VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken did a big interview with the New York Times this weekend about his legacy, the Biden administration’s legacy. And a big part of that interview was about Gaza. And I think it’s worth noting a number of things he said because I think they show the way in which people like Blinken live inside kind of intellectual and moral prison, in which basic truths are things that they cannot bring themselves to see or will not bring themselves to see. And they end up saying these things which are completely, utterly incoherent, and I think just morally inexcusable.
And so, the first thing that’s striking if you listen to Blinken’s comments on Gaza is that for him, the problem of Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza is a problem that begins on October 7th. He says, ‘since October 7th,’ this is Blinken, ‘we’ve had some core goals in mind. And what are those goals,’ he says, ‘make sure October 7th can’t happen again, prevent a wider war, and protect Palestinian civilians.’ Now, what he means by make sure October 7th can’t happen again, and he says it explicitly, is destroying Hamas’s military capacity, right. There’s no recognition that October 7th doesn’t just happen because Hamas has a bunch of weapons. October 7th happens because Palestinians are living in what Human Rights Watch calls an open-air prison, what the UN has said is a place that’s unlivable. This is before October 7th. That Palestinians are living in what all the world’s major human rights organizations call an apartheid state, right. All of that is completely absent.
So, Blinken thinks that the problem that he’s trying to solve begins on October 7th. And then he says astonishingly, he says, ‘when it comes to making sure that October 7th can’t happen again, I think we’re in a good place.’ No, you’re not in a good place. Not only because Gaza has been utterly destroyed, but you’re not in a good place in terms of making sure that things like October 7th can’t happen again because the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. But that’s basically completely absent from Blinken’s framework.
And what’s really striking is it’s so striking how Blinken is able to empathize with Jewish Israelis in a way that he can’t empathize with Palestinians. So, he says, this is Blinken, he says, ‘you had in Israel in the days after October 7th a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the Prime Minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.’ He says Israelis didn’t want any assistance to go to Gaza after October 7th. And he says you have to kind of understand that given the trauma in that society.
First of all, you notice the way in which he buys completely into the ethno-nationalist frame, right? What does he mean by society? Twenty percent of Israel’s own citizens are Palestinians—Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis. They wanted assistance to go into Gaza. So, you notice that when Blinken talks about Israeli society, he’s actually only talking about Jews, as if even the Palestinian citizens in Israel don’t actually matter, are not actually real Israelis. He’s completely bought into this ethno-nationalist framework. And then he says, yes, it’s unfortunate that they didn’t want any aid to go into Gaza. But after all, you have to understand they were really traumatized, right.
But there’s no recognition, right, that in understanding October 7th, and the horror of what Hamas and others did on October 7th, that it might be worth understanding that Palestinians were also totally traumatized, and that we should factor that in in understanding their actions—again, not excusing their action, but in understanding their action, right. So, Blinken can see Israelis through this kind of empathetic humanizing frame in a way he can’t vis-a-vis Palestinians.
The second point is the way Blinken talks about America’s leverage vis-a-vis Israel. He essentially talks about the US relationship with Israel as if America doesn’t give Israel weapons, or as if the notion that we would actually question whether we give Israel these weapons simply cannot be discussed, right. It’s completely outside of his mental framework, right. So, he says, ‘no one needs to remind me of the sufferings’—this is Palestinians—‘because it’s something that drives me every single day.’ Okay, so first of all, let’s just be honest. That’s bullshit. It’s a bold-faced lie. Antony Blinken might say that to make him fall asleep at night, but nothing in his actual actions suggests that he’s driven every single day by Palestinians suffering in Gaza because he keeps supporting the sending of those weapons, right.
And when he says, ‘we’ve done everything in our power to find a way to get to the end of the conflict,’ that statement only makes sense if somehow the question of US arms sales to Israel, right, is kind of an exogenous question, as if that doesn’t bear on American behavior, right. But it’s the single most important factor, right. That America is literally giving Israel the weapons it’s using to kill the people that Antony Blinken says he’s so concerned about.
And then Blinken tells this remarkable story. What’s remarkable about it is that he thinks it makes him look good. He says, ‘the very first trip that I made to Israel five days after October 7th, I spent with my team nine hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground, with the Israeli government, including the Prime Minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needs to get to Palestinians in Gaza,’ right. So, he’s proud of this, right. He’s proud of the fact that he was arguing for hours and hours and hours just about the idea that there should be any aid getting in, right. But why should Antony Blinken have had to argue for hours and hours and hours and hours, right. He only had to argue for hours and hours and hours because he wasn’t actually using the obvious leverage that was at America’s disposal. He would have not had to argue for hours and hours and hours if he simply said, no, we’re not going to provide you the weapons to destroy this society and to starve people to death. Then he wouldn’t have needed to argue for hours and hours and hours. But because he had taken the most important point of U.S. leverage off the table, he’s proud of himself for trying to convince the Israelis, acting like a supplicant, right, instead of the Secretary of State of the superpower that provides Israel the weapons that it needs to prosecute this devastating war.
And then when he’s explicitly asked by the interviewer of the New York Times about American weapon sales, he says ‘that support’—meaning the US arms—‘is vital to make sure Israel has an adequate defense. And in turn, that means we’re not going to have an even broader wider conflict that results in more death and more destruction.’ Sorry!? I mean, like, again, I understand in the nature of these interviews with the Times, the Times reporter has to be respectful, there’s a certain kind of way in which you’re supposed to address a Secretary of State, but what the fuck? I mean, the US, we give unconditional weapons to prevent a wider war and Blinken is saying that this strategy has worked. Has he not been noticing the utter destruction of Lebanon that’s taken place? And also, now Israel’s bombing of Syria? I mean, it’s just, again, this is like a man speaking in some kind of closed room in which he’s hermetically sealed off from reality.
And then to me, the most astonishingly pathetic and arrogant moment in the conversation is when the New York Times reporter says, ‘do you worry you’ve been presiding over what the world sees as a genocide?’ And Antony Blinken simply says, ‘no, it’s not.’ No, it’s not. That’s it. No suggestion that he might have read the Amnesty or United Nations reports. No suggestion that he needs to rebut these claims. No suggestion that the fact that Israel has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the universities, most of the agriculture, that 90% of the people are dislocated from their homes, right, that there’s been report after report of mass starvation that even some of Israel’s former security officials like Moshe Bogie Ya’alon are calling this an ethnic cleansing, right.
None of this makes Antony Blinken feel like he has to give any justification for why he doesn’t think it is a genocide. He doesn’t feel the need to make the argument. He simply says, ex cathedra categorically no it’s not, and then moves on. This is what William Fulbright famously called during Vietnam the arrogance of power. The arrogance of power. The arrogance and, frankly, the intellectual idiocy of power. We need to create an environment in this country, in the media, and in whatever institutions that people like Antony Blinken are going to be spending their time in when they leave the Biden administration, that will not accept those answers, in which you simply can’t say, no, it’s not, and then walk away.
If Antony Blinken thinks he’s going to become a professor at American University, or go to some think tank, or give interviews, or write op-eds in the New York Times, or show up on TV, or do whatever he’s going to do, it is critical for us as a country, as a society, to have the kind of accountability that means that he cannot get away with that. He does not have the right to simply say, no, it’s not end of conversation, right. He must be forced actually answer these charges because they are ultimately charges in part against him, right.
And I think the New York Times didn’t do enough in this interview to force him. We have to go outside of our comfort zones in some ways in these elite institutions to be a little bit less polite and be willing to make a little bit more uncomfortable when it comes to these situations, right. Given the magnitude of the horror that is happening, it’s simply not good enough to allow Antony Blinken to say, no, it’s not a genocide, next question. Because if we do let him do those kinds of things, then we’re laying the conditions, laying the seeds for this kind of thing to happen again. And it simply can’t happen again. The elite institutions in America have to change to ensure that there is never again a president like Joe Biden and never again a secretary of state like Antony Blinken who do this. It can never be allowed to happen again.