Hospital remains in Gaza after Israeli attack
“It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick… We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid.”
House Representative Tim Wallberg (R-Michigan), at a March 25th community gathering with constituents, on how to deal with Gaza.
OK, Wallberg is extreme, but even as he has tried (unsuccessfully) to walk back his statements, his approach is not altogether different from the extreme mutual support between two leaders facing criminal charges: Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. But it is Joe Biden who faces global wrath, Gen Z opprobrium (even younger Jews are railing against Israel) and severe pushback by Democratic Party Progressives… a position that could derail his candidacy and a rare moment where foreign policy could determine the outcome. His conversations, direct and through high-ranking intermediaries, with Netanyahu (who still loves Trump) to open channels to feed starving Gazans and implement a ceasefire have fallen on deaf ears. Even the US abstention in a UN Security Council vote to require such a ceasefire, meant little to critics of Israel’s callous military excess in Gaza. Russia and China vetoed the effort anyway.
Even as large anti-Netanyahu demonstrations explode across Israel, calling for new elections, even as the Hamas-held hostages appear to be anything but a priority to him, the United States continues to supply Israel with the munitions it needs to decimate Gaza. “The U.S. is sending a fresh round of bombs to Israel, two senior administration officials told NBC News, undermining the Biden administration’s public expressions of frustration at Israel’s conduct in the war and its own efforts at brokering a cease-fire… The bombs are part of a weapons package that was approved for Israel years ago, but is only being fulfilled now — and includes more than 1,800 Mark 84 (MK84) 2,000-pound bombs and approximately 500 Mark 82 (MK82) 500-pound bombs, the officials said.” NBC News, March 31st. “The US is close to approving the sale of up to 50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion. It would amount to the largest US foreign military sale to Israel since the country went to war with Hamas on October 7.” CNN News Feed, April 2nd.
It was all so hopeful, in the early 1990s when everyone seemed to believe a two-state solution (separate nations – Israel and Palestine) was possible. “In the U.S.-brokered Oslo accords signed in 1993, Israel accepted the Palestine Liberation Organization as the Palestinians’ representation, while the PLO recognized Israel’s right to a peaceful existence. The two sides agreed that the Palestinian Authority would take governing responsibilities in the West Bank and Gaza, creating some hope of a road map toward two states.
“In 2000, President Bill Clinton unsuccessfully attempted to reach a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Camp David. Months later, clashes broke out after an Israeli politician’s visit to a Jerusalem site venerated by both Jews and Muslims. A Palestinian intifada, or uprising, gripped the region for years… ‘There’s been zero steps forward since then, actually,’ said Gilbert Achcar, a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London, ‘and the situation has only deteriorated.’” Washington Post, last November. Since, with full support from Donald Trump, Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition partners have long disavowed that two-state solution and amped up new Jewish settlements (against US and UN severe objections) aimed at pushing Palestinians out of their homes and farms on the West Bank.
Israeli authorities turn a blind eye as Jewish settlers on the West Bank attack Palestinians who live and work there, often destroying their homes. As Nabih Bulos, writing for the April 1st Los Angeles Times, notes: “In 2005, Israel instituted a system in which most Palestinians wanting to access their land had to coordinate with the occupying country’s military for protection from settlers. Farmers had no choice but to limit harvesting to as few as three days a year. In 2006, when settlers commandeered roads for their exclusive use, [Palestinian West Bank] Turmus Ayya residents had to take ever-longer detours to get home.
“[The settlers’ destruction of Palestinian property on the West Bank] part of a wider pattern documented by rights groups, which report that Israeli settlers — often armed and in uniform as military reservists — have set up roadblocks to keep Palestinian farmers off their own land; have confiscated their equipment; and have detained and beaten up agricultural workers.
“Settlers are also accused of burning, breaking or uprooting thousands of [Palestinian farmers’] olive trees. In some instances, they simply harvested the olives for themselves. An estimated 9,850 trees or saplings have been damaged in hundreds of attacks by settlers since the war began, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs… These observers describe the aggression as a land grab aimed at expanding settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.
“In that time, at least 434 Palestinians in the West Bank — a quarter of them children — have been killed by soldiers and settlers, Palestinian authorities say. On the Israeli side, the death toll in the occupied territory is 15, including four security personnel, according to Israel’s official tally.” The West Bank was supposed to be Palestinian land under the two-state solution. That solution is all but impossible today, as Tareq Baconi, author of “Hamas Contained” and the president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, writes in his NY Times OpEd (April 1st):
“The language that surrounds a two-state solution has lost all meaning. Over the years, I’ve encountered many Western diplomats who privately roll their eyes at the prospect of two states — given Israel’s staunch opposition to it, the lack of interest in the West in exerting enough pressure on Israel to change its behavior and Palestinian political ossification — even as their politicians repeat the phrase ad nauseam. Yet in the shadow of what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be genocide, everyone has returned to the chorus line, stressing that the gravity of the situation means that this time will be different.
“It will not be. Repeating the two-state solution mantra has allowed policymakers to avoid confronting the reality that partition is unattainable in the case of Israel and Palestine, and illegitimate as an arrangement originally imposed on Palestinians without their consent in 1947. And fundamentally, the concept of the two-state solution has evolved to become a central pillar of sustaining Palestinian subjugation and Israeli impunity. The idea of two states as a pathway to justice has in and of itself normalized the daily violence meted out against Palestinians by Israel’s regime of apartheid.” Ideally, however, there is room for both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in these lands. It is doable, but with the recent explosion of violence on all sides, that answer is a very long way off. But absent that solution, the reality is so much worse.
I’m Peter Dekom, and given our unending and seemingly unconditional military support of Israel, anything that goes wrong in Israel is equally globally blamed on the United States.
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