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442008


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


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.


Responses:
[442009] [442010] [442011] [442014] [442015] [442016]


442009


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



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.


Responses:
[442010] [442011] [442014] [442015] [442016]


442010


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


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.


Responses:
[442011] [442014] [442015] [442016]


442011


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


international...welcome back...


Responses:
[442014] [442015] [442016]


442014


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


thanks. Well the series is fundamentally about US policy which seems like a
national issue to me, but ok


Responses:
[442015] [442016]


442015


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


the first 2 parts were, but the 3rd part was about gaza/israel...


Responses:
[442016]


442016


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


a bit nit-picky, i admit...


Responses:
None


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