EDITORIAL: So, Israel continues to hit civilian targets in central Gaza – like schools and residential areas with the IDF claiming a “precise” strike on Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, and manages to get away with it despite women, children and the elderly being counted among the dead.
And US President Joe Biden, whose trumpeted “peace plan” lies dead in the water thanks to his “friend” Benjamin Netanyahu rubbishing it as “not good enough”, is still not willing to put his foot down and get Israel to stop this madness even as the death toll races past the forty thousand mark.
As things stand, the mechanics of this carnage have become pretty straight forward. Even the part of the west – Israel’s traditional allies – that does not quite agree with the label of genocide yet concedes that the Jewish state is committing unimaginable atrocities and wants it to stop knows that it is not going to stop till it is ordered to by the United States.
That now makes the US the only country with power and influence that continues to give Israel a blank cheque to rampage across what is left of the Gaza Strip; and also makes the sole superpower not just complicit in this genocide but also responsible for it.
Yet the Biden administration continues to insult the world by inviting Netanyahu to Washington to address the Congress later in the summer. It says a lot that this announcement came alongside the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese publicly decrying acts of horrific torture and humiliation committed by Israel against Palestinian detainees in “shadowy detention centres” over the last eight months. These include “electrocution, forcing detainees to wear diapers, and sodomy”.
She went on to say that “abuse, torture, mass killings, wanton destruction, have been the daily reality for Palestinians under Israeli rule for over half a century”, showing how clearly the world’s top institutions, not just countries always friendly with Israel, have had the veil removed from their eyes because of this war.
Still, the only country with the power and influence to get Netanyahu to stop immediately and start working on the two-state solution not only continues to turn a blind eye to such facts, but it is still providing Israel the money and arms to destroy more territory and kill yet more people.
Israelis, especially Netanyahu, are not nearly as respectful of Democrats as they are of Republicans when it comes to their powerful patrons inside the superpower. Yet Biden, remarkably, has turned out to be Netanyahu’s dream come true.
Netanyahu has met none of his war objectives. Hamas is not nearly decimated – in fact it is continuously resurfacing in areas “cleansed” of it; perhaps because embittered survivors are turning to it to help take revenge for the massacre of their loved ones. And the only hostages coming home are in body bags.
But Biden has helped Netanyahu survive in office. Even now, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets every weekend to call for his ouster, the war is the only thing keeping him in office. Without it, he’ll be booted, dragged through court for this corruption trial, and most likely jailed.
So, the longer he can kill innocent Palestinians and blame it on a Hamas witch hunt, the longer he can evade justice at home. Little surprise, then, that he’s now looking to expand the war by targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Washington needs to listen to the world community. Because, just as Bibi is not listening to Biden and risking sparking a much wider, much nastier war, Biden is also not listening to the world about pulling the plug on Bibi, gambling with not just Israel’s reputation, which is already in tatters, but also America’s standing in the world.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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