For one reporter, the evasions of the current US administration had evidently become just too much on Tuesday. Addressing the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, the Grayzone’s Liam Cosgrove said: “This administration has financed a genocide in Gaza for the last year, and every day you’re up there denying accountability for it. People are sick of the [expletive] in here.”
Mr Cosgrove’s words struck a chord; a clip of him speaking has already had hundreds of thousands of views on X alone.
I had my own moment of sudden ire on Sunday morning. I had to resist the urge to break my coffee mug after I read the headline, “Biden issues terse words to Netanyahu over peace deal”. Because isn’t it time we’re honest about the fact that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been gaslighting us for months and months?
They keep telling us that they’ve been putting pressure on Israel and working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Oh, come off it. It strains credulity that they haven’t worked out by now that all they have to do, if they really want a ceasefire, is this: cut off the supply of arms and money to Israel.
In August 1982, then US president Ronald Reagan was so appalled by Israel’s bombing of Beirut that he phoned then prime minister Menachem Begin to tell him it was a “holocaust” and had to stop. It took just 20 minutes for Mr Begin to call him back to say he had ordered an end to the bombing.
Mr Biden has had no end of opportunities to do the same. He hasn’t. And the endless equivocation and covering for Israel’s murderous campaign from his spokespeople, Mr Miller and John Kirby in particular, over the past year have been so awful that I have to switch off after a few seconds every time I watch a clip.
This is terribly damaging for all sorts of reasons. I wrote in these pages last November that the impunity Mr Biden had granted Israel to flout international law, to the point of what no one can doubt are the commission of war crimes, had blown up the so-called “rules-based international order”. It is also, tragically, leading to a huge rise in anti-Semitism around the world, with incidents rising to their highest levels for decades in the US and UK, according to reports published in the past week.
Why should innocent Jewish people far from Israel suffer because of the actions of that country’s administration? First, it’s important to say that they certainly shouldn’t, and second that it is considered anti-Semitic to hold Jewish people anywhere else responsible for whatever the state of Israel does. But many don’t see so much of a distinction, and it doesn’t help when Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, describes Israeli troops as “our incredible heroic soldiers”.
That sounds perilously close to what the historian Deborah Lipstadt calls “the dual loyalty canard”, although having dual nationality myself – and, indeed, having an Irish friend who was called up to serve in the Israeli army during the First Gulf War – I don’t see anything inherently wrong in Jewish people feeling a close connection to Israel as well as their home country. But it does serve to weaken the idea that Israelis and diaspora Jews are two totally different groups. It may not be fair or right, but the latter are being held responsible for the crimes of the former’s government.
And those crimes, the privileging of Israeli lives over Arab lives, the outrage when Iran fires a missile barrage that kills no one and what appears to be a collective shrug by western leaders when huge numbers of Palestinians are killed in the West Bank or Gaza, has become so glaringly obvious that even The Washington Post reported there was “overwhelming anger” at the country at the recent UN General Assembly meetings. Jewish communities around the world are feeling a chill up the spine, and often far worse, as a result.
There’s a further aspect to this, too.
When Malaysia’s then prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, made the claim in front of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation in 2003 that “today the Jews rule the world by proxy”, I tried to persuade an old associate of his that this was “unhelpful” to say the least. “But it’s true,” he replied. What Mr Netanyahu is doing is making it all the harder to argue against that awful anti-Semitic trope, because no one who has the power to hold him back is exercising any restraint on him at all. He could be wilfully provoking untold disaster in the Middle East and yet all we hear, from the US and UK at least, is “we stand with Israel”.
This not to say that Israel should have not retaliated after the attacks of October 7 last year. Any administration would have had to do so. Both critics and those of us overwhelmed by the catastrophic destruction wrought by Mr Netanyahu need to acknowledge how much of a life-changing, existential shock the Hamas-led attack was for the vast majority of ordinary Israelis. No, the conflict may not have begun on October 7. But this part of it did for them.
It must also be acknowledged that any long-term peace has to entail not only Palestinian statehood but also an Israel that both is, and feels, secure. Whatever one thinks about the original establishment of the state of Israel, it is a reality, and seven million Israelis are not, and should not, have to go anywhere, any more than seven million Palestinians.
Regional peace agreements should have been a way to start building that peaceful future. The blame for the fact that that happy prospect currently appears to be no more than a mirage lies not with the state of Israel, but with its disastrous prime minister – and with the American president who has enabled him.
We should call out Mr Biden and Ms Harris, because you can’t honestly express regret for any of the tens of thousands of deaths, the children maimed, the desolate moonscapes created, or the blighting of at least a generation’s future, if you’re the one supplying the arms and money.
So cut the “malarkey”, to use one of Mr Biden’s favourite words, Mr President. Let’s hear no more of your “ceaseless” efforts. Because the world knows you could have stopped all this. And you didn’t.
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