The devastating news from Washington this week was that in spite of lip service against Israel’s war on the people of Gaza, the Biden administration “quietly” approved the transfer of more massive bombs to Israel.
Biden is sending along more than 2000 one-ton bombs and 500-pound bombs, the Washington Post reported (per Common Dreams).
“This is cowardly,” Yousef Munayyer wrote. “If you are going to be full backers of genocide, own it. We see you and history sees you as well.”
“This is obscene,” Bernie Sanders wrote. “We must end our complicity: No more bombs to Israel. The U.S. cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks.”
We can only imagine how horrifying such armaments are here in the West. Gazans don’t have to imagine. These instruments of annihilation have generated a neverending nightmare. Even the Washington Post says these bombs “are almost never used any more by Western militaries in densely populated locations due to the risk of civilian casualties.” But Israel has used them extensively.
Which is why more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority women and children. Israel justifies the slaughter of civilians by arguing that a majority of Palestinians approve of Hamas’s attack of last October. So, collective punishment is policy.
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At least Biden’s hypocrisy is being reported in the Washington Post. And we are seeing a broad movement in progressive circles to end Israel’s immunity to international law.
Harvard Law School’s student government voted for the university to divest from Israel. The global activist network Avaaz has got half a million signatures calling for a cutoff of U.S. aid to Israel.
America is Israel’s biggest arms dealer. You are giving American weapons to a government that is blocking life-saving aid and violating international law. This will only stop when you demand it stops.“
Public opinion is also horrified. A Gallup poll finds that 55 percent of Americans oppose Israel’s months-long military campaign (while 36 percent approve). “A mere 18% of Democratic voters approve of Israel’s effort.” And 75 percent disapprove.
Once again, Biden is going with the Israel lobby, and the big donors. But quietly.
Biden is not only defying his base. The liberal political establishment has now turned against Israel’s war. The head of the Democratic party thinktank, the Center for American Progress, called for a cutoff of aid.
The United States, by its own imposed standards, cannot heedlessly deliver offensive weapons as the Israeli government continues to bombard and starve innocents on a mass scale. These actions have nothing to do with self defense; they are clearly intended as collective punishment and are resulting in the complete devastation of Palestinians as a people.
The former top State Department human rights officer told NPR that it is time to apply the same rules to Israel as other countries. Charles Blaha:
[T]he State Department has said publicly that the same policy applies to Israel as apply to every other country. In practice, Israel gets special treatment…. You may recall the Biden administration suspended items that could be used in offensive air-to-ground operations for Saudi Arabia because they were causing civilian casualties. Those civilian casualties are nowhere near the civilian casualties that Israeli air-to-ground operations have caused so far. Yet unconditional transfers of air-to-ground munitions continue.
Joe Rogan called it “genocide” and a “holocaust” this week. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Israel was going too far. Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, trying to run from his own past, ran a piece saying, “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible.”
And at the Stimson Center this week, when Barbara Slavin said it’s not genocide because it’s not equivalent to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda or the Nazis killing 6 million Jews, Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace shot down that defense.
The definition of genocide under international law does not require it to meet that bar… It does not have to rise to, Trying to kill every member of a race in the world [to be a genocide. The idea that] ‘it can’t be genocide if it doesn’t kill everybody.’ That isn’t what it means under international law.
So the genocide is having consequences, even in the cowardly seat of empire.
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