A famine of empty words
January 17, 2025
Midwinter sunset at Sprague Lake in Adams County, WA
The indelible shame of U.S. complicity in Israel’s atrocities
The British medical journal, The Lancet, is one of the world’s premier scientific enterprises, followed by millions of readers globally. But in the maelstrom of other current events the on-line release of a major Lancet article on January 9th barely made news. At least not at first.
That would change though, both because of The Lancet’s solid reputation, and because the gist of the researchers’ findings in the article “Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip” bolstered longstanding accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other war crimes against non-combatants in Gaza. The nations in the crosshairs of this criticism are Israel and the United States.
If you’re an American, or an Israeli, this is not a subject for the faint of heart. Both the U.S. and Israel self-identify as mature democracies ostensibly committed to human rights and the rule of law. But that is not how their governments have behaved in the sphere of Gaza, and especially since early October of 2023 in the wake of a indisputably vicious cross-border attack by Hamas terrorists. As The Lancet acknowledged in its introduction to the study, Israel’s U.S.-backed military operation in Gaza “has attracted widespread scrutiny and is the subject of war crimes investigations.”
From the earliest days of Israel’s retaliations, neutral observers—including foreign aid workers and valiant medical professionals—have offered grim testimony to the carnage and suffering inflicted by Israeli forces upon non-combatants, including women, children, and journalists. U.S complicity in this has been through the transfer of munitions and other military material, including an astounding number of 2,000 lb. bombs (more than 14,000 thru June of last year, according to the Reuters News Agency).
A month before The Lancet article appeared, the highly respected human rights organization, Amnesty International, released a near 300-page report concluding that Israel has been committing widespread “atrocity crimes” against Palestinian civilians.
Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard explaining the human rights’ organization’s stark condemnation of Israel and its defenders last month upon the release of its stunning report.
In releasing Amnesty International’s account in early December, the organization’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, did so with an anguished appeal. “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call: this is genocide and it must stop now,” she said.
“We looked at the statements used by officials at the highest level, those in the [Israeli] war cabinet. We looked at how soldiers interpreted those statements, those on the ground, how they called as well for the dehumanization of Palestinians and the obliteration of Gaza. We looked at the entire context as well, one of apartheid, dislocation, military occupation and the only reasonable conclusion we could make is Israel intended to commit genocide…It is very difficult for Israel's allies to consider that Israel could be committing the crime of genocide. At the end of the day it does not quite matter why they are not calling it genocide. We are saying there are people that are dying in front of our very eyes [and] it is your international obligation to prevent the crime.”—Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard
A common refrain from defenders of the Israeli invasion is that the death toll in Gaza as reported by the Palestinian Health Authority (nearly 50,000 killed) is unreliable because the authority is influenced by Hamas. But what The Lancet researchers found is that the health authority had dramatically under-counted the actual death toll which The Lancet put at 64,260 as of six months ago.
“I’m Jewish, all right? My father’s family was wiped out by Hitler. Antisemitism is a disgusting and vile form of bigotry which has killed millions of people. I would hope that every American condemns antisemitism. We condemn Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry…Right now, we are looking at the possibility of mass starvation and famine in Gaza. When you make those charges, that is not antisemitic. That is a reality.”—Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in a CNN interview last April
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The breadth of the oceans that separate us from Gaza and Israel contributes to the ‘out-of-site, and almost out-of-mind’ experience for most Americans. But that’s illusory. As Senator Sanders reiterated in a Washington Post column last fall, the distance does not spare us from the moral obligation to square our senses to the bloodshed, famine, and abject displacement inflicted daily—in violation of U.S. and international law. To be silent about it is not to be neutral, it is to enable an indifference that foresakes human decency and, in the long run, only fuels more conflict and violence.
Peter Beinart giving his exasperated but insightful critique of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s defense of the Biden Administration’s material support for the onslaught in Gaza
One of the most engaged and articulate voices calling out the criminality and immorality of the U.S.—Israel alliance in the intensive siege of Gaza has been Peter Beinart. Beinart is an American Jew, journalism professor and an accomplished writer and editor-at-large at Jewish Currents. To be sure, there have been several conscientious and astute American, Israeli and Palestinian voices who’ve spoken and written with great insight on the history and present reality of the U.S.-backed demolition of Gaza over the past 15 months. As I wrote about last May and February, part of the broader tragedy is the unheeded, anguished appeals and resignations of conscientious public servants who’ve named themselves as morally offended and repulsed by the Biden Administration’s complicity in the Israeli atrocities.
I sometimes find myself, in usually polite arguments, defending journalists who work for mainstream news organizations. I’ve worked in news rooms, some of my life-long friends are reporters and editors who’ve worked for mainstream publications and broadcast outlets. Just because a reporter takes a paycheck from a corporate media group doesn’t mean he or she is blind, corrupt, or consciously indifferent to what’s true.
That said, there’s no doubt the parameters of American journalism about politics and government are weighted—sometimes absurdly so—toward a muted, neutral voice wedged between the positions of the two major political parties. This is what has happened here, and why brave and intelligent voices like Mehdi Hasan’s have been shunted aside, even by supposedly left-leaning MSNBC. The distortion has been excruciating and blinding—due in no small part to how solidly Biden has backed Netanyahu’s right-wing government in Israel. It has largely shielded American audiences from the truth about how Biden’s moral blindness has badly damaged American credibility and standing around the globe.
A mind-numbing artifact of this morass has emerged this winter as two leading spokespersons for Biden’s Mideast policy have made appearances to defend the Biden Administration’s conduct in the Israel-Gaza imbroglio and their personal involvement in it. The officials are Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security advisor Jake Sullivan. Blinken recently (Jan 4th) sat for an extensive interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro at the New York Times. Sullivan recently appeared at the 92nd Street Y in New York and even more recently as a guest on the Ezra Klein show at the New York Times. (Note: Klein saves his hard questions about Gaza for the very end of the hour-plus long interview.)
I’ve thought hard about whether and how much to summarize Beinart’s reactions to Blinken and Sullivan. I’ve decided not to do so, because I don’t think I can do his critiques justice—not just through his words but through his audibly emotional punctuation. His disagreements are poignant and they link together in ways that Beinart has clearly composed with great care. Beyond the focal points of the Gaza crisis/policy he shapes the deeper questions and insights into how we should react when people with power insist upon non-negotiable premises as they work to warp parameters and context in order to justify and excuse their behavior. I’ll stop here, to simply recommend both the audio clips from Beinart below (one responding to Blinken, the other to Sullivan) and leave it at that.
As I write in the dark this morning there is the welcome news that the Israeli security cabinet under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just approved the cease-fire agreement negotiated by the Biden team between Israel and Hamas. The agreement is expected to go in effect Sunday.
I don’t intend to slight its importance (if it holds) but we shouldn’t be under the illusion that this long-sought breakthrough excuses or in any way compensates for the war crimes and misery inflicted on the people of Gaza. Nor can it forgive the long months in which the U.S. abetted the devastation. We still have a long way to go. We can only get there through honest reflection and atonement.
—tjc
