Who Would Have Thought That The Right To Defend Would Degenrate Into Ethnic Cleansing, Mass Starvation & Plausible Genocide? DUH?
GUEST ESSAY
Can a Political Spectacle Make a Horror More Real?
July 24, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
By
Megan K. Stack
Ms. Stack, a contributing Opinion writer, covered the Middle East for several years.
The elephant in the room will be impossible to ignore when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addresses Congress on Wednesday, turning attention to the bloody spectacle that both major parties have been taking pains not to mention: the ongoing death and destruction in Gaza.
That U.S. politicians from both major parties invited Mr. Netanyahu to Washington at all — let alone to lecture our lawmakers in the people’s house — is a disgrace. Mr. Netanyahu’s war on Gaza has already killed at least 39,000 Palestinians (many of them women and children), according to the health ministry in Gaza, displaced some 1.9 million people and spread what
experts describe as a famine across the besieged enclave.
The International Criminal Court prosecutor has
applied for a warrant to charge Mr. Netanyahu with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice has taken up the question of whether the Israeli attack on Gaza constitutes a genocide — a classification the court deemed “
plausible.” Israel has for months behaved as if a range of orders from the world’s highest court simply didn’t exist, including to prevent the destruction of human life in Gaza, rush humanitarian aid into the territory and preserve evidence needed by investigators to determine whether genocide is taking place.
History will cast Mr. Netanyahu’s visit in deservedly ugly tones. He’s not a guest we should aspire to host, but he is a visitor we deserve. Gaza is our war, too, thanks to the indispensable military aid and political cover the U.S. government has lavished on Israel as the death toll climbs.
The current war on Gaza began Oct. 7, after bands of Hamas gunmen broke from Gaza into southern Israel and carried out a devastating spree of killing and hostage-taking. Mr. Netanyahu vowed vengeance, and then delivered it beyond imagination. What exploded as a war of retribution against Hamas has looked increasingly like a broader campaign of annihilation — the slaughter of trapped civilians; the excruciating deaths of thousands of children; the destruction of hospitals, schools and much of the civilian infrastructure.
The American people have not been broadly supportive of Israel’s harsh tactics. Polls have shown for months that more Americans disapprove than approve of the onslaught in Gaza. Antiwar demonstrations roiled U.S. campuses; significant numbers of Democrats voiced dissent by voting “uncommitted” in the primary; a string of Biden administration officials have
quit in protest of what some of them describe as an unsalvageable disregard for Palestinian life.
Criticism narrowly aimed at Mr. Netanyahu has become fairly commonplace among U.S. politicians (many of whom carefully avoid mentioning the broader apparatus of Israeli military and government, let alone their own crucial hand in the violence in Gaza). And dozens of lawmakers are expected to boycott Wednesday’s speech. But come voting time, many of Mr. Netanyahu’s denouncers reliably opt to keep funding his military.
Despite the damning chapter of history still unfolding on our watch, Gaza seems to have drifted to the edge of our collective awareness. It has gotten easier for politicians to ignore it these days — there are so many other things to discuss. Documentary accounts from the wrecked enclave are sparse, harsh and devastatingly repetitive. Another bombed school. Another mass grave. Another emaciated child. Another soul, and another, and another.
It’s been a deadly spring and summer in Gaza, with Israel repeatedly bombing schools serving as shelters and even tent encampments where displaced civilians had sought refuge. At least some of those bombs were made by the
United States. By now, at least 70 percent of the schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Never mind, the United States is
resuming the (ever so briefly suspended) shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel.
Hunger, too, has increased perilously. A famine that first appeared in the most isolated and battered spots of northern Gaza has now spread throughout the territory, independent United Nations experts recently
announced. Israeli officials deny fault for what food experts describe as a man-made famine, but the “who, me?” claims are undercut by international organizations and U.S. lawmakers who blame Israel for restricting the passage of food, failing to open adequate land routes and even
attacking some of the
trucks carrying humanitarian aid.
Instead of using its leverage to force Israel to let enough food into Gaza, the Biden administration has either feigned powerlessness or — the most generous interpretation — sincerely failed to grasp that, as the major supplier of munitions to Israel, the United States has an opportunity to stop the starvation in Gaza.
Instead of getting Israel to open enough land routes, the Biden administration wasted $230 million and precious time building a floating pier off the Gaza coast. Some humanitarian food did finally enter Gaza via the pier, but it was too little to stanch the humanitarian disaster. This month, the government declared “
mission complete” and scrapped the whole project.
While the United States has
failed to get an adequate amount of food to Gaza, it has excelled at sending all manner of weapons and ammunition to Israel so that Gaza can be attacked. There have been votes in Congress authorizing yet more money and bombs, supplemented by
more than 100 weapons transfers that the Biden administration was able to quietly approve since they were below the threshold that requires the White House to inform Congress of weapons sales.
Between President Biden’s hosting of the NATO summit and the Republican National Convention, both held earlier this month, world affairs have been prominent in U.S. politics this summer. We talk about Ukraine and Russia, China and Mexico — and yet the acute problem of Palestinian mass death has been largely ignored in a mighty, and mightily bipartisan, feat of willful oblivion.
Mr. Biden has hardly mentioned the Palestinians lately. At the end of the NATO summit, held in Washington during a
week of heavy killing in Gaza, Mr. Biden was asked whether he wished he’d done things differently since the start of Israel’s war. In his answer, Mr. Biden didn’t speak about the staggering Palestinian death toll. Instead, he said that he wished Israeli officials had been more cooperative.
This is a tacit version of the now hackneyed excuse we’ve been hearing for months: That U.S. officials have
tried to make this war less ghastly;
tried to get food into Gaza;
tried to talk sense into an intransigent Mr. Netanyahu. But what can they do — the Israelis won’t listen!
But if Mr. Netanyahu has rebuffed U.S. stipulations while demanding our help, why is he coming to Washington? And why has the U.S. government allowed itself to get played?
Maybe Mr. Netanyahu’s visit can be salutary. As he takes pride of place under the dome of Congress, perhaps we might catch a glimpse of ourselves
