[News] US foreign policy is prolonging Israel’s genocide in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 US foreign policy is prolonging Israel’s genocide in Gaza
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Wednesday 20-March-2024 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/us-foreign-policy-is-prolonging-israels-genocide-in-gaza/

When a country’s foreign policy as large and significant as that of the
United States is governed by a case of cognitive dissonance, terrible
things happen. These terrible things are, in fact, already happening in the
Gaza Strip, where well over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed, wounded
or are missing, and famine is currently ravaging the displaced population.
US foreign policy is prolonging Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

>From the start of Israel’s war on 7 October, the US has mishandled the
situation, although recent reports indicate that US President Joe Biden,
despite his advancing years, has read the overall meaning of that fateful
day correctly. According to the Axios news website, Biden argued in a
meeting with special counsel Robert Hur on 8 October that the “Israel
thing” — the Hamas attack and the Israeli war on Gaza — “has changed it
all”.

By this he was referring to the fact that the outcome of these events
combined will “determine what the next six, seven decades look like. Biden
wasn’t wrong. Indeed, everything that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and his government and war council have done in Gaza point to a
similar Israeli reading of the significance of the “world-altering” events.

Netanyahu has proven his willingness to carry out genocide and starve
millions of Palestinians because he still feels that the superior firepower
of the Israeli army is able to turn back the clock, and restore Israel’s
military standing, geopolitical influence and global position. He is wrong,
though, and five months of war and senseless killing continue to
demonstrate this.

However, the US political gamble in the Middle East and the global
repercussions of Washington’s self-defeating foreign policy makes far less
sense. Considering Washington’s historic support for Israel, the US
behavior in the early days of the war was hardly a surprise.

The Biden administration mobilized quickly behind Netanyahu’s war cabinet
and sent aircraft carrier battle groups to the eastern Mediterranean,
indicating that the US was ready for a major regional conflict. Media
reports began speaking of direct US military involvement, specifically
through the Delta Force, although the Pentagon claimed that the 2,000 US
soldiers were not deployed to fight in Gaza itself.

If it was not obvious enough that the US was a direct partner in the war,
mainstream media reports ended any doubt. On 6 March, the Washington Post
reported that, “The United States has quietly approved and delivered more
than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war
began.”

Moreover, with time, US foreign policy regarding Gaza became even more
perplexing.

Although in the early weeks of the war-turned-genocide Biden questioned the
death toll estimates produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in
Gaza, the casualty count was no longer in doubt later on. Asked on 29
February about the number of women and children killed by Israel during the
war, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin answered without hesitation:
“It’s over 25,000.”

Yet, the numbers are growing all the time, as are US shipments of arms and
ammunition to Israel. “We continue to support Israel with their [sic]
self-defense needs. That’s not going to change,” US National Security
Advisor John Kirby told ABC News on 14 March.

This particular statement is worth a pause, since it came after many media
leaks regarding Biden’s frustration — in fact, outright anger — with the
way that Netanyahu is handling the war. ABC News reported in early February
that the US president had been “venting his frustration” over his
administration’s “inability to persuade Israel to change its military
tactics in Gaza.” Netanyahu, the outlet quoted Biden as saying, is “giving
me hell.”

This is consistent with other recent reports, including one by Politico,
claiming that Biden has privately “called the Israeli prime minister a ‘bad
f*cking guy’,” due to his stance on the Gaza war.

Yet, Netanyahu remains emboldened to the extent that he appeared in a Fox
News interview on 11 March, speaking openly about “disagreements”, not only
between Biden and the Israeli government, but between the US president “and
the entire Israeli people.”

It is glaringly obvious that, without continued US military and other forms
of support, Israel would not have been able to sustain its war on the
Palestinians for more than a few weeks. Thousands of lives could have been
saved, and tens of thousands more dreadful, life-changing wounds could have
been avoided.

Moreover, the US has served as Israel’s vanguard against the vast majority
of world governments which, daily, demand an immediate and unconditional
ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. If it were not for repeated US vetoes at the
UN Security Council, a resolution demanding a ceasefire would surely have
been passed.

Despite this unconditional support, the US is struggling to stave off a
wider regional conflict, which is already threatening its political
standing in the Middle East. As such, Biden wants to regain the initiative
by renewing discussions — albeit without commitment to real action — about
a two-state solution and the future of Gaza.

Netanyahu is disinterested in these matters not least because his single
greatest political achievement, as far as his right-wing constituency is
concerned, is that he has completely frozen any discussions on a political
horizon in occupied Palestine. For Netanyahu, losing the war means the
unceremonious return to the old US political framework of the so-called
“peace process”.

The embattled Israeli prime minister also knows that an end to the war
would mean the end of his coalition government, mostly sustained by
far-right extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. To achieve
his self-serving goals, therefore, the Israeli leader is willing to sustain
a war that is clearly being lost.

Although Biden has completely “lost faith in Netanyahu”, according to the
Associated Press, he continues to support Israel without questioning the
disastrous outcomes of the war, not only on the Palestinian people, but
also on the region and the world, including the United States.

Americans, especially those in Biden’s Democratic Party, must continue to
increase their pressure on the administration so that it resolves its
cognitive dissonance in Palestine. The president must not be allowed to
play this deadly balancing act, privately demanding that the war should
stop, while openly funding the Israeli war machine.

The majority of Americans already feel that way, but Biden and his
government are yet to get the message. How many more Palestinians have to
die before Biden listens to the people chanting “Ceasefire now”?

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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