall scope of the
damage and the number of civilian lives that have been lost, we do
believe it’s reasonable to assess there are incidents in which Israel
did not meet all of its international humanitarian law obligations. But
when it comes to specific incidents, those reviews are still ongoing.
QUESTION: But I mean, I’m actually surprised
that you, unprompted, flag the NSM-20 report, which exactly, yes, says
that. So it’s a – isn’t it a little bit inconceivable that more than a
year now – some of these incidents go way back to last October – it’s
been more than a year and you guys are still yet to definitively assess
that any one single incident violates international humanitarian law?
MR MILLER: So let me just first say the reason I
flagged the NSM-20 report specifically is because one of the stories to
which you referred had sourced to officials as if it were a revelation
that we believe that there very well could be violations of
international humanitarian law when that is something that a report
ordered by the President, overseen by the Secretary had concluded
several months ago. So we have been quite clear – we’ve been quite clear
about the fact, and that’s why I – that’s why I thought it was
important to mention it.
But no, the – when it comes to these determinations, these are
incredibly difficult. It takes gathering facts, it takes gathering
information, and it takes, ultimately, making legal judgments about
those facts. And oftentimes you have conflicting accounts of what
happened, and it is our job to try to sort through that the best we can.
And it is a very difficult process where we’re looking at a number of
incidents. I can tell you we want to finish that work as soon as
possible. We have a number of people working on it, but it’s very
difficult work.
QUESTION: Is the – would you say the United
States Government is committed to investigating any possible misuse of
its weapons by any foreign forces, including Israel?
MR MILLER: Yes, absolutely.
QUESTION: But then how do you square that commitment with your inability to find anything in a year?
MR MILLER: We are – no, we are conducting those
investigations, and we are conducting them thoroughly, and we are
conducting them aggressively, but we want to get to the right answer.
And it’s important that we not jump to a preordained result and that we
not skip any of the work that we do, all of the important fact finding
that we need to do, before making what is a pretty significant
determination, and that’s what we’re doing.
The Washington Post article comes just a month after the ProPublica
story that revealed Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected reports
from multiple government agencies detailing how Israel purposely blocked
humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
As Marcetic mentions, there’s a recurring mainstream narrative that frames Biden as a well-intentioned leader who is continually conned by the crafty Netanyahu.
In this interpretation Israel’s brutality is a tragic consequence of
Biden’s naivety, not a reality that the president has repeatedly
co-signed.
“The metaphor that always arises in diplomatic conversations is of
Joe Biden as Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, and each time
Netanyahu pulls it away (sometimes, Hamas pulls it away as well),” wrote
Nicholas Kristof in a recent New York Times column.
500 times? |