The White House needs a cover story to obscure its complicity. In desperation, it is once again resurrecting the long-dead two-state solution
By Jonathan Cook
US President Joe Biden disembarks Air Force One on 9 November 2023 (AFP)
The White House faces a dilemma. It has the power to stop the death and destruction in Gaza in its tracks, at any time of its choosing. But it chooses not to.
The US is determined to back its client state to the hilt, giving Israel licence to wreck the tiny coastal enclave, seemingly whatever the cost in Palestinian lives.
But the optics – and that is all that concerns Washington – are disastrous.
TV images have shown hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their destroyed homes, on a scale unseen since Israel’s earlier mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967.
Even the western media is struggling to obscure the veritable mountain of crushed and bleeding bodies in Gaza. The known death toll has now surpassed 11,000, with thousands more buried under rubble. Those who survive face a genocidal policy, starving them of food, water and power.
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By the weekend, Israel’s declared war on Hamas had shifted into an open war on Gaza’s hospitals. Medicins San Frontieres reported that al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City had been bombed repeatedly and its power cut off, with horrific scenes of premature babies dying after their incubators had stopped functioning. Staff who tried to evacuate, as Israel had ordered them to, were shot at. Similar scenes unfolded at al-Rantisi hospital.
Western publics are growing increasingly incensed. Protest marches have attracted numbers not seen since the mass demonstrations against the Iraq war 20 years ago.
Western allies are finding it harder to obscure and justify their complicity in what are indisputable Israeli crimes against humanity. French President Emmanuel Macron broke ranks at the weekend. His message was summed up bluntly by the BBC: “Macron calls on Israel to stop killing Gaza’s women and babies.”
In private, US allies in the Middle East are pleading with the US to use its leverage to restrain Israel.
Meanwhile, Washington is only too aware of how quickly Israel’s regional opponents could get dragged in, dangerously expanding and escalating the conflict.
Its immediate response has been desperate, and preposterous, stop-gaps to ease the criticism, including from 500 administration staff who submitted a letter to Biden on Tuesday protesting the White House’s blanket support for Israel.
Those measures have included the president calling for “less intrusive action” from Israel towards the hospitals, shortly before Israeli forces were reported storming al-Shifa, and rumours that Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who joined the US attack on Iraq in 2003 in violation of international law, might serve as the West’s “humanitarian coordinator” in Gaza.
Never-ending occupation
But what the Biden administration really needs is a cover story to justify the fact that it is continuing to supply the weapons and funding needed by Israel to carry out its crimes in broad daylight.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken set out his stall last week at the G7 summit. The goal is to shift the focus away from Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, and Washington’s backing for them, to a purely theoretical discussion about what might happen after the fighting ends.
Outlining his post-war “vision” for Gaza, Blinken said: “It’s also clear that Israel cannot occupy Gaza. Now, the reality is that there may be a need for some transition period at the end of the conflict… We don’t see a reoccupation and what I’ve heard from Israeli leaders is that they have no intent to reoccupy Gaza.”
James Cleverley, Britain’s former foreign secretary, echoed his US counterpart, insisting power would in Gaza be handed to “a peace-loving Palestinian leadership”.
Both appear to favour the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas taking over Gaza – or what’s left of it.
This bad-faith manoeuvre is off the charts, even by the pair’s usual mendacious standards. Both the US and Britain want us to believe, at least while Palestinians are being massacred day after day, that they are serious about reviving the long-cold cadaver of the two-state solution.
The layers of deceit are so plentiful they need to be peeled away one by one.
The first glaring deception is Washington’s insistence that Israel avoid “reoccupying” Gaza. Blinken wants us to believe that the strip’s occupation ended long ago, when Israel dismantled its Jewish colonies in 2005 and pulled out the soldiers who protected the settlers.
But if Gaza was not actually occupied before Israel’s current ground invasion, how does Washington explain the Israeli blockade of the tiny enclave for the past 16 years? How did Israel manage to seal off Gaza’s land borders, block access to Gaza’s territorial waters, and patrol Gaza’s skies 24/7?
The reality is that Gaza has not experienced a day free of Israeli occupation since 1967. All that Israel did 18 years ago when it pulled out its Jewish settlers, was to run the occupation more remotely, exploiting new developments in weapons and surveillance technologies.
Israel developed and refined a very sophisticated, arm’s length occupation, using Israeli teenagers with joysticks at distant sites to play God with the lives of 2.3 million imprisoned Palestinians.
Israel is not in danger of “reoccupying” Gaza. It never stopped occupying it.
Make-believe confrontation
Another deceit is the impression Blinken is intentionally creating that the US is preparing for a confrontation with Israel over Gaza’s future.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he is in no mood to sit down with Palestinian leaders, even of the “peace-loving” kind. At the weekend, he once again declared that Israel would take “security control” of the enclave as soon as Hamas was gone.
“There will be no Hamas,” he told Israelis on Saturday evening. “There will be no civilian authority that educates their children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to destroy the state of Israel.”
He added that Israeli troops would be able to “go in [to Gaza] whenever we want in order to kill terrorists”.
Certainly, Israeli military commanders seem to be taking this message to heart, vowing that they are back in Gaza for good.
But the suggestion that Israel and Washington are not on the same page is pure trickery. The “row” is entirely confected, designed to make it look like the Biden administration, in pushing for negotiations, is taking the Palestinians’ side against Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The pretence is a boon to both sides. The US wants to look like one day – after all Gaza’s homes are destroyed and its people ethnically cleansed – it will drag Netanyahu to the negotiating table kicking and screaming.
An embattled Netanyahu, meanwhile, is able to score popularity points with the Israeli right by posturing defiantly against the Biden administration.
It is pure theatre. The confrontation will never materialise. The US “vision” is nothing more than make-believe.
The no-state solution
The truth is that Washington formally abandoned the so-called two-state solution years ago, aware that Israel would never allow even the most circumscribed of Palestinian states.
Over the past three decades, Israel has gone from the pretence – maintained during the Oslo process – that it might one day concede a sham, demilitarised Palestinian state, cut off from the rest of the Middle East, to outright rejection of Palestinian statehood on any terms at all.
Back in July, before Hamas’ 7 October attack, Netanyahu was widely reported to have told a closed Israeli parliamentary meeting that Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state “must be eliminated”.
Will the same Israel that refused to countenance a state under Abbas, the Palestinian leader who called security coordination with Israel “sacred”, really be ready to hand over the keys to the kingdom after its latest rampage?
Remember, it was Netanyahu who explained to his ruling Likud party in 2019 that “bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas” were the best way for Israel to “thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state”.
This was not some rogue position. It was shared across the military and security establishments.
The strategy was achieved through Israeli policies designed to permanently split, physically and politically, the two main territorial components of any future Palestinian state: the West Bank and Gaza.
Movement between the two was made all but impossible, and Israel cultivated different, antagonistic local leaderships for each territory so neither could claim to represent the Palestinian people.
At the July parliamentary meeting, Netanyahu also insisted it was a vital Israeli interest that the PA be propped up in the West Bank.
At the same time, the necessary capital of a Palestinian state, Jerusalem, has been physically sealed off from both territories, and stripped of any Palestinian political representation.
As the Biden administration knows only too well, Israel would never allow a “moderate” Palestinian leadership to become established in Gaza, uniting it with the West Bank and strengthening the case for a sovereign Palestinian state.
But talk of a revived two-state solution does serve as a useful distraction from the actual solution Israel is implementing in plain view.
Israeli actions tell that story. The bombing into rubble not only of Gaza’s homes but of the civilian infrastructure – hospitals, schools, United Nations compounds, bakeries, mosques and churches – needed to support one of the most overcrowded places on earth.
The population in Gaza’s north has been forcibly dislocated to create an even smaller, even more overcrowded holding pen in southern Gaza, ensuring the enclave is “a place where no human being can exist”, as Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, phrased it.
The goal is transparent: to expel Gaza’s population into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai. And given Israel’s previous form, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that Gaza’s refugee families – some of them about to be exiled by Israel for a second or third time – will never be allowed to return to the ruins.
The Biden administration can pretend to be resurrecting a non-existent two-state solution. But the reality is that Israel has had just such an expulsion plan – called the Greater Gaza Plan – on the drawing board for decades.
According to reports, Washington has been signed up to the creation of a Palestinian enclave in Sinai since at least 2007.
Powerless Abbas
Assuming anything of Gaza survives the current onslaught, Blinken’s next deceit is the suggestion that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are able or willing to take Hamas’ place.
There is, of course, the small matter of how Abbas could rule a population with which he has so discredited himself in the past by endlessly accommodating Israel’s crimes. After all, his Fatah party was ousted from Gaza in 2006 after it was defeated in Palestinian legislative elections.
But Abbas is losing even more credibility with Palestinians as he sits passively through the horrors unfolding in Gaza. As former British ambassador Craig Murray has noted, with Palestine a member of the UN, Abbas could invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel.
That, in turn, would require a ruling from the International Court of Justice. It would put Israel, the US and the UK firmly on the back foot. But Abbas has once again sacrificed his people to avoid angering the US.
Even more preposterous is the idea that Israel would ever let the Palestinian Authority rule Gaza when that same PA is not allowed to be in charge of the West Bank.
Abbas has no control of any kind over the 62 per cent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords placed – temporarily – under full Israeli rule, enforced by the Israeli army and Jewish settler militias. What was intended by Oslo to be temporary was long ago made permanent by Israel.
In another quarter of the West Bank, the PA is nothing more than a glorified local authority, running the schools and emptying the bins.
And in the remaining fifth of the territory, chiefly the built-up areas, Abbas has extremely circumscribed powers. The PA does not have control over borders, internal movement, airspace, electronic frequencies, currency, or the population register.
Abbas has no more than a police force in these cities, one that acts as a local security contractor for the Israeli military. When the Israeli army decides to do the job itself, and bursts into a West Bank city unannounced, Abbas’ forces shrink into the shadows.
The idea that Abbas can take charge of Gaza when he is powerless in his “stronghold” of the West Bank is a fairytale.
No eradicating Hamas
But perhaps the most fraudulent of the White House deceptions is the assumption that Hamas – and by extension, all Palestinian resistance – can be eradicated from Gaza.
Palestinian fighters are not some alien force that invaded the enclave. They are not occupiers, even though that is the way they are portrayed by every western government and media outlet.
They emerged organically out of a population that has endured decades of military abuse and oppression from Israel. Hamas is the legacy of that suffering.
Israel’s genocidal policies – unless it intends to wipe out every Palestinian in Gaza – will not moderate that impulse for resistance. Israel will simply inflame more anger and resentment, and a stronger motive for vengeance.
Even were Hamas to be wiped out, another, probably more desperate and vicious resistance group would surface to take its place.
Most of the Palestinian children now being bombed and terrorised, made homeless along with their families, and witnessing loved ones being killed, will not grow up over the next few years to become young peace ambassadors.
Their birthright will be the gun and the rocket. Their ambition will be to avenge their families and restore their honour.
Israel and the US know all this, too. History is crammed full of such lessons taught to greedy, arrogant colonisers and occupiers.
But their goal, whatever they claim, is not a solution or a resolution. It is permanent war. It is perpetuating the “cycle of violence”. It is greasing the tank treads of the West’s profitable war machine by spawning the very enemies that western publics are told they need protecting from.
Whether Palestinians are returned to the Stone Age in Gaza, as Israeli military commanders have long desired, or expelled to live in refugee camps in Sinai, they will not accept a fate in which they are treated as “human animals”.
Their fight will go on. And Israel and Washington will have to keep inventing new, ever more fanciful stories to try to persuade us that the West’s hands are clean.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net Via Middle East Eye
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Comments
19 responses to “Israel-Palestine war: Don’t be fooled. Biden is fully signed up to genocide in Gaza”
The white supremacists of Israel have been performing genocide upon the Palestinians for 75 years backed up by the Christian white supremacists of the US all the way. Both the Christians and Jews are people who think they have been chosen by God to rule the earth very evident in both are genocidal maniacal people. Rules and laws do not apply to God’s chosen whether Christian or Jew, nor have they ever when it comes to genocide, they seem to enjoy it as their “God given right”. How this madness can be stopped is anybody’s guess but it won’t happen anytime soon.
And why not list Islam along with Christianity and Judaism in the pantheon of superstitious mythological craziness beliefs that plague humankind? Not a bit of sanity in any one of them!
The factual article in no manner alluded to your piffle, as if you had one anyway.
Good idea, list it.
“The white supremacists of Israel” You should correct that. The Khazar land thieves see themselves as above white.
They are “The Synagogue of Satan”
Kind regards,
Spender_CGB
This was meant as a reply to ‘Woopy’
In his shocking and disturbing lecture titled, “False Messiah’s Donkey”, investigative journalist David Sheen reveals the ruthless terrorist ideology adhered to by devoted Israeli followers of Meir Kahane (1932-1990), in particular conveying the Kahanists’ extraordinary influence on the American Democratic party…
Thx Tom.
Don’t let the genocidal Baal worshipping loxists get you down.
Keep up the good work exposing and sharing the TRUTH.
Israel will never dare to stage war against the Palestinian civilians and kill so many Palestinian children and babies without the US green light it. Joe Biden told Netanyahu (via Blinken) to move faster and kill as many Palestinian children as possible. Biden is refusing to impose ceasefire and had threatened Hezbollah and Iran if they get involved get involved.
In truth, Israel is incapable of doing anything without the U.S. It is armed and financed by the U.S.,and therefore never interested in peace. For its part, the U.S. was never an honest broker. The U.S. is only following Zionist dictates. The Jews have an iron grip on all U.S. politicians and own the entire U.S. mainstream media and the entertainment industry. This will allow the Jews to brainwash and turn Americans into an ignorant and bewildered herd. Hence, Israel is above all and takes precedence over U.S. interests.
In reality, Fascism never ended. It continues where it was left in a different form, normalized and accepted by the media and the entertainment industry. We live under barbaric Jewish Fascism.
That Jewish element is another decoy duck from the WA$P imperial global pi££age idiots.
Zionism harks back to Reformation Puritan delusions the Brits were a lost tribe of the chosen people, midwifed as British Israelism circa 1580 and nursed by evangelical fundamentalists until the Hungarian Herzl boosted it in the 19th century.
Balfour picked up the baton in 1917, passed it to Rotschild, and then the well organised, white collar criminals armed and financed Adolf’s final solution to render Europe judenrein, topped by the US and Britain closing their borders to the traumatised death camp survivors to direct them into Palestine for indoctrination as fodder in the divide-and-conquer sectarian wedge into the Semitic peoples of the imploding Ottoman territories.
Do try to steer around their anti Jewish trap. Jews opposed the Zionist project from the start, and increasingly do so today as the mirror Nazionism reveals its white supremacist sinews.
Jews and Arabs are BOTH Semitic peoples, the big lie, a la Joe Goebbels, is that Zionism is a Semitic project when it is from its inception an antisemetic sectarian distortion.
Look up Semite in a dictionary, before they do a hasbara rewrite.
BU$iness as U$ua£ for ye o£de WA$P mercenary AmeriKKKan corporate war indU$tries.
The system is a£gorithmically automated, via g£oba£i$€d stock exchange indices, to serve Mars, Roman deity of both war and Mar-KKKet. Evang€£ical KKKri$tianity is just it’s mask.
The program needs an update, before it crashes the planet and vaporises us all.
I realize three things regarding this conflict.
1. If you know the history of this area going back many years, the British, the United States, and the U.N. are responsible for this mess.
2. Both sides, Palestine and Israel, have committed atrocities and cannot be trusted about anything. Just two evil forces trying to kill each other for territory.
3. As more nations get involved, there is a real chance that a major war may take place that will widen the conflict until it becomes World War III. Then it won’t matter anymore.
So many people are taking sides, I prefer to stay out of it. Therefore, I’m neutral.
1.The ‘UN’ is not responsible for this mess. Its involvement started in 1947 when Britain gave up its 30 year project of facilitating Jewish immigration from Europe into Palestine, the development there of the Jewish community while simultaneously retarding any development of the far larger Palestinian Arab community….both initiated via the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and facilitated via the de facto self-awarded ‘British Mandate for Palestine’. Defeated, it threw the entire mess into the UN lap but in fact threw it directly under the control of the only standing power after WW2, the United States. Truman undermined the democratic process in the UN by swinging the vote via bribery of certain nations and arm twisting of others, resulting in a majority swinging the vote to what Truman, under intense Zionist pressure from abroad and from home, wanted. The UN member nations who ‘switched’ their votes were weak and desperate. They were easy pickings. So it’s unfair to lump the UN together with the two major perps here: first the British, then the US.
2. Palestinians are not an evil force. Anyone who understands the overwhelming population and land ownership percentages of Palestinians in the land…at the time of Herzl’s First Zionist Congress, at the time of Balfour, and at the time of Truman’s collapse to Zionist pressure in 1947…understands the extent and the tragedy of dispossession they have been subjected to by the world’s Western ‘democracies’…which have been the true evil forces here along with the Zionists. The Palestinians by international law have a legal right to resist, with arms if necessary. Yes it is sometimes messy. Consider what they are up against. What does one expect them to do, roll over and surrender? Would you, in that position?
3.Absolutely concur about this point. However, as in Ukraine, the ONE SINGLE NATION that could do something about it, is only concerned with its narrow hegemonic objectives of eliminating all of its declared enemies. It doesn’t care about people or a peaceful world.
LAST: Burying your head in the sand, especially if you are a citizen of either the US or the EU, is an extremely cowardly thing to do considering the genesis of this issue….including the centuries old history of antisemitism in Europe with its discrimination, pogroms, holocaust of Jews…within the aforementioned states.
Disagree. It was Britain problem from the start. When they didn’t want to deal with any further, they turn it over to the U.N. All the U.N. had to do is tell Britain its your problem, not ours. That did not happen. I’m aware of the history of this issue. I live in the United States and realized a long time ago that I do not have any say so in this country. Britain could have stop any Jewish migration to Palestine, if they wanted to follow that process.
The other members on the Security Council could have veto any attempt to throw the problem in their lap.
As for burying my head in the sand, why would I care when two evil groups of people are killing each other. Both sides have committed atrocities. Do your research.
Disadvantaged: The white Jews have no rights to the land they have stolen from the Palestinians under any law. The white Jews are occupying stolen land and have no “right to defend themselves” from homeowners trying to reclaim their stolen property however Hamas has every right under all law. The white Jews need to return to New York, New Jersey, Germany, Russia or anywhere else they came from.
Disadvantaged: The facts are that the white Jews, Khazars, inclusive from people from New York, New Jersy, Florida, Germany etc. who fly over and steal homes and land from the Palestinians are on the wrong side of the fence. Under any law, moral, international, national, or common-sense show that illegal occupation does not have any rights whatsoever in the land they are illegally occupying. Hamas has every legal right to fight against the illegal occupation just as you would fight for your home if it were illegally taken from you. Hamas has every legal right to fight for their homeland and the US taxpayers should be helping them instead of the genocidal maniacal people who fly over there from New York to steal land.
Woopy: Remember, many nations on this planet obtain territory from someone else. Did the Palestinians own the territory 10,000 years ago? Who gave it to them legally? Did the Jews own the land they now occupy? Who gave it to them? Most nations will use any international law, treaty, verbal agreements, common-sense, religious writings or any other means necessary to justify a way to say this is our land which means absolutely nothing in the real world.
For example, the United States should only be the size of the original colonies, not the size we are today. Germany has a valid claim to a part of Poland which belongs to them , not Poland. Look at a map of Europe 1910 and what it looks like today. Several other European nations have made claims that other European countries are occupying land that belongs to them. Look at Asia, all the disputes over small islands that various nations are claiming. The same applies to Africa, and South America as well regarding territory.
Can you see various American Indian tribes launching attacks on American cities claiming that the land belongs to them. Something to think about as it relates to the current conflict in the Middle East.
The only thing that counts is the use of force to occupy a territory. Over time, it becomes accepted that a nation control that territory. As for the Middle East, those disputes are still unsettled. The big problem is that other stupid nations are being drawn into that conflict.
The world stands by while thousands of innocents are buried alive under bomb strewn rubble. If these were Israelis the media would be crying genocide and holocaust. Instead the pundits are proclaiming self defense and the Israelis are using to the fire bombing of WW2 Dresden as legal justification. This is akin to John Gotti recounting Al Capone as moral justification for organized crime.
When??? was the last time/occasion that the US stood up for ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’???