Biden; Stop the Bombing

 I’m deeply troubled that the Biden administration continues to approve the transfer of thousands more bombs to Israel. 

Not only does this further our moral complicity in the bloodbath in Gaza, but it gives away whatever bargaining leverage the Biden administration might have to stop Benjamin Netanyahu from further death and destruction in Gaza. 

One need not take sides in this war to be horrified by the killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. 

Of course Hamas deserves condemnation for seeking the obliteration of Israel and for the inhumanity it wrought on October 7. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu deserves condemnation for killing over 30,000 Palestinians living in Gaza, a large percentage of them children. By May, the World Food Program and others suggest that half the population of Gaza may be on the verge of catastrophic starvation.

I believe Joe Biden genuinely wants this conflict to end. I believe he truly thinks Israel’s operation to go after Hamas has been “over the top,” as he’s said, in terms of it being wildly disproportionate to the odious actions Hamas took on October 7. I believe Biden was truly “outraged and heartbroken” by the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza earlier this week that killed seven aid workers for the charity group World Central Kitchen. And I believe he really does want to draw a “red line” and prevent Netanyahu from mounting a planned invasion of Rafah, where 1.4 million Palestinian refugees have sought shelter. 

Despite all this, the Biden administration has been unwilling to impose a single cost or consequence that would translate into real pressure on Netanyahu. Instead, the U.S. has just authorized the transfer of billions of dollars’ worth of more military equipment to Israel. It just approved a shipment of two-thousand-pound bombs, and twenty F-35s.

Beyond America’s moral complicity in the bloodbath in Gaza there is also politics — here in America and in Israel. 

Americans are no longer willing to provide unconditional support to the Israeli government as it kills or starves ever more Palestinians. Many Democratic voters are unhappy with Biden’s inability or unwillingness to confront Netanyahu, the most rightwing Prime Minister of the most rightwing government Israel has ever had. 

Netanyahu, for his part, needs to keep this war going for his own political survival. He knows that if the war stops, he is probably going to lose power.

We can and we must get tough with Netanyahu. The U.S. government has the authority to suspend an arms package any time before delivery. 

Granted, it is politically difficult to confront an Israeli Prime Minister. I was in the Clinton administration when Netanyahu met with him in June of 1996. I heard Clinton explode after that meeting, “Who’s the fucking superpower here?” 

But there comes a time when America must stand up even to our closest allies when those allies are in the wrong. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower threatened sanctions if the Israelis did not withdraw from Sinai. That was just before an American election. The Israelis did withdraw. Eisenhower was reelected. 

Syria War Dead

In seven years, the casualties of Syria’s civil war have grown from the first handful of protesters shot by government forces to hundreds of thousands of dead.

But as the war has dragged on, growing more diffuse and complex, many international monitoring groups have essentially stopped counting.

Even the United Nations, which released regular reports on the death toll during the first years of the war, gave its last estimate in 2016 — when it relied on 2014 data, in part — and said that it was virtually impossible to verify how many had died.

At that time, a United Nations official said 400,000 people had been killed.

But so many of the biggest moments of the war have happened since then. In the past two years, the government of President Bashar al-Assad, with Russia’s help, laid siege to residential areas of Aleppo, once the country’s second-largest city, and several other areas controlled by opposition groups, leveling entire neighborhoods. Last weekend, dozens of people died in asuspected chemical attackon a Damascus suburb, prompting the United States, Britain and France to launch retaliatory strikes against Syrian targets early Saturday.

In addition, American-led forces have bombed the Islamic State in large patches of eastern Syria, in strikes believed to have left thousands dead. And dozens of armed groups, including fighters backed by Iran, have continued to clash, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that the world is struggling to measure.

Historically, these numbers matter, experts say, because they can have a direct impact on policy, accountability and a global sense of urgency. The legacy of the Holocaust has become inextricably linked with the figure of six million Jews killed in Europe. The staggering death toll of the Rwandan genocide — one million Tutsis killed in 100 days — is seared into the framework of that nation’s reconciliation process.

Without a clear tally of the deaths, advocates worry that the conflict will simply grind on indefinitely, without a concerted international effort to end it.

“We know from conflicts around the world that we can’t have any sustainable peace if we don’t have accountability,” said Anna Nolan, director of The Syria Campaign, a human rights advocacy group. “The most critical thing to understand in that situation is who is being killed and who is doing that killing, and without that information we can’t expect the people involved in resolving this conflict to come to the right decisions.”

Photo

A Syrian man evacuated an infant from the rebel-held town of Hamouria after heavy bombardment in February. As the seven-year Syria war drags on, growing more diffuse and complex, many international monitoring groups have stopped counting casualties.

New York Times