[News] The U.S.-Led Ceasefire Talks Are Just Buying More Time for Israel’s Genocide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

theintercept.com
<https://theintercept.com/2024/08/22/biden-harris-israel-ceasefire-gaza/>
The U.S.-Led Ceasefire Talks Are Just Buying More Time for Israel’s Genocide
Sunjeev Bery
August 22, 2024
------------------------------
[image: Vice President Kamala Harris poses with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu at White House on July 25, 2024.] Vice President Kamala
Harris poses with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White
House on July 25, 2024. Photo: Amos Ben-Gershom(GPO)/Handout/Anadolu/Getty
Images

For anyone paying attention, it is now abundantly clear that the U.S.-led
Gaza ceasefire talks have become a tool for the perpetuation of Israel’s
genocidal war <https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide>.
What began as a liberatory demand by Rep. Cori Bush
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-resolution/786>
and grassroots
<https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/us/jewish-palestinian-protest-israel-gaza/index.html>peace
advocates
<https://theintercept.com/2023/11/11/palestine-israel-protests-ceasefire-antisemitic/>
has now been fully co-opted by President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala
Harris, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The so-called
ceasefire negotiations are a form of camouflage that is being deployed by
Biden and Harris to distract from the reality of their support for Israel’s
mass atrocities in Gaza <https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976>.

To even use the word “ceasefire” to describe what the Biden administration
is pursuing is itself a form of linguistic violence. The latest draft
“ceasefire” proposal announced by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
essentially endorses continued Israeli occupation of Gaza
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/world/middleeast/gaza-ceasefire-proposal-israel-hamas.html>
with
no permanent cessation of war
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/world/middleeast/gaza-ceasefire-proposal-israel-hamas.html>.
But even this was apparently too much of a concession for Netanyahu, which
is why he reportedly continues to undermine it
<https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6ynq1jwdqo>. Meanwhile, it was just
one week ago that the State Department announced
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/blinken-approves-20-billion-israel-223555559.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFGlZ7T8bCM6w6uFt-ZSOiZU-x1SoBpvMwSOa1DSdAZLaMG__SPZzaiXWjxtURuxoMq0bWbTjaH-Tvu9lGLPwDjWZR-n4otHLVFl0oOUyNwvZJRUti0jH_8N8AvQc18xYvkjFOlgXo9L46O551INfQ6kVHDK1VU6ujXu_9CVkNaO>
the sale of another $20 billion in U.S. weapons to Israel.

The bad-faith terms of the latest proposal are just the beginning. Hamas is
unlikely to agree to the terrible new conditions that Blinken has put on
the table, and that rejection will in turn enable Biden, Harris, Blinken,
and Netanyahu to further blame Hamas for “rejecting peace.” This will then
buy Netanyahu more time to continue bombing, starving
<https://theintercept.com/2024/03/13/intercepted-gaza-mass-starvation/>,
and killing
<https://theintercept.com/2024/06/14/rafah-tent-massacre-israel-gaza/>
Palestinians. Then the cycle will repeat itself again, with Blinken soon
returning to the Middle East for yet another round of so-called ceasefire
negotiations, while the U.S. continues to send Israel even more weapons for
its war.

Breaking this cynical cycle requires getting honest about Biden and
Harris’s roles in this blood-soaked charade. While Biden is ultimately
responsible for America’s full-tilt support for Israel’s violence, Harris
has repeatedly supported
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/us/politics/harris-israel-arms-embargo.html>
the president’s continued arming of Israel. And through a fraudulent and
never-ending ceasefire negotiation process, both Biden and Harris have
enabled the broader Democratic Party to avoid acknowledging the horrifying
reality of their own leaders’ responsibility for a genocide
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-has-undeniable-complicity-gaza-war-killings-say-former-us-officials-2024-07-03/>
.

One of the worst examples of this came earlier this week, when progressive
icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood at the podium
<https://theintercept.com/2024/08/20/dnc-democrats-gaza-genocide-silence/>
of the Democratic National Convention on Monday and wrongly praised
<https://theintercept.com/2024/08/21/dnc-aoc-ilhan-omar-kamala-harris-gaza/>
Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing
hostages home.” Ocasio-Cortez offered Democratic voters the seductive
fiction of Harris as a vice president who is doing something other than
enabling the continued supply of U.S. weapons
<https://theintercept.com/2024/05/09/israel-military-teenagers-ceasefire-mesarvot/>
for the daily massacre of Palestinian civilians. By doing so, Ocasio-Cortez
became a willing political accomplice to the Biden/Harris policy of
supporting Israel’s genocidal war.

One driving force for all of this is the pro-Israel lobby, with its vast
network of high-net-worth donors. Many politicians
<https://theintercept.com/2024/01/20/israel-aipac-house-mike-johnson/>
stick to the lobby’s talking points
<https://theintercept.com/2024/05/08/rafah-israel-invasion-aipac-lobby/> in
order to avoid its guillotine
<https://theintercept.com/2022/08/02/michigan-primary-andy-levin-results-aipac/>.
They
would rather pretend that something positive is happening than face the
wrath that Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush experienced when that same
pro-Israel donor network deployed millions
<https://theintercept.com/2024/08/06/aipac-cori-bush-election-results-wesley-bell/>
of dollars
<https://theintercept.com/2024/06/26/jamaal-bowman-primary-aipac-latimer/>
to defeat them in their recent Democratic primaries.

These pro-Israel lobbying groups and donor networks have built a bipartisan
reality of pro-Israel U.S. politicians
<https://theintercept.com/2024/04/04/republicans-congress-palestine-israel-double-standard/>
who now enable the worst impulses in Israeli politics
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/everything-is-legitimate-israeli-leaders-defend-soldiers-accused-of-rape>,
culture
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/02/netanyahu-gaza-palestinians-war-israeli-society/>,
and society
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-prison-rape-no-criminal-charges>.
Israel does not have to come to terms with its own genocidal mania because
its sugar daddy, the United States, will protect it
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/19/a-history-of-the-us-blocking-un-resolutions-against-israel>
from all consequences. And despite this, or perhaps because of it, Biden
and Harris are able to continue to posture as brokers of peace while
sending billions of dollars in weapons to Israel’s soldiers. To believe
that Biden, Harris, and Blinken can (or will) push for a real ceasefire is
to accept the fantasy that they can be advocates for peace when they are
already the primary enablers of genocide.

This fantasy has deep roots that go back to the so-called Oslo peace process
<https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/oslo-accords-anniversary-palestine/>,
which gave Israel decades of time
<https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/oslo-accords-palestinian-women-first-intifada-naila-and-the-uprising/>to
steal Palestinian land and expand its borders by building Jewish Israeli
settlements
<https://peacenow.org.il/en/30-years-after-oslo-the-data-that-shows-how-the-settlements-proliferated-following-the-oslo-accords>
across the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Palestinian analyst Mouin
Rabbani recently spelled all of this out when he described the current
<https://x.com/mouinrabbani/status/1824689411310690482?s=46&t=XvtYvPx6MWJUQFKo9c59fA>
ceasefire talks as “an Oslo process for genocide … Just as Oslo served as
the essential fig leaf enabling Israel to intensify settlement expansion
and annexationist policies, while Washington ran interference for Israel
with a ‘peace process’ designed to go nowhere.”

Peace advocates who continue to call for a ceasefire now risk becoming
props for the Biden/Harris playbook. The broader American public will
likely find it difficult to differentiate between an activist demand for a
ceasefire and the politicians who nod in duplicitous agreement while
enabling the opposite. By using the same abused word, the difference
between what peace advocates are calling for and what the Biden
administration is actually doing becomes harder to understand.

To believe that Biden and Harris push for a real ceasefire is to accept the
fantasy that they can be advocates for peace when they are already the
primary enablers of genocide.

The blunt reality is that Biden and Harris must be pushed to enact a full
arms embargo on Israel and end U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of
Palestinians. That may seem too politically difficult to achieve, but to
continue to talk of ceasefires is to unwittingly enable Israel’s genocide
by failing to accurately describe what the U.S. is actually doing.

So long as Kamala Harris and her surrogates have the freedom to stand at a
DNC podium and pretend that they are pushing for peace, it will be easy for
Biden and Harris to continue supporting the slaughter of Palestinians. If
Harris is elected as the next president of the United States, no one should
expect that U.S. foreign policy will magically change. Without external
pressure, a Harris White House is likely to continue supporting Israel’s
destruction of Palestinian society, all while proudly waving the banner of
“peace.”
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