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<h1 class="gmail-single_title">US foreign policy is prolonging Israel’s genocide in Gaza</h1>
<div class="gmail-article-author"><h3>By <a href="https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012"> Ramzy Baroud </a></h3></div>
<p class="gmail-single_date">Wednesday 20-March-2024 - <font size="1"><a href="https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/us-foreign-policy-is-prolonging-israels-genocide-in-gaza/">https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/us-foreign-policy-is-prolonging-israels-genocide-in-gaza/</a></font></p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Moreover, with time, US foreign policy regarding Gaza became even more perplexing.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”?</p>
<p><em>-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).</em></p>
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