( Tomdispatch.com ) – One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.

In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict — with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance” — including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria — has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Buy the Book

It was President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the U.S.-Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure,” reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, threatening its very existence and warning that he could “obliterate” Iran.

Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.

Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.

“Natanz,” Digital Imagining, Dream, Realistic v. 2, 2024.

Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as the Washington Post reports, “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”

Trump’s Anti-Iran Jihad

While the U.S. and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.

Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.

In exchange, the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.

Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.

But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “decertified” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the EU and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)

Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times op-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”

Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “maximum pressure.” Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions…. We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”

Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.

Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in strikes and demonstrations, including most recently 2023’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government’s response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory Iran ramped up its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of clashes with U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, attacked or seized foreign-operated oil tankers, shot down a U.S. drone in the Straits of Hormuz, and launched drones meant to cripple Saudi Arabia’s huge oil industry.

“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”

Biden’s Reign of (Unforced) Error

Having long supported a deal with Iran —  in 2008, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in 2015, in a speech to Jewish leaders — Joe Biden called Trump’s decision to quit the JCPOA a “self-inflicted disaster.” But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.

Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.

Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the ten most critical weeks.”

It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”

When the talks finally did resume in April — “gingerly,” according to the New York Times — they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran’s top nuclear research facilities with an enormous explosion. Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from 20% to 60%, which didn’t exactly help the talks, nor did Biden’s unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.

That June, Iranians voted in a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration, and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had reached “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.

It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”

Over the next two years, the United States and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again.  “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the U.S., I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” wrote Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.

By the end of 2022, Biden reportedly declared the Iran deal “dead” and his chief negotiator insisted he wouldn’t “waste time” trying to revive it. As Mousavian told me, Iran’s crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt in the wake of its “morality police” torturing and killing a young woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested on the streets of Tehran without a veil, and increased concern about Iranian drones being delivered to Russia for its war in Ukraine soured Biden on even talking to Iran.

Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks — helped, perhaps, by a prisoner exchange between the United States and Iran, including an agreement to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues – resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials described as a “political ceasefire.” According to the Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60 percent purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”

But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after Hamas’s October 7th attack doomed any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?

Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the United States, Iran, and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the United States and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.

What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage vis-à-vis Washington.”

“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”

And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket. 

Copyright 2024 Bob Dreyfuss

Via Tomdispatch.com

Iran struck because Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on April 1 had the consular annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus bombed, killing high-ranking Iranian officials, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and seven other officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Those officials were there at the invitation of the Syrian government, and embassies are protected from military attack by the Vienna Convention.

Iran cited Article 51 of the United Nations Charter for its counter-strike on Israel, which guarantees states the right of self-defense. Embassies are considered national soil.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s clerical Leader, had said Wednesday at his Eid al-Fitr sermon: “The consulate and embassy institutions in any country are the soil of that country. The evil regime made a mistake and must be punished and will be punished.” He added, “The events in Gaza showed the evil nature of Western civilization to the world. They killed thirty-odd thousand defenseless people; aren’t these human? Do they not have rights?” He also said, “They showed what kind of civilization this is. A child is killed, in the mother’s arms. The patient dies in the hospital. Their power cannot touch … the men of the resistance; so they target the lives of family members, the lives of children and the oppressed, the lives of old men.”

Al Jazeera English Video: “Israel’s war on Gaza live: Blasts, sirens as Iranian missiles intercepted”

Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations in New York wrote on X,

“Conducted on the strength of Article 51 of the UN Charter pertaining to legitimate defense, Iran’s military action was in response to the Zionist regime’s aggression against our diplomatic premises in Damascus. The matter can be deemed concluded. However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe. It is a conflict between Iran and the rogue Israeli regime, from which the U.S. MUST STAY AWAY!”

Tehran is saying that with this exchange, “the matter can be deemed concluded.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not looking for an all-out war.

It was not only the strike on the Iranian embassy that set the stage for Iran’s barrage, but also the six months of intensive Israeli bombing of the Palestinians of Gaza, in which the vast majority of those killed were innocent noncombatants, with 70% being women and children and many others noncombatant men. The death toll now stands at 33,686 Palestinians. Only a small clique of militants committed the horrific October 7 attack on Israel, without telling anyone else what they were planning. There is no military or other justification for using an artificial intelligence program to identify all members of Hamas’s paramilitary (some of which is the equivalent of a neighborhood watch for local security) and to murder them from the skies along with their spouses, children, extended families, and neighbors.

Iran is pledged to defend the Palestinians and has been made to look ineffectual and foolish by the ongoing Israeli atrocities, which have set the blood of the publics in the Middle East to boiling and much raised the esteem in which they hold Iran. The embassy strike was the last straw. If Iran did not reply to it at least symbolically, its credibility, and any deterrence it was perceived to have, became a joke.

Netanyahu for his part was attempting to provoke Iran, in the hope that Tehran would take the bait. He knew that even Washington had come to see Israel as the aggressor in Gaza, and that he was losing support in Congress. He knew that if the issue became an Iranian attack on Israel, the Western capitals would all rally around him and forgive him at least for a while for having brought the Israeli equivalent of Neo-Nazis into his cabinet and then gone Amalek on tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

In the end, Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards let their devotion to the late Gen. Zahedi sway their emotions and they fell for Netanyahu’s trick.

Earlier on Saturday the naval section of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps boarded and confiscated a container ship in the Gulf of Oman that belongs to the company of one of Netanyahu’s billionaire backers. While this action violated the law of the sea and can’t be condoned, it was a wiser way of replying to the embassy attack than sending missiles against Israel. It hit Netanyahu where it hurts and no one would have cared about it in the outside world.

Now, we have to suffer with Netanyahu proclaiming his victimhood (he started it) and suffering through statements of solidarity with his fascist government in the face of the ayatollahs, with the ongoing genocide in Gaza cast into the shade.

As many observers are pointing out, this very dangerous situation was caused by President Joe Biden’s mishandling of the Gaza crisis. He should have cut Netanyahu off at the knees by January 1, once it became clear that the Israelis were implementing their notorious Amalek imperative, which implied genocide. By vetoing 3 United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire and by undercutting the only one he allowed to pass by branding it nonbinding, Biden let the butchery continue apace. It continued the past week, during which Israel continued to bomb the bejesus out of Gaza, to kill hundreds of innocents, and to starve them (despite phony pledges to let more aid in, on which Netanyahu did not follow through.)

Biden, UK PM Rishi Sunak and other leaders could also have defused the deliberate provocation of Iran by Netanyahu by simply condemning the embassy attack of April 1 and defending the Vienna convention. Again, the Iranian mission to the UN said this plainly:

“Had the UN Security Council condemned the Zionist regime’s reprehensible act of aggression on our diplomatic premises in Damascus and subsequently brought to justice its perpetrators, the imperative for Iran to punish this rogue regime might have been obviated.”

Instead, Biden and his allies declined to condemn Netanyahu’s action, continuing the North Atlantic insouciance toward Israeli war crimes and continuing the implementation of their double standard whereby International Humanitarian Law applies only to white people. That is, there is not as much difference between Trumpian white nationalism and Biden’s foreign policy as it might seem on the surface, though Trump is of course far worse.*

—
*earlier syntax problem fixed.

Sen. Warren spoke at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts, and a video of one of her exchanges was posted to X by WGBH reporter Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford).

A member of the congregation asked her if Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation that has been made in international forums.

She replied:

WARREN: “So, I think what’s happening now is going to be a long and involved debate over what constitutes genocide when you ask a legal question. For me it is far more important to say that what Israel is doing is wrong — and it is wrong. It is wrong to starve children, women, a civilian population, in order to try to bend them to your will. It is wrong to drop 2,000-pound bombs in densely-populated civilian areas. I think I can make a more effective argument by describing the behavior that is happening and whether I believe it is right or wrong and look people in the eyes if you want to tell people you think it is right and it should be the policy of the United States of America to support those actions. So that’s how I analyze this –”

Audience member: “You didn’t answer the question.”

WARREN: “No, I did answer the question. I said –”

Audience member: “It was a yes or no.”

Audience member: “It was a yes or no. The second question was a yes or no question, to clarify.”

WARREN: “So if you want to do it as an application of law, I believe they [the International Court of Justice] will find it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so. What I’m also trying to tell you is that I’m trying to get people past a labels argument, which seems to throw up a screen, and get them to look at the behavior on the ground, get them to look at the children; to get them to look at the moms and the old people and the people who have been displaced and the people who are living outside and the people who are drinking dirty water. And talk about what the role of the United States is in connection with supporting the Netanyahu government, which put the people of Gaza in that position.”

At a Q&A at a Wayland mosque last week, @SenWarren is asked if she thinks that Israel is committing a genocide.

"If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they will find that it is genocide," she says, adding that she's trying to get "past a labels argument" pic.twitter.com/mxqBP6oTlH

— Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford) April 8, 2024

I think the subtext of this exchange is that it is easier for a member of the Senate to decry particular military tactics of the Israeli government than to utter the word “genocide,” because admitting that Israel is committing genocide would require that the US cease transferring arms and perhaps even money to Tel Aviv. Even elements of the Israel lobbies must be feeling pretty conflicted about the horror story in Gaza by now, and might be willing to tolerate severe criticism of it. But “genocide” is a step too far for most of them. Most Jewish Americans, of course, know the score, and young Jews are done out with Netanyahu and increasingly with Israel; I’m talking about the AIPAC establishment.

It is important to underline that we got this admission from Warren, who has a Rutgers law degree, that under International Humanitarian Law, Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide, only because Muslim Americans held her feet to the fire.

Israel in the halls of Congress is now the king with no clothes, and Warren has worked herself toward admitting it in public. Many of the Progressive Caucus among Democrats in the House have been saying these things for some time. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for instance, used the term genocide on the House floor two weeks ago, and so paved the way for this admission by the more circumspect Warren (who began her political career as a Republican).

Then, Power testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Rep. Jaoquin Castro (D-TX) questioned her about the situation the Israeli government has created in Gaza (“House Foreign Affairs Committee Holds Hearing on USAID’s Foreign Policy and International Development Priorities”) (emphasis added):

“JOAQUIN CASTRO:… Administrator Power, thank you for joining us today. And of course, I’d normally ask you about locally led development and some of your great work there at USAID. But I want to ask you obviously, about the very urgent situation, humanitarian situation in Gaza. In your testimony, you said that the entire population of Gaza is living under the threat of famine.

News reports came out recently that certain USAID officials sent a cable to the National Security Council warning that famine is already likely occurring in parts of the Gaza Strip. According to the report, quote, ‘famine conditions are most severe and widespread in northern Gaza, which is under Israeli control.’ Do you think that it’s plausible or likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine?

SAMANTHA POWER: Well, the methodology that the IPC [Integrated food security Phase Classification] used, is one that we had our experts scrub, it’s one that’s relied upon in other settings, and that is their assessment. And we believe that assessment is credible.

JOAQUIN CASTRO: So there’s — famine is already occurring there.

SAMANTHA POWER: That is — yes.

JOAQUIN CASTRO: Yeah. OK. And more than half of the population of Gaza is under the age of 18, as you know, and are seriously affected by the lack of access to food and nutrition. And various organizations, including the United Nations, have warned that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children may die, if they don’t get necessary food and nutrition assistance in just the next two to three weeks.

Has USAID made such an assessment itself? And do you have a sense of how many such children might be at risk of dying if they don’t get access to food and nutrition that’s currently unavailable?

SAMANTHA POWER: I do not have those assessments on hand. but I will say that the — in northern Gaza, the rate of malnutrition, prior to October 7th, was almost zero. And it is now one in three kids. But extrapolating out is hard. And I will say, just with some humility, because it is so hard to move around in Gaza, because the access challenges that give rise, in part, to the malnutrition are so severe, it is also you know, hard to do the kind of scaled assessments that we would wish to do. But in terms of, you know, actual severe acute malnutrition for under fives, that rate was 16 percent in January, and became 30 percent in February.

And we’re awaiting the — the March numbers. But we expect it to continue —

JOAQUIN CASTRO: So it got markedly worse.

SAMANTHA POWER: Yeah, markedly worse . . .

President Joe Biden apparently lives in a world where it is unthinkable that Israel is committing a genocide or deliberately starving the civilian population to, as Sen. Warren put it, “to try to bend them to” its will. But the people around him are not blind or stupid, and they know the score. They haven’t been able to get through to him in any significant way. He finally admitted that 30,000 are dead in Gaza and said “it cannot become 60,000.” He is not doing anything practical to forestall that result, however, and the likelihood is indeed that 60,000 will be murdered if not more.

Power declines to resign, even though she helped propel the Obama administration into a war in Libya to try to prevent the killing of 25,000 protesters by Gaddafi in 2011. If she were consistent she would be calling for a US war on Israel to make it withdraw from Gaza.

Warren, meanwhile, continues to vote to give ever more arms and money to Israel, so she appears merely to regret the genocide but prefers to be senator than to try to do anything practical to stop it.

Despite these frank admissions, which come far too late, the reek of rank hypocrisy in the Democratic Party concerning the impunity of Netanyahu and his fascist henchmen continues to lie like a thick layer of fog over our nation’s capital.

As for the truly unhinged Republican Party, which may be to the right of Netanyahu, its bright idea is to condemn Biden for being too hard on the Likud. Some Democrats say they will go along, for all the world like politicians of the Hutu Power faction denouncing Rwandans who were too soft on the Tutsi minority.

A more radical view, however, has been taking shape, thanks largely to the extremism of the Netanyahu government in Israel and the intransigence of a succession of U.S. governments. In 2020, influential Jewish intellectual Peter Beinart published a piece in The New York Times that effectively renounced the notion of a Jewish state in favor of a “one-state solution” in which Jews and Palestinians live together with equal rights in a single state.

Given a choice between liberalism and Zionism, many Americans are giving up on the latter. What started as a trickle has now become a noticeable stream, as Beinart writes in an article last month in the Times. The polling supports his analysis. Last year, Gallup revealed that sympathy among Democrats now favored Palestinians (49 percent) over Israelis (38 percent), a reversal never seen before in the polling. The gap within the Democratic Party is sharply generational. Among Democrats under the age of 35, 74 percent side with Palestinians compared to only 25 percent of those 65 and over.

Here’s an even more startling Ipsos poll, from last year. When asked about a situation in which the West Bank and Gaza remained under Israeli control, a majority of Republicans (64 percent) and Democrats (80 percent) said that they would favor Israeli democracy over its Jewishness. Without really knowing much about Zionism—most respondents in the poll either didn’t know about or were unfamiliar with the ideology—a majority of Americans have already gone down Beinart’s path.

U.S. politics hasn’t quite caught up with U.S. public opinion. In March, Senator Majority Leader Charles Schumer delivered a 44-minute speech on the floor of the Senate that called on Israelis to hold an election and essentially get rid of Netanyahu and his ruling coalition. Even though Schumer expressed his love for Israel and denounced Hamas, he still came in for considerable criticism from Republicans as well as from those who were aghast that he didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire in the conflict.

Like Schumer, the Biden administration has been shifting its position on Israel, but not enough to satisfy younger voters on the left. Together with Arab-Americans, these voters have made their voices heard in the primaries in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Hawaii where the “uncommitted” slate has picked up 25 delegates so far. It may not be enough to tip the election—voters who are uncommitted in the primary are still likely to vote for the Democrats in the face of a potential Trump second term—but it still worries the Biden camp, which is behind in most head-to-head election polls.

The Biden administration has altered its policies toward Israel over the last months, though it might not seem like much of a change given that those policies haven’t ultimately made an impact on the course of the war in Gaza. However, combined with evolving public opinion, these incremental changes may well mark the beginning of a major course correction in U.S. foreign policy. After decades of military assistance and policy coordination, the United States is facing up to its irreconcilable differences with Israel, which could prompt one or both parties to file for divorce.

The Biden Shift

The deaths of over 30,000 Palestinians during Israel’s prolonged assault on Gaza—which was launched after the Hamas attacks of October 7—has certainly concerned the Biden administration. The president and his emissaries have tried to persuade Benjamin Netanyahu to be more “targeted” in his onslaught so that Israeli forces don’t kill quite so many non-combatants. Around 70 percent of Palestinians casualties so far have been women and children.

The Biden administration has also tried to persuade the Israelis not to launch a ground attack against Hamas in the southern city of Rafah, where so many Palestinians have sought refuge. And it has been pushing for a temporary ceasefire that could provide an opportunity for Israel to retrieve some of the hostages that Hamas and its allies still hold and for Gazans to get more humanitarian assistance to stave off serious food and medical crises.

The Israeli authorities have shrugged off U.S. criticisms and suggestions, often angrily, which has basically been the Israeli approach all along.

The most recent Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy of three vehicles, which killed seven aid workers, has prompted even more soul-searching within the Biden administration. The humanitarian organization provided the Israeli authorities with full information about its intentions and its route. Still, Israeli armed forces struck all three vehicles with pinpoint accuracy, even though the lead vehicle and the one at the back were separated by nearly a mile and a half. Nor were these isolated deaths. At least 196 aid workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023.

Netanyahu apologized for the “tragic incident.” But it’s hard not to conclude that “more precise targeting” is not the issue in the Gaza war, given how precisely that convoy had been targeted. The issue is that Israel kills indiscriminately and with impunity. The issue is that the Netanyahu government is engaging in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and, with the assistance of armed settlers, in the West Bank as well. The Israeli government seems determined to remove the material basis for a Palestinian state.

In the face of this policy, the Biden administration’s response is obviously inadequate. In addition to the failed effort to minimize civilian casualties, Washington has pushed for more humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. Here it has had more success in changing Israeli policy—though the policy hasn’t been implemented at all crossings and, as Oxfam points out, “It is a drop of water in an ocean of need.”

The administration has not stopped supplying Israel with military assistance or attached any conditions on that aid, despite some congressional pressure. More than 30 House Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, recently sent a letter strongly urging Biden “to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed.” The distressing part is that it took the killing of international aid workers, not the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, to prompt such a letter.

Guardian News Video: “Biden calls for Israel to push for ceasefire and says Netanyahu making a ‘mistake’ on Gaza”

As for the administration’s attempt to forestall an Israeli attack on Rafah, the Netanyahu government has announced on many occasions that it fully intends to “finish the job.” In this context, providing humanitarian assistance so that people don’t starve to death before they are killed in a military operation is a morally dubious position.

So, at what point will the Biden administration—or any U.S. administration—decide that its relationship with Israel is a net negative?

Best Friends?

The boosters of the alliance between Israel and the United States like to note that Israel is a democracy, one of the most prosperous countries on the planet, and “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk,” as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig once put it. President Obama was even blunter, “The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel.”

All of these statements are at best half-truths.

After various autocratic moves by the Netanyahu administration—the judicial “overhaul” designed to weaken the Supreme Court, the various corruption cases—Israel’s democratic credentials have become significantly tarnished. Meanwhile, the Palestinians who make up 20 percent of the population don’t enjoy the full citizenship rights of Israeli Jews. The same can be said about the country’s prosperity: half of Arab families in Israel qualify as poor compared to one in five Israeli Jewish families.

Nor is Israel America’s aircraft carrier. There is only one clandestine U.S. military base in Israel—a radar surveillance site with an unknown number of U.S. soldiers. Most U.S. soldiers based in the Middle East are in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar (with other U.S. forces located in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria). On top of that, Israel frequently engages in military conflicts that run counter to U.S. interests.

As for friendship, the relationship has rarely been all that close. In 1956, the Eisenhower administration was furious at Israel’s occupation of the Sinai peninsula and threatened to withhold aid if it didn’t withdraw. Ultimately, Israel did (though it reoccupied the peninsula a decade later). In 1967, Israel attacked a U.S. spy ship in international waters, killing 34 seamen. In 1981, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq, which was awkward for the Reagan administration since it was then allied with Saddam Hussein against the Iranians. And Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank has jeopardized relations with several U.S. administrations, beginning with George H. W. Bush.

The Balance Sheet

So, what does Israel provide the United States?

There’s an economic relationship, with Israel investing about $24 billion in the United States. That might sound like a lot, but it doesn’t make it into the top 20 (Singapore invests $36 billion, the UK $663 billion). Meanwhile, since 1946, Israel has absorbed $158 billion in unrestricted aid from the United States, more than any other country.

On the military side, the United States has benefitted (probably) from the sharing of intelligence. On the other hand, Israel kept its own nuclear program a secret from its American friends, so it certainly can’t be accused of over-sharing. Meanwhile, Israel has launched attacks in the region—Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria—that have complicated (to put it mildly) U.S. objectives in the region. However, an argument can be made that Israel sometimes serves as a useful attack dog, taking more aggressive actions than the United States feels that it can make.

Israel used to be a bulwark against Soviet communism. But the Soviet Union is no more, and Israel did not join the sanctions regime against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

Israel was a more-or-less reliable ally for the United States in its various interventions in the Middle East. But that hasn’t always been the case. Israel’s anti-Iranian positions got in the way of forging a nuclear agreement with Iran. Israel’s invasion of Gaza has drawn the United States back into a military conflict with the Houthis in Yemen. And Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Syria threaten to turn the Gaza conflict into a region-wide war, which would be a nightmare for the United States (among other countries).

Then there’s the reputational issue. The United States has used its veto 45 times at the UN through December 2023 to defend Israel—which is more than half of the U.S. vetoes at the Security Council. Most of these vetoes were about Israeli settlement policy or treatment of Palestinians. In February, the United States was the only country in the Security Council to vote against the Gaza ceasefire proposal. The next month, however, the United States abstained from the vote, allowing the UN resolution to move forward, though it didn’t have any effect on Israeli policy.

The United States did a credible job rallying the world against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That it has failed to do the same against Israel’s invasion of Gaza is obviously hypocritical. True, many countries are equally two-faced for rightly protesting Israel’s actions and doing little to nothing to push back against Russia’s violations of international law. The hypocrisy of other countries notwithstanding, the United States risks what remains of its positive international reputation by its support of Zionism over liberalism.

It’s long past time for the United States to reevaluate its relationship with Israel. The era of arms shipments should end (especially since Israel makes most of what it needs domestically). The recent congressional pushback is a start. The protective cover provided at the UN must end as well, since the United States is so out of step with international public opinion. The abstention on the most recent ceasefire proposal is also a positive sign.

The U.S. ending of its support of Israel as a Jewish state is a much heavier lift. After all, the United States is also a settler state, and there are powerful Christian forces that support the U.S. alliance with Israel for religious reasons. But the process that has begun within the American Jewish community, to choose liberalism over Zionism, must ultimately be the decision for U.S. policymakers as well. Divorce can be averted, of course, if Israel also chooses liberalism over Zionism. Since that’s not very likely at the moment, it might just be time to bring in the lawyers.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

EA: Now that we’re talking about world leaders. In the past few days, we’ve seen increasing protests in Israel calling for the removal of Prime Minister Netanyahu and international condemnation after the death of World Central Kitchen aid workers during an Israeli airstrike. Do you think at this point, Prime Minister Netanyahu is more concerned about his political survival than he is in the national interest of his people?

JB: Well, I will tell you, I think what he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach. I think it’s outrageous that those four, three vehicles were hit by drones and taken out on a highway where it wasn’t like it was along the shore, it wasn’t like there was a convoy moving there, etc… So I what I’m calling for is for the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow for the next six, eight weeks total access to all food and medicine going into the country. I’ve spoken with everyone from the Saudis to the Jordanians to the Egyptians. They’re prepared to move in. They’re prepared to move this food in. And I think there’s no excuse to not provide for the medical and the food needs of those people. It should be done now.

Univision Noticias Video: “Exclusive interview with Joe Biden on Univision”

President Biden spent six months defending Netanyahu’s brutal total war on Gaza. He said he saw pictures of beheaded babies when he did no such thing because there weren’t any, sparking a hysteria against Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. and helping justify the Israeli assault on ordinary people. Informed of the unconscionable numbers of dead among civilians in Gaza, Biden replied, “What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war. (The) Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that (are) propagating this war against Israel. And it’s against their interest when that doesn’t happen.”

We now know thanks to Yuval Abraham and +972 Mag that the Israelis set Artificial Intelligence programs to kill some 37,000 persons suspected of being members of the Hamas paramilitary, and programmed in a tolerance of up to 20 civilians dead for each alleged militant. The targets were tracked by GPS and hit when they got home in the evenings, ensuring that family members were also blown away. I have pointed out that if the program functioned within these parameters, transmitting kill instructions to Israeli pilots and drone operators, they could kill as many as 740,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 99.5% of them innocent civilians (and actually much more because few of the 37,000 in the paramilitary deserved to be summarily blown away any more than their baby girls did). That is roughly a third of the entire population, which shows genocidal intent.

So Netanyahu made a fool out of Biden, telling him that the innocents killed were just “the price of waging a war” and that the Israelis were being incredibly careful that they were only killing those Qassam Brigades and al-Jihad al-Islami militants who struck Israel on October 7. Biden swallowed this Big Lie hook, line and sinker and then broadcast it to all Americans and to the world.

Biden vetoed three ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. To this day his spokesmen decline to admit that Israel has violated the international laws of war and they keep saying they haven’t seen evidence of genocide. Either they don’t know what genocide is or they haven’t been watching the Israeli total war on Gaza.

So Biden’s Univision interview is weak tea indeed, even if it is the strongest condemnation he has issued of the fascist government of Netanyahu, who brought the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis into his government.

What does he really say?

1. Netanyahu’s total war on Gaza is a “mistake.” Not an atrocity, or a war crime, or a genocide. Just a “mistake.” Taking the wrong exit off the freeway is a mistake. What Netanyahu has done to the Palestinians is not just an error of judgment.

2. Biden found it outrageous that Israeli fighter jet pilots repeatedly hit the vehicles of the World Central Kitchen volunteers, given that there was no reason to have thought that they were an enemy convoy. (North Gaza had been declared clear of Hamas fighters and was a supposed safe zone by then). But Biden has never shown as much outrage or grief about any of the 14,000 Palestinian children killed in equally brutal ways. The children still seem to be the price of waging a war, though only if you wage a genocidal war with bloodthirsty murderbots.

3. Biden wants a pause in fighting of six to eight weeks. Not a permanent ceasefire, mind you. Just a decent interval so that food and medicine can be gotten in to the noncombatant population. Presumably he is all right with Netanyahu relaunching the war after a couple of months.

Given where we are in the most vicious military action of the twenty-first century, responsible for more deaths of children than any other in this era, “mistake,” “killing 7 white people,” and a 6 to 8 week pause in fighting are woefully inadequate responses.

Biden and his foreign policy team still just don’t get it. There is widespread revulsion at their stance in the general public. It isn’t something that can be fixed with a band aid and a few words of empathy. The US public is increasingly seeing Netanyahu and his mob as the war criminals they are, and unless Biden finds a way to distance himself from Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bibi Netanyahu, they will continue to be an albatross around his neck.

Science fiction writer Martha Wells has authored a series of novels and short stories about a “Murderbot.”, an artificial intelligence in the body of an armored warrior. Her Murderbot, despite being lethal, is a good guy, and in noir style frees himself from the control of his corporate overlords to protect his friends.

The Israeli army, in contrast, is acting much more robotically.

Lavender is just a program and doesn’t have a body attached, but uses Israeli fighter jet pilots as an extension of itself.

The AI programs identified the Hamas militants according to vague specifications. It is known to have a 10% error rate and in other cases the supposed militant might have only loose connections to the Qassam Brigades paramilitary or the IJ. There was, Abraham writes, almost no human supervision over the working of the algorithm.

AI Lavender, at a 10% error rate, could have identified 3,700 men in Gaza as Hamas guerrillas when they weren’t. It could have allowed as many as 20 civilians to be killed in each strike on each of these innocents, That would give a total of 77,700 noncombatants blown arbitrarily away by an inaccurate machine.

One of Abraham’s sources inside the Israeli army said, “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

I hope the International Court of Justice, which is considering whether Israel is committing a genocide, is reading +972 Mag.

The AI program included extremely loose rules of engagement on civilian casualties. It was set to permit 10-20 civilians to be killed as part of a strike on a low-level Hamas member, and up to 100 civilians could be killed to get at a senior member. These new rules of engagement are unprecedented even in the brutal Israeli army.

The “Where’s Daddy” program identified and tracked the members.

37,000 Hamas paramilitary fighters did not carry out October 7. Most of them did not know about it beforehand. It was a tiny, tight clique that planned and executed it. The civilian wing of Hamas was the elected government of Gaza, and its security forces provided law and order (refugee camps are most often lawless). It may be that Lavender and “Where’s Daddy” swept up ordinary police in the definition of low-level Hamas fighters, which would explain a lot.

“Gaza Guernica 12: Terminator,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream, PS Express, IbisPaint, 2023

This new video game way of war violates the Rules of Engagment of the US military and all the precepts of International Humanitarian Law. The Marine Corps Rules of Engagement say,

c. Do not strike any of the following except in self defense to protect yourself, your unit, friendly forces, and designated persons or property under your control:

– Civilians.

– Hospitals, mosques, churches, shrines, schools, museums, national monuments, and other historical and cultural sites.

d. Do not fire into civilian populated areas or buildings unless the enemy is using them for military purposes or if necessary for your self-defense. Minimize collateral damage.

e. Do not target enemy Infrastructure (public works, commercial communications facilities, dams), Lines of Communication (roads, highways, tunnels, bridges, railways) and Economic Objects (commercial storage facilities, pipelines) unless necessary self- defense or if ordered by your commander. If you must fire on these objects to engage a hostile force, disable and disrupt but avoid destruction of these objects, if possible.

None of the Israeli “soldiers” operating Lavender were in danger from the civilians they killed. They made no effort to “minimize collateral damage.” In fact, they built very substantial collateral damage into their standard operating procedure.

If the Israeli military killed an average of 20 civilians each time they struck one of the 37,000 alleged militants, that would be 740,000 deaths, or three quarters of a million. Of babies, toddlers, pregnant mothers, unarmed women, unarmed teenagers, etc., etc. That would be about a third of the total Gaza population.

That is certainly a genocide, however, you wish to define the term.

And there is no way that Joe Biden and Antony Blinken haven’t known all this all along. It is on them.

Since it was founded, Israel has received the most cumulative funding in the form of U.S. foreign economic and military aid, receiving about $300 billion. And in 2022 alone, the US provided Israel $3.3 billion in military aid. Since October 7, 2023, the Biden administration has asked Congress to provide Israel up to $14 billion more in aid. While this legislation has yet to pass, the United States has since made more than 100 arms transfers to Israel, and almost all have occurred without Congress’ consent or notification. In less than 60 days and between October – December 1, 2023, the United States provided Israel 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

These weapons transfers highlight not only the ways in which the United States is complicit in the military operations that have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. They also highlight the US policy of unobstructed support, encouragement, and actions aiding and abetting Israel in the slaughter of innocent and helpless people who are being forcibly removed from their homes, bombarded, and starved to death.

Here in the United States, the Muslim, Arab, and MENA background populations have turned sharply against Biden. Despite being a part of Biden’s 2020 winning coalition, they have been vital to the success of the ‘uncommitted campaign’ during the 2024 presidential primaries, which has seen large-scale and public referendums on Biden in key swing states, sending strong signals that Biden has a realistic chance of losing the election in several battleground states in November 2024 if his administration does not shift course with respect to its unwavering support for Israel.

However, most importantly perhaps, for scholars and keen observers of American politics, is that US policy is not just out of step with the preferences of its Muslim, MENA, Arab background citizens, but is in stark and direct opposition to mass public opinion.

A new Gallup poll shows that the majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions. In fact, approval of the military action Israel has taken in Gaza fell from a razor thin 50% in November 2023 to 36% by March 2024. What’s more, Democrats have always opposed Israel’s military action in Gaza; in November 2023, 36% of them approved, and by March 2024, this figure dropped by half to a mere 18%. In this poll, not even a majority of Independents – a constituency we might think that Biden is trying to win over in 2024 – has ever supported Israel’s effort. In November 2023, 47% of them approved, and by March 2024, approval declined to not even one-third of Independents (29%). Only a majority of Republicans has ever approved of Israel’s military actions, though even among this group, there has been a decline in support from 71% in November 2023 to 64% in March 2024.

On March 6, 2024, I fielded a public opinion survey on 1,110 Americans about various policies related to the Israel-Gaza war on the survey platform Prolific. To make the respondent sample more representative of the US population, I applied ACS weights for age, race, and education. These results echo the Gallup findings, but also reveal that Americans want the US to pursue policies that the Biden administration is simply not pursuing. For instance, the survey reveals that Americans across the ideological divide are strongly in favor of a permanent ceasefire and overwhelmingly opposed to sending military aid to Israel – in direct contradiction to the Biden administration’s own actions at the moment.

Respondents in the survey were asked: “Since October 7, 2023, Israel and Hamas have been in a state of active warfare in the Gaza Strip. Have you been actively following the Israel-Hamas war?” I find that Americans are indeed paying attention to this conflict, with over two-thirds (67.81) indicating that they are either somewhat (50.97%) or actively (16.84) following the war.

Survey respondents were also also asked “To what extent do you support the following actions in the war unfolding between Israel and Hamas?: An immediate and temporary ceasefire, An immediate and permanent ceasefire, The US to provide humanitarian aid to Palestine, The US to provide military aid to Israel, The US to vote for the UN ceasefire resolution, and A deal to release Israeli hostages held by Hamas.”

The figure below displays how much all respondents, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents strongly or somewhat agreed with each of these policies.

Click to enlarge.

These findings confirm that the American public is at odds with the administration’s own policies. Not only do they reveal not just how out of step the Biden administration is with its core constituency, Democrats, but also, how out of step it is with most of the American public.

Take the US position on a ceasefire. On January 22, 2024, the White House explicitly indicated that it was opposed to a ceasefire, and by February 20th, it was the sole country to veto the three UN Security Council resolutions for one. With respect to an immediate and temporary versus permanent ceasefire, the results from the Prolific survey indicate that more than nearly three-quarters (74.41%) – either strongly or somewhat support a permanent ceasefire. This number is larger than support for a temporary one (66.13%). Moreover, majorities of each partisan group – and the overwhelming majority of Democrats (82.63%), Republicans (58.06%), and Independents (75.47%) either strongly or somewhat support a permanent ceasefire.

In terms of aid, Americans are also at odds with Biden. The survey reveals large public support for delivering humanitarian aid for Palestine and weak support for military aid for Israel. Nearly two-thirds of Americans in the survey (62.34%) somewhat or strongly support providing humanitarian aid to Palestine, while less than one-third (29.1%) somewhat or strongly support providing military aid to Israel. While 80.85% of Democrats, 31.23% of Republicans, and 57.56% of Independents are in support of sending humanitarian aid to Palestine, no majority of either of the three partisan groups is somewhat or strongly supportive of sending military aid to Israel (e.g., 22.54% of Democrats, 41.51% of Republicans,  and 29.06% of Independents). Given that the Biden administration has been incredibly slow at providing humanitarian aid to Palestine and has bypassed Congress over 100 times since the war began to deliver military aid to Israel, the results from this survey demonstrate the many ways that the Biden administration is pursuing policies at odds with the American public’s policy preferences.

Finally, regarding a UN ceasefire resolution and hostage release, there is large-scale public support for both. More than two-thirds of Americans (66.24%) somewhat or strongly support the US voting for a UN ceasefire resolution and somewhat or strongly support a deal to release Israeli hostages held by Hamas (68.47%). Breaking these figures down by partisanship, over 80% of Democrats, about 42% of Republicans, and 63.95% of Independents support a US vote in support of a UN ceasefire resolution. Majorities of all three groups support a deal to release the hostages (e.g., 74.53% of Democrats, 58.05% of Republicans, and 67.19% of Independents). Importantly, the American public does not see hostage release and a ceasefire as mutually exclusive.

These findings beg the question: Why is US policy under a Democratic president in an election year so at odds with the preferences of both Democrats and the American public? The results clearly outline how Americans want US policy to look moving forward. Not only are they paying attention to this conflict, they are most in favor of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and of a deal to release the hostages. One other finding from this survey is also clear: the key constituents that Biden has to mobilize in the 2024 presidential race (e.g., Democrats and Independents) are very skeptical of his administration’s policies, and especially of sending military aid to Israel.

But there is a difference between theoretical law and practical legality. The latter has to be adjudicated by some official body– a court, Congress, the State Department. As America’s chief diplomatic organ,the State Department would make a pretty good arbiter here.

Unfortunately, the State Department is in the hands of a genocide-denier and -enabler, Antony Blinken, whose boss, Joe Biden, is an even bigger genocide-denier and -enabler.

So State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on March 25 of Israel’s total war on Gaza, “We have not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance. So we view their assurances through that ongoing work that we have done.”

Mr. Blinken apparently does not have a smartphone, or he could have seen the unfolding war crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli military in real time. Most smart TVs have YouTube, so he could just watch Al Jazeera English live streaming. He’d see quite a lot of evidence that Israel is in violation of the laws of war and of the requirements it allow in to Gaza humanitarian aid.

Miller’s statement ranks up there with the Kremlin’s denial that its troops committed war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha or Bashar al-Assad’s denial that he had any role in the massive deaths racked up during the Syrian Civil War.

Just after Miller made his statement, a State Department official, Dr. Annelle Sheline, loudly denounced him, saying, “To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians.” Sheline noisily resigned from State. She had “served for a year as a foreign affairs officer at the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.”

The Young Turks Video: “BRAVE State Dept. Official Resigns Over Biden’s Handling Of Gaza War”

She wrote, “Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving the 2 million people who remain, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food; a group of charity leaders warns that without adequate aid, hundreds of thousands more will soon likely join the dead.”

Sheline was supposed to have been liaising with Middle Eastern NGOs working on human rights. None of them wanted to touch the US with a ten-foot pole. You can’t enable genocide and expect to be welcome in circles that value basic human rights. So she may as well resign. Biden and Blinken made her job impossible to do. The Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has been made a laughingstock and a pariah.

Ronna McDaniel was fired from NBC News almost immediately after she was hired, since the anchors at NBC and MSNBC denounced her for having fomented the Big Lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. McDaniel’s behavior was egregious and she shouldn’t have been hired. The firing was entirely justified.

But Ronna McDaniel didn’t deny that it is genocide to bomb over 30,000 civilian noncombatants to death in their apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and places of worship, even in their tents once they were made refugees. Ronna McDaniel hasn’t arranged for over 100 arms sales to Israel during the past 5 months, as Joe Biden and Antony Blinken have. Maybe she would, but she didn’t.

But NBC would even now blithely bring on screen genocide denialists.

Both McDaniel on the one side and Blinken and Biden on the other are dire threats to the stability and integrity of America. McDaniel tried to undermine the state domestically, Blinken and Biden are undermining it internationally. Both are purveying the Big Lie at a time when the public can fact check it in real time.

( Michigan Advance ) – Without equitable data systems, governmental policies will always come up short of fairly representing all of the people they are intended to serve. 

It is with that in mind that we at the Michigan League for Public Policy and many of our partners have long advocated for the inclusion of racial and ethnic groups that are currently left out of data collection, including, but not limited to individuals with origins in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The MENA region includes several countries, such as Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria and Yemen; many Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic speaking groups, as well as ethnic and transnational groups.

For far too long, MENA has been excluded as a separate race category in federal data collection — such as the decennial census — here in the United States, but is instead collapsed into the white or “other” categories. This means no federal agency has established an understanding of MENA Americans or their lived experiences. It also means the MENA-American experience has been systemically unaccounted for in federal data and has, therefore, long been excluded from the design and implementation of policies and programs intended to address civil rights and racial equity. 

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

This has had significant impacts on many aspects of the lives of MENA Americans and masked many pressing social concerns, like barriers to quality healthcare, limited opportunities for success among MENA small business owners and entrepreneurs, and a lack of understanding by federal agencies regarding health disparities, child well-being, and other social and economic disparities in MENA communities. 

Having complete, disaggregated federal data that provides more visibility for MENA Americans is especially important here in the Great Lakes State, as the state’s population becomes more diverse and the MENA population rapidly grows. 

In fact, Michigan has the second-largest MENA population in the U.S. at 310,087, second only to California, according to data collected through a new write-in option under the white category in the 2020 Census that specifically solicited MENA responses. 

While this data is valuable, it’s incomplete and does not provide a full, accurate and reliable picture of the MENA population. And, the decennial census write-in option continues to fail to recognize that many of the people in MENA communities do not identify as white and have very different lived experiences from white people with European ancestry. 

The good news is that we may soon see MENA added as a minimum reporting category in federal data collection thanks to one of several recently proposed, important updates to Statistical Policy Directive (SPD) 15. SPD 15 was developed in 1977 in order to collect and provide consistent, aggregated data on race and ethnicity in every area of our federal government, including the decennial census, administrative forms and household surveys. It serves as a crucial element in the oversight and administration of policies and programs that address racial and ethnic disparities and, yet, since its development, it has only undergone one update — in 1997. 

Recognizing the need to keep up with population changes and the evolving needs and uses for the federal data collected, a work group was established in 2022 to develop several new, proposed updates to SPD 15. And early last year during the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) public comment period on the initial proposed updates, we at the League were proud to formally voice our support for the proposal to add MENA as a new minimum reporting category.

The League also made sure to include a policy recommendation in the 2023 Kids Count in Michigan Data Book calling for investment in more robust and equitable data systems — specifically pointing to the lack of a MENA reporting category in the U.S. Census.

By ensuring that MENA Americans are included in federal data collection moving forward, we can ensure that they receive the representation, resources and programmatic support they need to thrive, support their families and make a stronger impact in their local communities. Changes to our current data systems are long overdue and must be made in order to lift up and address the needs of racial and ethnic groups that have been long overlooked. 

We at the League are continuing to follow the status of the proposed SPD 15 updates closely and are hoping to see the OMB make changes — including the addition of the MENA reporting category — this year. Community members are welcome to follow the League’s website and social media for updates on this issue as they become available. 

 

Simon Marshall-Shah

Simon Marshall-Shah is a state policy fellow at the Michigan League for Public Policy. He previously worked in Washington, D.C,. at the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), providing federal policy and advocacy support to nonprofit, Medicaid health plans (Safety Net Health Plans) related to the ACA Marketplaces.

 

 

 

Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.