The Gaza Crisis and the War Between Israel and Palestine, as Revisited by the U.S. President J. J. Blinken and the White House
Administration officials said the shift in tone and substance was the result of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where the health ministry says more than 8,000 people have been killed, provoking outrage in the United States and around the world.
He said that they talk about this daily with the Israelis. He then noted that hospitals were not legitimate military targets just as Israel was warning that another major hospital in Gaza had to be emptied out before the next round of bombing.
President Biden assured Netanyahu that he supported his vow to turn Gaza into a wasteland, after the slaughter of 1,400 people by Hamas.
“I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive and overwhelming,” Mr. Biden recalled saying during a call between the two leaders on Oct. 10.
Over the past three weeks the president has changed his message and he is now saying that he is with the mourning that is sweeping through Israel. Mr. Biden and the rest of his military and diplomatic officials have become more critical of Israel after the terror attacks and the humanitarian crisis.
The president’s aides think that the current war could lead to a restart of dialogue between Israel and Saudi Arabia and even an attempt at a two-state solution in which Israel and Palestine live side by side. Mr. Netanyahu has resisted the move before.
American officials have grown more strident in reminding the Israelis that even if Hamas are intermingling with civilians, operations need to be tailored to avoid nonmilitary casualties. Last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said at the United Nations that “humanitarian pauses must be considered,” a move that Israel has rejected.
Israel has the right to defend itself but the way it does so is important, Mr. Blinken said.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said on Sunday that the hospital in Gaza was used by Hamas for terrorist purposes and not as a command center as Israel had said. On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Mr. Sullivan stated that Hamas use of civilians as human shields “creates an added burden for the Israeli Defense Forces.”
We give Israel money to pay for the weapons. Then we give Palestinians money to pay for the damage done by those weapons. The violence gets worse as we keep doing the same things.
The anti-heroess: a case study of the Israel-Gaza-bombardment “cease-fire”
We are pretending to think that the cycle has a different result than it did before. There are some amazing but not impossible odds in this game.
I’ve Been Under Bombardment. There Must Be a Cease-Fire in Gaza. I’m sorry, but I can’t explain it
An editor tried to convince me that it was not a good idea. “You’re a writer, and you like to choose pretty words,” the editor said. Jerusalem does not allow the use of pretty words. You have to use the careful words.” The editor was correct. Writing about Israel is very careful and careless. No reader can guess what we’re saying anymore, so we nitpick. The death tolls aren’t true. How do we know? What are things happening? They said we couldn’t ask for a cease-fire.
I still feel the rage in the people who are around me and within my own mind, against a nation that would kill like that.
Gaza is worse than that. I have never experienced the merciless pace of airstrikes and death now being suffered by the people of Gaza — people who did not travel to a war zone as foreign reporters, but who are getting attacked at home, with their children and grandparents. People who had already lived under blockade never had a chance to escape.
As Americans, we should have learned the same lesson over and over. All the military might of the United States could not defeat the ragtag bands of Taliban or force a nation of conquered Iraqis to accept a U.S. occupation. Maybe we don’t want to understand.
The Israelis Who Wanna Be Bombed: The Truth About Hamas and Israel’s Violation Against Israel and Lebanon on Oct. 7
Getting bombed from the sky is a particular horror: The sense that death hangs quite literally over your head, invisible until it’s too late, and maybe it will hit you. Maybe this is the moment. Or this. Or this. Every heartbeat hammering through your skull.
I have seen the US attack Afghanistan, barely escaped an attack from a Russian MiG in Georgia, and lived under heavy bombardment in Lebanon.
The atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 were shocking and evil. The vicious attack, which killed more Jews in a single day than any day since the Holocaust, cries out for an answer.
More than 40 percent of the people killed by Israel were children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry had heard President Biden suggest they could be lying about their deaths and so they released a list of the dead, page after page of names.
I think we ought to believe the words of the Israeli political and military leadership, because the assault on Gaza was driven by straightforward vengeance.
“You wanted hell, you will get hell,” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian of the Israeli Defense Forces warned the residents of Gaza, whom he referred to as “human beasts.”
Generations of Palestinians have had their lives defined by an open-ended military occupation. They don’t have a state to call their own, their rights are limited and there is little reason to look forward to better days. Palestinian political violence is older than Hamas, extends beyond Hamas across society, and will surely outlive Hamas in the absence of a political solution.
Israel knows this. Israel has bombed Gaza pitilessly before, but Hamas is still there. Hezbollah is still there, even though Israel turned parts of southern Lebanon to rubble.
His pained voice turned to anger when he recounted encountering disbelief that Hamas committed terrible atrocities when it attacked Israel. Lavi was bewildered by the thought of people exaggerating over the notion of people being beheaded or their heads falling off.
In one particularly gruesome twist, there has been an uproar over whether Hamas had beheading babies, and it was made up by President Biden before the White House walked it back.
The Iraq War and the Israel War on the Gazan: How Israel and the Palestinians Meteorized and Critified the U.S.
There are many historical examples of the Iraq war being a rationale for war, due to the fact that horrific but false or exaggerated claims are being used as a rationale.
After the attacks, the United States received deep global sympathy. Many Muslims around the world were furious about this blemish upon Islam, even if they opposed U.S. policies: Citizens held vigils, politicians condemned the attacks and clerics repudiated them in mosque sermons. The idea that Muslims celebrated the attacks has been proven false multiple times, back to a few instances of dubious clarity.
The United States chose to wage a war in Iraq that caused great damage and was justified by lies about weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration lied to the American people in the lead-up to the war, as well as the ensuing chaos and death that set off the invasion of Iraq, which damaged the United States and its allies.
People also saw how occupation policies, like the quick and thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi Army, contributed to the creation of ISIS a decade later.
To make matters worse, the Israel government has a long history of making false claims and denying responsibility for atrocities that later proved to be its doing.
In one example of many, in 2014, four boys younger than 13 were killed by Israeli airstrikes while playing by themselves at a beach — three of them hit by a second blast while desperately fleeing the initial blast.
Israel then investigated and exonerated itself. Peter Lerner, then a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, said that it had targeted a “compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilized exclusively by militants.”
Some of the journalists who saw the bombing said there had been no attempt to interview them, according to The Telegraph.
One can see how this history plays out in the current turmoil over the Hamas claim that an Israeli missile hit a hospital courtyard. Israeli and American officials denied this, and asserted that the missile came from within Gaza. Initial reports of 500 people dead in the hospital blast led to global condemnations. Then the number was challenged, sparking another round of uproar and back and forth.
It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza — such misfires have happened. But Israel bombardment has also caused large civilian casualties. The evidence isn’t conclusive either way, and the truth remains unknown.
The Story of Kuwait 1990: A Case Study of a Demonstration of Security and Security for a Revolutionary State in the Early 21st Century
But there’s still the fact that fabricating or exaggerating atrocities is done to influence the calculus of what the public will accept — including what costs are justified to impose on civilians.
After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 there was a widespread resistance to the idea of a new war by the United States because it had not shaken its “Vietnam syndrome” that it was best to avoid large foreign military entanglements.
A teenager told Congress in 1990 that she had watched Iraqi soldiers kill premature babies out of incubators and then leave them to die on the floor, a claim that was repeated by high-level officials. The claim was widely repeated by officials and the media, and even by Amnesty International.
The daughter of a Kuwait ambassador to the United States was the only person who knew about the secret that she was a false witness.
The shocking fabrication played a key role in selling the war to the American public. The rulers of a tiny country created by colonial powers in the early 20th century needed to make sure that the oil fields stayed in their hands. Opposing an army so savage that it commits the most unthinkable crimes is a more convincing appeal for war.
The terrible result of all this history is widespread distrust and dehumanization, as ordinary people are seen suspiciously as potential causes of further loss and pain for others.
There are plenty of echoes of this on social media. The person posted on X said the babies beheaded by Hamas were similar to the WMD’s lie.
Human Rights Watch independently verified some of the videos of the horror on Oct. 7 and called them deliberate killings. The attacks were condemned by the organization ascruel and brutal crimes including mass killing, hostage-taking. Both organizations have called for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.
Both organizations have a history of documenting Israeli wrongdoings, including its treatment of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, and are vilified by the government of Israel and some NGOs.
These are the kind of voices that need to be heard. Even though the United States supports Israel regardless of its actions, President Biden may want to consider elevating independent human rights voices instead of embracing Netanyahu.
Source: Opinion | The Memories That Feed Distrust in the Middle East
Why kidnapping civilians shouldn’t happen: Action for the rights of civilians and the families of the victims in the Gaza Strip
As Amnesty International states, kidnapping civilians is a war crime and the hostages should be released, unharmed. And their families shouldn’t have to endure this suspicion on top of their pain.
But to credibly demand that war crimes be stopped and lives respected requires equal concern extended to all victims, including the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.