As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel.
We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.”
Then explain the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians. Not just on Oct 7th, but over the entire century before. You have reams of evidence of Israeli atrocities, this is good, but you are completely silent on Arab atrocities. I assure you there were many, which I won’t link to because I am not a propagandist. You’re educated, though, you know how to find the examples. Explain the bombings during and after the negotiations over the Oslo Accords. Explain the continued fueling of the fear that Netanyahu leverages to maintain his power.
This is an attempt to whitewash the past with a new progressive interpretation, but much like how the “river to the sea” slogan has several different variations in Arabic, we should remember that a new, re-worded variation does not eliminate the historical existence of previous variations, like “min el-mayeh lil-mayeh, Falastin Arabiyeh”. This whitewashing is one of the dangers of Post-Modernist historical work, and why such historians do not deserve their credentials.
There is no inherent difference between colonialism and resistance to colonialism. There are structural differences applied by our ideologies, but functionally they are all humans of one singular species living on land. While people are actively invading, resistance can be justified, if battle has a reasonable chance of success. Once the invaders have settled, though, they are no longer invaders, they are neighbors. This was incredibly common through the European Middle Ages, the Vikings did it up and down the Eastern Atlantic, as just one singular example. Human history over the whole globe is full of these movements of people, continuing even into the modern day, though usually much more nonviolently.
This statement is historically false. It should not be taken with blanket faith, but should be critically examined. Not to excuse the furthering of illegal settlements into the modern day, but simply to point out that just because settlement happened at some point in the past does not mean violence is necessary forever into the future. Doing so will inevitably result in the extermination of the weaker group, based on historical precedent. This is not necessary, however. The Anglo-Saxons and Norse co-existed very peacefully after a time, despite one being Christian and the other Pagan, just to continue on my earlier example.
Ultimately, you should consider what sorts of actions will empower and strengthen Netanyahu’s hand, making his strategies more likely to succeed by allowing him a firmer grip on his own people, and what sorts of actions will weaken him, and make him more likely to fail. These practical considerations are what the survival of the Palestinian people hinges on. Not justice, rights or dignity. Remember too, that starvation of every last Palestinian man, woman and child does not require any foreign aid from any power for his country, and just how many genocides have succeeded throughout global history. How rare it is for a genocidal regime to actually be stopped by the international community. SE Asia, Central Africa, the Balkans, the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis, the Ukrainians, our own Native Americans.
That’s what we’re up against, and your one-sided, propagandized vision of hamas is playing right into Netanyahu’s hands, as you excuse the dangers his own people experience, giving further fuel to their fear. You know what afraid people are capable of? Genocide. Instead, consider acknowledging a more nuanced understanding of the conflict, one less reliant on capitalized vocabulary words and systemic structures and more on natural human physiological and emotional reactions to certain sorts of stimulus.
Not even to speak of hamas’ oppression of their own people, an entirely separate topic altogether.