“We still believe that there is time and space for a diplomatic solution.  War is not inevitable.  And we’re going to continue to do everything we can to try to prevent it.”

– John Kirby, National Security Council spokesman, September 20, 2024

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology exceeded our humanity.”

– Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist, 1879-1955

“How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see.”

– Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” 1962

No Democratic administration has been willing to challenge the excesses of Israeli policy, and the Biden administration is no exception.  President Joe Biden’s bear hug of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several days after the Hamas attack on October 7th indicated that U.S. policy would be one-sided.  Even worse, Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel on October 12th, and said that he was there not only as secretary of state but “as a Jew.” Accordingly, the United States has been complicit in virtually every aspect of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza as well as negligent in accepting Israel’s brutal policies against innocent Palestinians on the West Bank.

U.S. silence in the wake of the deadly explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon is one more indication of U.S. unwillingness to condemn heinous Israeli acts of terrorism.  U.S. diplomats and National Security Council spokesman Kirby continue to claim that their efforts have prevented a “full-blown war” between Israel and Lebanon, but this simply has not been the case.  The fact that hundreds of innocent Lebanese have been killed and injured, including children and health-care workers, doesn’t appear to count as “acts of war.”  Meanwhile, Blinken is in Egypt urging “all parties” to avoid steps that could “further escalate the conflict that we’re trying to resolve.”  Obviously, Blinken seems to have no idea that he is being ignored by the Israelis, and that his feckless statements have only embarrassed the United States in the Middle East as well as the larger global stage.

Meanwhile, government watchdogs in the Departments of State and Defense are about to issue statements that will document the export of billions of dollars of U.S. weapons that are in violation of laws that prohibit the transfer of military assistance to countries that commit violations of human rights and block the movement of humanitarian assistance.  The statements of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court document these violations, and as a result there are countries (e.g., Belgium, Britain, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, and Spain) that have begun to restrict the weapons flow to Israel.  Aside from the pause in one shipment of highly devastating MK-84 2,000-pound bombs in June, which never should have been provided to Israel in the first place, the Biden administration has taken no action to restrict the surge of U.S. weaponry to Israel.  Approximately 70 percent of the weapons used against Gaza and Lebanon are from U.S. inventories.

Five months ago, a report from the Department of State faulted Israel for its failure to protect civilians in Gaza, but the report avoided the conclusion that Israel violated any laws, thus putting no pressure on the Biden administration to restrict arms to Israel.  A former State Department lawyer, Brian Finucane, called the report “watered down” and heavily “lawyered.”

An independent task force called the report “intentionally misleading in defense of acts and behaviors that likely violate international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes.”  The report was delivered to Congress late on a Friday afternoon, a device government agencies typically use to minimize an announcement’s public impact.  NSC spokesman Kirby, who consistently kowtows to Israel,  predictably denied that the delay in the timing had any “nefarious” motive.  The report failed to note that the pattern of Israeli attacks on humanitarian aid convoys was either intentional or indicative of reckless incompetence.  The Israelis are not incompetent, so you can draw your own conclusions.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D/MD) is one of the few senators emphasizing the need to hold Israel accountable.  “If Israeli conduct complies with international standards,” Van Hollen said, “then God help us all.” The Foreign Assistance Act clearly prohibits military assistance to any country that restricts humanitarian assistance, which has been sufficiently documented.

The continuity of Israeli persecution of the Palestinian and Arab communities has been clear from the start.  The displacement of the Palestinian community was planned even before the declaration of Israeli statehood.  Israel’s secret involvement in the Suez War in 1956 demonstrated to the Arab states that Israel was a part of the British and French colonial experience in the Middle East.  There were no Israeli efforts to signal an interest in making Israel a legitimate neighbor to the Arab community.  The 1967 Six-Day War was never the preemptive attack that is part of the conventional wisdom among pundits and politicians.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 produced a strategic nightmare for Israel for nearly two decades.  In an effort to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire they had set, the United States suffered the loss of several hundred American soldiers and diplomats.  President Ronald Reagan put the troops in harm’s way without adequate protection and then failed to retaliate against the terrorist act despite sensitive intelligence that identified the perpetrators.  Reagan’s deputy national security adviser, Colonel Robert McFarlane, publicly accepted the blame for the lack of protective measures.

The current hostilities in Gaza and the West Bank have their own predicates.  The Israelis have always maintained that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land,” which made it inevitable that brutal ethnic conflict would take place.  Israeli writer David Shulman, writing in the “New York Review of Books,” noted that Israelis have denied the “very existence of a Palestinian people who share the land with the Jews but who are disenfranchised, without legal recourse, indeed without any basic human rights, which inevitably generates violence and aggression.”  Israeli denial is an illness for which there seems to be no cure.

It is abundantly clear that Netanyahu’s strategy is to annihilate both Hamas and Hezbollah regardless of the cost to Israeli hostages or Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.  The mainstream media continues to insist that the United States has little sway over Iran and Hezbollah but wields significant leverage over Israel.  The use of such leverage would involve limiting the scope and pace of U.S. arms shipments as soon as possible, but there is no sign that the Biden administration will take such a step.