Not surprisingly, the White House issued blanket approval yesterday of Israel decision to launch a devastating attack on Jenin, a Palestinian refugee camp in occupied territory:
“We support Israel’s security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups.”
The language reflects Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is attacking a “nest of terrorists.”
“Another green light from the Biden admin for Israel’s military offensive,” Khaled Elgindy of Georgetown University slammed the statement. “This admin seems utterly incapable of nuance or anything other than unqualified, uncritical & reflexive support for Israel’s actions.”
“I think we will continue to see – as has happened in the past – the U.S. administration run cover for the Israelis and let them get away with doing whatever they want,” Daniel Levy of the Middle East Project told Al Jazeera. The Biden administration “won’t risk its relationship with Israel,” Al Jazeera paraphrased Levy.
Indeed, in a sign of the Biden administration’s obeisance to the Israel lobby, Biden appointed warhorse Elliott Abrams to a U.S. advisory commission on public diplomacy yesterday. This is purely a sop to neoconservatives to indicate that Biden won’t go off the reservation on Middle East policy as he runs for reelection.
Others are critical of the U.S. policy. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, retweeting Al Jazeera footage of bulldozers destroying roads in the camp, called on the U.S. to stop funding apartheid:
Israeli forces are now blocking ambulances from reaching the dozens of wounded Palestinians after at least eight people were killed in Jenin. Congress must stop funding this violent Israeli apartheid regime.
The media is not as credulous as it usually is of Israeli claims. News outlets have been airing critical or highly skeptical views of the onslaught. PBS News Hour led with the invasion last night, and host Amna Nawaz set a tone of concern and skepticism, if not outright criticism.
Today the BBC news service, airing on public radio in the U.S., featured the report of an anonymous Palestinians whose extended family of 35 “humans” fled the camp as the Israelis destroyed all cars and infrastructure in sight. And no media were in the camp, he said, to shine a light on the brutality.
“It’s unimaginable how frightened you all must have been,” the BBC’s Razia Iqbal said. “Were the Israelis willing to let you leave the camp? The mosque that was bombed– is it still standing?”
CNN gave a platform to Nour Odeh, a Palestinian analyst, who offered a forceful condemnation of Israeli occupation and violence:
There is nothing surprising about the fact that Palestinians don’t want to be ruled by foreigners, who use unnecessary force, who use extreme force against civilians…
This Israeli government, which Israelis are protesting against, is the most violent, is the most violent, the most extreme, the most anti-Palestinian that we have seen since Israel’s establishment perhaps. At its core and its declared agenda… [is] to annex the West Bank… but also to crush the very notion of Palestinian freedom and statehood… They feel that their very existence is under attack.
Being ruled by a foreign military against your will is violent and it’s violent every day, even when it doesn’t make the news…
On MSNBC yesterday, Andrea Mitchell was surprisingly sympathetic to Palestinians. She highlighted allegations that Israel has committed “war crimes and target[ed] civilian infrastructure.” She noted that the Netanyahu government faced “serious domestic pressure” by the right-wing to launch a “full-scale invasion of the West Bank,” that the government earlier OK’d the storming of the Al Aqsa mosque, “and the settler incursion into occupied areas has been extraordinary.”
Her guest Ben Rhodes expressed criticism of the Israeli government:
All the ingredients are here for continued deterioration… You have the most rightwing government in Israeli history that is intent on expanding Israeli settlements, that is intent on taking a much more punitive approach in the West Bank, that’s intent on militarizing security concerns in the West Bank. Netanyahu has constantly looked over his far right shoulder…
You have a dynamic here where the Israeli government feels incentivized to pursue a more aggressive approach in the West Bank. The US has no policy of bringing the parties together…
Even Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations was skeptical of American actions in his comments to Mitchell:
There’s no political process whatsoever… What we are seeing is a deterioration of the security situation across the board… I don’t see any ingredients by which this situation improves.
And here is a statement by Churches for Middle East Peace, criticizing Biden for allowing Israel to continue the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since 2005.
The Biden Administration’s failure to give urgent attention to the ongoing violations of rights and violence perpetrated by IDF has only served to embolden the most radical far-right Israeli government. The Biden Administration must take immediate diplomatic steps to intervene and call for a de-escalation of violence and respect for civilian life…. As long as the U.S. continues to provide aid without any conditions, the Israeli military will act with impunity. CMEP’s Manager of Middle East Partnerships, Kevin Vollrath, based in the Jerusalem area, says, “How many youth and civilians must be killed before the US says ‘enough’”?
On WBUR, Daniel Estrin of NPR sounded the new mainstream wisdom, the U.S. is being passive. And Israel is an occupier.
Palestinians especially in the Jenin refugee camp are committed to resisting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank that’s been going on for more than half a century.
Thee is no horizon for any kind of political resolution for the larger conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
In a bleak Western political landscape, we must call that progress.
The mainstream media has not exactly done a stellar job explaining how the Jenin refugee camp started, which might clarify things for the general public:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jenin-refugee-camp-symbol-resilience-and-resistance-west-bank
“The Jenin camp was established in 1953 by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) to accommodate Palestinians displaced during the 1948 war which established the State of Israel. Its population was among more than 700,000 Palestinians forced from their homes by Zionist militias.”
(PBS story from 2009)
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/uncategorized/heart-of-jenin-map-palestinian-refugee-camps/5089/
The Jenin camp looks like an established city because it has been there since 1953. It is one of 58 Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria where an estimated 1.3 million Palestinians live.…The camps were created when Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948 during the creation of Israel, and again after Israel occupied additional land in 1967.
I’m not sure the Abrams appt is a sop necessarily— that implies that there is some significant distinction between Abrams and the Biden Administration, but on foreign policy, with a few exceptions, occasionally significant, there is a great deal of continuity from one Administration to the next. People who care about human rights will find the Abrams appointment outrageous, but for the D.C. foreign policy “ community”, the concept is largely just a propaganda tool to be used against our enemies.
And it’s not as if Biden has been terribly hard on Israel. I did see a few idiots on Twitter recently all upset that the Administration had said something critical ( and meaningless) about settlements, but the Abrams appointment wouldn’t satisfy them. They want total enthusiastic rhetorical commitment to everything Israel does.
“Nest of terrorists”??? How about all the ‘terrorists’ that have been persecuting Palestinians since 1948??? And what about all the ‘terrorists’ nations that keep looking the other way…too cowardly to stand up to israel???
dialog of the deaf….. \https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOsKtIsSIHY