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Date: October 07, 2024 at 16:04:55
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: NR: Joe Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way |
URL: https://newrepublic.com/article/186695/joe-biden-chose-gaza-catastrophic-path |
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Matthew Duss October 7: A Year of Unfathomable Misery and Political Failure Part 1: Joe Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way
What’s happening in the Middle East was enabled by a president with ideological priors, aides who failed to push back, and a cheerleading media establishment.
Biden KENT NISHIMURA/GETTY IMAGES
1 Joe Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way 2 One Year After October 7, American Jewry Has Been “Broken … in Half” 3 A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point View All
There’s a 23-year-old quote from Benjamin Netanyahu in The New York Times that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Reached on the evening of September 11, 2001, the then-former prime minister was asked what the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers and killed almost 3,000 people meant for relations between the United States and Israel. “It’s very good,” he said. Then he quickly edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.”
He may have been rude and insensitive, but he was also being uncharacteristically honest. Like any demagogue, Netanyahu knew instinctively that enormous pain could be easily transformed into permission.
In addition to providing Israel’s then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a freer hand in crushing the second intifada, Netanyahu also saw America’s trauma as an opportunity to achieve a wider set of regional security goals. As Congress was considering the Iraq invasion, he came to the United States to lend his support. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” he assured a congressional committee in September 2002.
It didn’t.
Obviously, the U.S. didn’t invade Iraq because Netanyahu told it to. He was one of many self-styled foreign policy experts who supported it, a list that includes our current president, who to this day has never adequately accounted for his own key role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in enabling the war, sheltering behind the transparently nonsensical claim that he was misled by President George W. Bush.
The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, were an abominable crime. The Israeli government had both the right and responsibility to protect its people. Biden was right to respond with support and solidarity.
It was also right to expect him, at some point over the last year, to pivot to real pressure to end the war and save human lives.
He never did.
It’s unclear yet whether the consequences of Israel’s post–October 7 war will be as bad as the Iraq War. They very well might, but one thing already clear is that both catastrophes were enabled in part by a U.S. president with strong ideological biases, a confidence in his own judgment as unshakeable as it was unjustified, advisers unwilling or unable to push back effectively, and an elite media establishment with an overtly militarist bent and a shockingly callous disregard for Arab lives, far more interested in editorializing about college student chants than about sitting U.S. senators—that is, people with actual power—urging Israel to “flatten” Gaza. (It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the bigotry still underlying our foreign policy discourse that, amid the flood of anti-Palestinian invective issuing from members of Congress, the only censure the U.S. House managed to pass was of its one Palestinian American member.)
It was obvious from early on in this war that Biden administration officials either did not understand, or just refused to acknowledge, what they were dealing with. As the public statements from Israeli leaders (collected as evidence in South Africa’s brief charging Israel with the crime of genocide), combined with the staggering amount of destruction being poured onto the 2.3 million people trapped within an area about twice the size of Washington, D.C., show, Israel’s concept of “self-defense” includes the intentional infliction of civilian suffering.
A memo from a defense attaché at the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv from November made this clear barely a month into the war. Israel’s strategy, the attaché wrote, is “deliberately causing massive destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers” in Gaza, targeting houses, bridges, and roads, and causing massive civilian casualties. Israel’s approach, he concluded, clearly violated “international treaties and laws of war.” Israeli military conduct over the past year has repeatedly and consistently proven that analysis correct.
And the people in this administration know it. Early this year a senior official described to me the administration’s efforts to convince the Israeli government to loosen its onerous aid restrictions into Gaza. The Israeli public was still in a vengeful mood and felt that all Gazans should be made to suffer, he said, and the Israeli government, deeply embarrassed by its failure to prevent the worst attack in Israel’s history and frantic to direct the public’s anger elsewhere, was still very happy to oblige.
“It’s a kind of sickness,” he said.
In late September, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had overruled the determinations of USAID and the State Department’s own refugees bureau—the two divisions of the U.S. government most directly responsible for assessing such situations, both of which had concluded that Israel was restricting humanitarian aid, which under U.S. law should trigger a suspension of military aid. Seeking to downplay the story, Blinken told an interviewer the following day that it was “actually pretty typical” to look at different reports then “put out our own report,” an impressively disingenuous answer that requires one to ignore that the American reports of violations agreed with analyses by virtually every humanitarian aid agency and human rights organization in the world. What was typical was the administration’s decision to overrule them in favor of the voices advocating for the seemingly easier political path of just continuing to send the bombs.
In public the Biden administration seemed to be watching a completely different war, pretending not to see the mounting atrocities that everyone in the world with a smartphone could plainly see, offering occasional kind words for international law and the protection of civilians with all the heft of the “thoughts and prayers” offered by Republican members of Congress after school shootings. On the ground, Biden deferred to Israeli preferences and practices in almost all cases, no matter the clear humanitarian impact. The mass killing and displacement of civilians, which would be condemned in the harshest possible terms were it being done by an adversary, and in fact has been so condemned when done by Russia in Ukraine, has been treated like the weather. Simply nothing to be done. Pass the ammunition.
In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s policy was found in his remarks to donors last December, in which he assured them that, while his administration would continue seeking to build a broader regional security architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20 years.
And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines were meaningless. His stubborn refusal to impose any costs on Netanyahu (except for a token suspension of a few shipments of bombs that was quickly superseded by massive deliveries of new weapons) is what all but ensured that his May cease- fire proposal would wither and die. The story that is now being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path, and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place, America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules- based order” even more “so-called” than when he entered.
“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.”
Making sure this is not forgotten is part of the task now. The architects of this policy will tell themselves, each other, and us that they did their best, that they made the least bad of the bad choices that confronted them. Those of us who work in this community don’t have to believe that. Over the past year, so many of my colleagues both inside and outside government have regularly confessed private anger with Biden’s policy. We’ve been at conferences and workshops together. Gaza has come up repeatedly, the bone in the throat of any discussion we try to have about America’s future role in the world. At one recent such gathering, participants were asked an open-ended question of what specific actions we would recommend a Harris administration take in the first 100 days. Variations on “Stop sending arms to Israel” were an overwhelming favorite. This should not be surprising, as polls show a near supermajority of Democrats share this view.
It’s not easy for foreign policy professionals to acknowledge any of this, given that many are carefully positioning themselves for jobs in a new administration. There’s probably no more abused word in this city than accountability, but it’s one we must consider amid this still-unfolding disaster. The support that Washington’s policy community has given to this catastrophic war is a symptom of our own sickness. We get to decide if we want to be part of the cure.
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Date: October 07, 2024 at 16:07:51
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: #2 One Year After October 7, American Jewry Has Been “Broken … in Half |
URL: https://newrepublic.com/article/186698/october-7-anniversary-american-jewry-broken-half |
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Emily Tamkin October 7: A Year of Unfathomable Misery and Political Failure Part 2:
One Year After October 7, American Jewry Has Been “Broken … in Half”
"The casualties in the Middle East include thousands of innocents lives and (for now) any hope of peace. The casualty here? The dream of liberal Zionism.
October 7: A Year of Unfathomable Misery and Political Failure
1 Joe Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way 2 One Year After October 7, American Jewry Has Been “Broken … in Half” 3 A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point View All
“I think this has thrown mainstream Jewish institutions in America into a tailspin.” Shaul Magid, who teaches modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, was describing October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, most of whom were Israeli civilians, and the tumultuous and tragic year that followed.
The year that followed has featured a war, carried out by Israel against Hamas in Gaza, that has seen over 40,000 Palestinians killed (some say this is a conservative estimate). It has featured massive rallies to stand with Israel and protests across the country to stop the war, both organized by Jews.
“The real crisis is in the liberal Zionist consensus that was operative since the 1970s,” Magid said. What October 7 and the war that followed did, Magid says, has been to carve out the liberal Zionist middle. The worldview of that middle has been built around certain principles: that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state; that the occupation is wrong; that there should be a two-state solution; that right-wing extremists in Israel are a minority, albeit one in power. But October 7 and the war forced American Jews in the liberal Zionist consensus to pick a side: Are you in favor of the war or not? If you’re in favor of a war that’s killed thousands of children, Magid asked, where’s the liberal part of “liberal Zionism”?
He answered his own question: “It has broken American Jewry in half.”
The sense of division is backed by polling. According to the latest polling by Pew on the issue, roughly a third of American Jews think that the Israeli response has been appropriate. Somewhere between a quarter and a third think it’s gone too far; another quarter, not far enough. Thirteen percent aren’t sure what to think.
The marked difference wasn’t captured only by one survey. Back in May, the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs found that just over half of American Jews supported U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement of a potential arms embargo, which is to say just under half did not. (In the end, the White House paused one shipment of bombs and moved forward with a more than $1 billion weapons deal for Israel.) The same study found that about a third agreed that Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza; about half disagreed.
Over the past year, American Jews have stared out from their different, competing realities, gazing at one another’s opposing views in disbelief, disgust, and fear. Some have wondered how their coreligionists couldn’t support Israel at this time. Others cried out in response asking how they could.
American Jewishness is distinctive for its pluralism. Other countries—in Europe, for example—have a chief rabbi and a formal Jewish community. The United States has Jewish communities. There are Orthodox and Conservative and Reconstructionist and Reform and secular humanist Jews.
And when it comes to religious practice, Magid said—whether you believe in God or you don’t, how you want to believe in God, what Judaism looks like in a person’s life—pluralism is alive and well. But, Magid said, “when it comes to Israel? It’s dead.” And in pluralism’s place is polarization.
“Where you stand on that national question becomes whether you’re a Jew or an un-Jew,” Magid said. “The un-Jew is the breakdown of pluralism—but only on the question of Israel.” He pointed to a 1915 quote from socialist Chaim Zhitlovsky, who predicted that a Jewish state would mean “the basis of our life in America will not be the Jewish religion, but rather our Jewish nationality.”
Said Hadar Susskind, head of Americans for Peace Now: “Groups have moved. Some of the folks who are, for lack of a more precise term, further to our left have moved, I think, further to the left. Some of the folks on the right have dug in even deeper.”
He referenced a panel he was on after October 7, during which a different speaker mentioned the group IfNotNow, a self-described “movement of American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future.” Of this group, the speaker said: “If you ask me, they’re not Jewish.” Susskind further recalled: “He said, ‘It’s not my choice. They chose by their actions to put themselves outside of the Jewish community.’”
“I think IfNotNow, frankly, has made a lot of decisions in this past year that I disagree with,” Susskind continued. “But the fact that I disagree with some of the positions or things that they’ve said is entirely different from, ‘Oh, they’re not part of our community.’” He said that he asked the crowd at the event to think about their Jewish children and grandchildren who are involved in IfNotNow.
“I don’t like to call everything antisemitism,” said Simone Zimmerman, co- founder of IfNotNow. But “the most hatred and vitriol that I have received as a Jew has been from other Jews. Not just during this last year, but of course over this last year it’s reached new lows.”
“It’s been so hard,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. “It’s been so, so hard.”
Being called self-hating Jews and kapos (Jewish inmates in Nazi prison camps who carried out the will of the guards) “from our own so-called wider community” makes it hard, she said, to maintain community. And what were productive differences before October 7, in some cases, became “more oppositional.”
Still, she said, “I’m in many, many spaces with Jews I disagree with all the time.” She said she tries to keep that space open.
But the war is still ongoing. Israel is still killing Palestinians, and now, Israel has invaded Lebanon; Iran shot ballistic missiles at Israel the day before I sat down to write this. The fighting is continuing, as is the dying. And the pain and fear and unrecognition in American Jewish communities—that’s ongoing too. “I do think that we’re still in it,” Sasson said. “It’s hard to know where it’s going to land.”
American Jews are at odds not only over whether and how to support Israel but also what it means for their existence as political actors and simply as citizens here in the United States. “One of the very weird and difficult spin-offs of all of this is the very real antisemitism that has exploded exponentially in America, and the response to that threat and perceived threat,” Susskind said.
But people do not agree on what constitutes antisemitism, or how much has been driven by antisemitism as opposed to disapproval of the war, or on how to build coalitions with other groups, Jewish and not.
Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, started her job a month before October 7. This is the only world in which she’s had the job. “I think there are so many people in a variety of spaces who are still treating this moment as if it’s normal, as if the same approaches to coalition building and fighting antisemitism and engaging people around Israel are going to apply,” Spitalnick said. “And our world has fundamentally changed. And we need to have people understand that.”
To her, that means creating space for Jews to have a relationship with Israel while recognizing the humanity of Palestinians, and “engaging across lines of difference” to help non-Jews understand they can do the same and that the Jewish community isn’t a monolith.
Many American Jews felt, after October 7, that non-Jewish groups that were otherwise ideological partners abandoned Jews, blaming Israelis for the attack. Others rejected that characterization. “I think this idea that nobody stood with us on October 7 is absolute nonsense,” said Zimmerman of IfNotNow. “I don’t think it’s true. I think that narrative has been fueled by people interested in keeping Jews terrified and isolated and [who] want to use that terror and isolation to mobilize support for the war.”
Zimmerman, the protagonist of a documentary called Israelism—which, as the title suggests, is critical of Israel and the American Jewish community’s support for it—noted that, while book talks were canceled because Zionist speakers were featured, screenings of Israelism were too, as were pro-Palestinian cultural events. “All of that’s very real,” said Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American writer and analyst. “At the same time, it’s sort of expected.”
All of this is happening in the context of a presidential election year. Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly support Donald Trump, while American Jews overall, per polling, are expected to support Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump has taken to using “Palestinian” as a slur while alleging that Harris hates Jews and that any Jew who votes for her “should have their head examined”; Harris has said there needs to be a cease-fire but has reiterated her support for Israel and not broken with Biden on policy.
Ann Toback, CEO of the Workers Circle, pointed out that her organization has, since its founding over a century ago, been domestically focused, turning its attention first to the labor movement, then to women’s suffrage, to immigration rights, and then to civil rights. Workers Circle left the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in August 2023 because it felt the focus of the group’s activism was almost exclusively on Israel, and not on democracy.
“Even as our focus is domestic and democracy in the United States, we don’t have blinders on,” Toback said. “But for us, the focus has been the erosion of democracy in the United States, and also abroad, and we see that erosion as fueling this ongoing and expanding conflict, and we see it as driving the incredible suffering, extreme suffering that’s been being borne by ordinary people.”
“We’re just getting so close, and maybe we’re there, into racialized language about Jews, and that has historically been the most dangerous precondition” for threat to Jewish life and community, said Marjorie Feld, author of Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism. She was referencing Trump’s comments preemptively blaming Jews should he lose the 2024 presidential election. “That is what scares me more than anything,” she said, adding, “I’m not frightened by the growing dissent. I actually think it’s healthy.”
But how many feel the same way? So often I hear from Jews that one thing they value about our tradition is debate; so often I have wondered whether they mean, “So long as I win it.”
There are still some who will use, and believe in, the center, the liberal Zionism. But I wondered if Magid wasn’t right: if, to be a Zionist, to defend the state of Israel, which is increasingly illiberal, American Jews wouldn’t make increasingly illiberal arguments, not only about Israel but also for American society. Is arguing against the right to protest liberal? Magid told me that, given the choice between liberalism and Zionism, he believed that many in the American Jewish center would choose Zionism. And many in the younger generation would not. We are divided, then, not only by generation but by what we see as our first Jewish obligation.
The center was fraying before October 7. A year later, I imagine someone yelling out across the void of consensus: How can you say that? Can’t you see what’s happening? What are we becoming? I picture the words echoing out, but never quite reaching the other end of the void."
Emily Tamkin Emily Tamkin is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and the author of The Influence of Soros and Bad Jews.
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Date: October 07, 2024 at 16:10:34
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: #3 A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point |
URL: https://newrepublic.com/article/186700/october-7-year-brought-us-breaking-point |
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October 7: A Year of Unfathomable Misery and Political Failure part 3
Yousef Munayyer / October 7, 2024 NO END A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point Alongside the mass graves and beneath the tons of rubble, there may lie another victim: the very possibility of a jointly imagined coexistence.
Palestinians help a man injured in an Israeli strike BASHAR TALEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES "Palestinians help a man injured in an Israeli strike that targeted a mosque turned shelter in Deir Al Balah in the central Gaza Strip, on October 6.
The anniversary pieces are here. There will be many of them, one year after October 7, 2023, written in magazines and journals, turned into videos and segments and performed as ceremonies as well. To fixate on this date, however, is to fundamentally misunderstand its genesis and its meaning; and, perhaps most importantly, is to inevitably welcome more horrific versions of it in the future.
The temptation to reflect in this moment is tremendous. After all, this has been the bloodiest and most destructive year in the Middle East in some time, and, for Palestinians in particular, the bloodiest ever. The stories of victims from one week of the past year are enough to shatter you for a lifetime. At the same time, to focus on this year as a unique period is to separate it from the historical context that produced it and to sacrifice an understanding of how we got here and where we are going. If you are looking to read such a piece, I am sure there will be many, but this will not be one of them.
What we have witnessed in Palestine over the last year has been a continuation of what we have witnessed in Palestine over the last century. Undoubtedly, the level of violence we are witnessing now is greater than before, and, importantly, it may well pale in comparison to the level of violence we will witness a decade from now. Hard as it may be to wrap one’s head around that possibility, it is nevertheless imperative for us to do so. Unless the patterns that created this year of genocide can be broken, we should expect them to repeat—and to become worse.
The patterns at play here have shaped and bloodied the region for decades; Zionism, a political ideology imposed against the will of the people of Palestine and the broader region with Western imperial support, can be sustained only through ever increasing levels of violence. In years past, this violence has taken many forms, including interstate war and mass repression campaigns. It has now escalated to the point of genocidal violence. If they have yet to accept us after this beating, the Zionist logic goes, then we must hit them harder. After decades of operating with this logic, with the full backing of the Western powers, is it any wonder we have reached genocidal violence?
Due to a fundamental inability to see Palestinians as human beings, to see their grievances as legitimate and to recognize their rights, Western backing has had the effect of legitimizing ever increasing levels of Israeli violence against them. There was a time when Washington would condemn the targeting of Palestinian militants by Israel if such strikes also killed a handful of civilians. Then that became the norm. There was a time when Washington would oppose Israeli strikes that targeted large civilian infrastructure. Then that became the norm. There was a time when Washington opposed the targeting of health facilities. Then that too became the norm.
Every red line up the ladder to genocidal violence has been erased by continued U.S. backing. Now genocidal violence itself is being normalized. Our leaders won’t say these words, but they have given their blessings to the actions that constitute the crimes those words describe. In doing so they are laying the groundwork for genocides to come in Palestine and yes, perhaps beyond Palestine as well.
In the process, Israel has become little more than a garrison state in a perpetual state of war or preparing for the next one. This is far from the idea of a safe haven for Jews. In defense of this the West has sacrificed any notion of values or human rights and, consequently, incalculable soft power on the global stage.
Perhaps the most depressing reality of all is that the time to break these patterns and reverse course is fleeting and maybe already behind us. I used to believe and continue to believe for now that justice is the only substitute for revenge and that law, not vigilantism, is the bedrock of peaceful societies. That, however, is much harder to believe if you have lived your entire life in a refugee camp, only to be made a refugee again and again, and had your children blown to bits by bombs dropped by militaries claiming to have “moral” superiority while raining “justice” from the bellies of their death machines.
Should it be the case that the chance to break away from the pattern has already escaped us, then this year would indeed mark something different. Alongside the piles of children’s bodies in Gaza left butchered by the Israeli genocide, next to the mass graves and beneath the tons of rubble, there would lie another victim: the very possibility of a jointly imagined coexistence.
Yousef Munayyer @YousefMunayyer Yousef Munayyer is head of the Palestine/Israel program at Arab Center Washington DC.
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Date: October 07, 2024 at 16:36:58
From: mr bopp, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: #3 A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point |
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international...welcome back...
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Date: October 07, 2024 at 17:01:23
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: #3 A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point |
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thanks. Well the series is fundamentally about US policy which seems like a national issue to me, but ok
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Date: October 07, 2024 at 17:39:48
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: #3 A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point |
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the first 2 parts were, but the 3rd part was about gaza/israel...
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Date: October 07, 2024 at 17:43:02
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: #3 A Year That Has Brought Us to the Breaking Point |
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a bit nit-picky, i admit...
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