“A depraved new normal” — from genocide in Gaza to ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
The Biden Administration has never taken any concrete steps to stop the Gaza genocide, and now it isn’t even bothering to voice its concerns.
It had no criticism of Israel after its April 1 attack on Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus that killed as many as 16 people including Iranian military commanders. Israel reportedly delayed until the very last moment giving the US notification of its impending strike, which could have dangerously widened the region’s conflicts.
But the Administration has had plenty to say about Iran’s carefully calibrated response with 350 drones and missiles on April 13 that injured a seven-year-old Bedouin girl in one of Israel’s ‘unrecognized villages’ and cost Israel and its allies (US, Britain, France, Jordan with Saudi Arabia forwarding intelligence) over $1 billion to deter. With Israel seen as the imperiled victim of what Secretary of Defense Austin called “reckless and unprecedented attacks by Iran and its proxies,” the war on Gaza no longer dominates news cycles.
President Biden took the opportunity of Iran’s retaliation to put his name on a Wall Street Journal op ed calling on Congress to immediately provide Israel and Ukraine with military aid so they can “defend themselves against brazen adversaries that seek their annihilation.” On April 20, the House voted by 366–58 to give Israel $26.38 billion (which includes $9.1 billion for humanitarian aid for Gaza and other “conflict zones”) — this on top of the $3.8 billion in military aid Israel receives annually from US taxpayers.
According to some reports, Netanyahu agreed not to strike back at Iran in a way that could drag the US into a larger war in exchange for US backing for an Israeli operation against Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s subsequent “limited” strike on a military base outside Isfahan on April 19 was condemned as “lame” by National Security Minister Ben Gvir, but must have brought relief to the White House.
Meanwhile, the US continues to shield Israel at the UN Security Council. On April 3, It prevented the body from issuing a statement condemning Israel’s attack on the Iranian diplomatic compound, saying that it had not yet determined the status of the building that was hit. Weeks later, the State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the Administration still had not “made a determination” whether Israel had bombed the kind of diplomatic facility that is supposed to be accorded special protection under international law.
On April 18, the US provided the sole veto (the UK and Switzerland abstained) to defeat the Palestinian effort to gain full UN membership for the State of Palestine, which was supported by 12 countries as a step towards the ‘two-state solution’ that the US claims to embrace.
The genocidal war grinds on
Not including at least 7,000 bodies that have never been recovered, the casualty figures compiled by the Gaza Health Ministry are now more than 34,000 killed (including some 15,000 children and over 10,000 women) and nearly 77, 000 injured: that’s five percent of Gaza’s population (the per capita equivalent of 17 million Americans). According to UNICEF, a child is killed or injured in Gaza every ten minutes.
The lives of as many as 11 children were eradicated by missiles on April 16 when they were at a playground near the al-Maghazi refugee camp. On the same day, at least seven law enforcement officers tasked with coordinating supplies near Gaza City were killed in an attack on their police vehicle, and many more people were slaughtered when missiles hit a residential building in central Rafah. Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al Balah was repeatedly bombed between April 10 and April 15, and thousands of Palestinians came under army fire on April 15 as they tried to reach their homes in the north. Among those killed was a five-year-old girl who was shot in the head. On April 19, heavy bombardment was reported in many parts of the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah where, on April 20–21, air strikes killed at least 14 people, nine of them children. The military onslaught is ongoing.
Chilling details about the horrific slaughter at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City are now coming to light. Eyewitnesses have described how the Israeli army killed patients in their beds and doctors who refused to leave their patients. Executions of hundreds of hospital employees and people Israel suspected of being Hamas members were carried out in the courtyard and then buried by army bulldozers. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, as many as 1,500 people were massacred, injured or are missing. After the army withdrew from Khan Yunis’ Nasser Medical Complex, it also left behind a mass grave containing more than 150 bodies.
On April 4, as pressure mounted following the April 1st assassination of foreigners in the World Central Kitchen convoy, President Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu that continued US support for the war depended on Israel’s allowing significantly more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza to avert the looming famine. There is little evidence that this is being done.
Israel had promised to open the Erez Crossing to the starving north, but then quickly dropped this plan. It finally permitted Erez to be used for the first time on April 18. By April 9, Israel had allowed more trucks to enter the Kerem Shalom and Rafah Crossings but, according to the UN, food was “three times more likely to be blocked by Israel than other aid.” By April 11, the number of trucks had significantly declined and Israel still had not made good on its assurance to President Biden that supplies for Gaza would be cleared through the port of Ashdod. On April 21, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that two-thirds of humanitarian missions to Gaza were being blocked or significantly delayed. The convoys organized by UNRWA, whose services are vital for effective food distribution, have not been permitted to move to the north where food during the first half of April only reached about 15 percent of the population. The lack of sufficient fuel has continued to hobble the distribution of food and prevent bakeries from operating.
Jamie McGoldrick, the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator, reported on April 12that although Israel had made commitments to scale up assistance, no visible difference could be seen on the ground and that “if we don’t have the chance to expand the delivery of aid in all parts of Gaza, but in particular to the north, then we’re going to face a catastrophe.”
On the same day, Samantha Power of USAID became the first senior US official to state that what is happening in Gaza is a famine. Her Congressional testimony was bolstered by two timely investigations. A Human Rights Watch report published on April 9 describes how children in Gaza are dying from malnutrition and dehydration and condemns “the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.” In its publication ‘Stopping Famine in Gaza,’ the International Crisis Group warns that “the political fallout from an escalating famine could turn out to be more difficult for Israel to navigate than the operational challenges posed by Hamas’s continued presence in Gaza. Israel’s efforts to deflect responsibility for the famine have not been successful. As the humanitarian crisis worsens, so, too, Israel’s standing in the world will fall. Already its closest allies are turning against the war effort. While Israel might anticipate that the world will eventually drift back into indifference, the implications of mass death by starvation are more severe.”
On April 19, Netanyahu got irate when the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock warned him that Israel was “heading towards famine in Gaza.” He reportedly told her “come and see the pictures of the markets in Gaza, the beaches in Gaza, there’s no famine there…we’re not like the Nazis who produced fake images of a manufactured reality.”
Netanyahu may be in denial about starvation and other war crimes Israel is committing in the Gaza Strip, but according to Israeli media, the German foreign minister was one of the “diplomatic figures with influence” he and other Israeli officials turned to out of concern that the International Criminal Court might be prepared to issue warrants for their arrest.
The locked down West Bank
While genocide continues to unfold in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank has, in the words of Haaretz journalists Gideon Levy and Alex Levac, “undergone a metamorphosis” as Israel “seized the opportunity to intensify the occupation, with mass arrests of Palestinians, hundreds killed, a host of new illegal settler outposts and roads, shepherds expelled from their homes, violent settlers rampaging in uniform. All under the aegis of the war.”
They go on to describe the West Bank as “shuttered and besieged. Practically all Palestinian cities and villages have some, or even many, access roads that have been sealed off…. Life has become intolerable for three million people.” With movement of Palestinians severely restricted and their economy stifled, settlers “have launched veritable pogroms, suddenly arriving in their uniforms in all-terrain vehicles, sowing violence, making local inhabitants feel even more helpless…. Hundreds of Palestinians, mostly children and teenagers, have been killed, most for no apparent reason. Soldiers deployed in the West Bank seem to have become more trigger-happy than they were before.”
After the 14-year-old son of a settler family went missing on April 12 and was found dead the following day, the violence ratcheted up, with settlers rampaging through at least 17 Palestinian villages, setting property ablaze, displacing 20 families after burning down their homes, and murdering seven Palestinians, including two children. On April 19 and 20, the army raidedNur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem, destroying parts of the camp and killing 14 people, among them a 15-year-old boy. In protest, a general strikewas called throughout the West Bank on April 21. As many as 483 West Bank Palestinians, including over 100 children, have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers between October 7, 2023 and April 20, 2024.
The West Bank is also experiencing a surge in night raids of homes resulting in mass arrests. On April 17, which is marked every year as Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, Israel’s prisons reportedly held some 9,500 Palestinians, including 3,660 administrative detainees imprisoned indefinitely without charge and 200 children. In the last seven months, prison conditions have sharply deteriorated and torture and Abu Ghraib-style humiliation have become routine. Sixteen prisoners have died in Israeli jails since October 7.
Also on April 17, Human Rights Watch published a damning report, West Bank: Israel Responsible for Rising Settler Violence. It highlights some of the 720 settler attacks that have taken place between since October 7, half of them with soldiers present, and details the plight of five agricultural communities where residents have been beaten and expelled, and have not been permitted to return to their lands. The seizure by settlers of a thousand acres of Palestinian land and the expulsion of 1,244 Palestinians since October are being carried out with the assistance of US firearms that have been exported to Israel in skyrocketing numbers and distributed to settlers by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir.
The Israeli cabinet recently gave the green light to 3,500 new settlement units in the West Bank while Ben-Gvir has called for Palestinians to be pushed out of Gaza and replaced by Israeli settlers. An editorial in Haaretz(April 8) headlined “Goodbye, Green Line: The Israeli Government Goes All Out to Boost West Bank Settlements” describes the “outrageous and dangerous bills” that have been passed by the Knesset “to normalize the settlements” and “sabotage the possibility of reaching a territorial compromise.” So much for President Biden’s ‘two-states’ mantra.
The US and EU have recently extended sanctions against more individuals in the violent ‘Hilltop Youth’ (including the grandson of Meir Kahane) and Lehava. But to date the US has refused to sanction military units participating in human rights abuses as required by the Leahy law. The April 17th ProPublica revelation that Secretary of State Blinken had not acted on the recommendation by the State Department’s Israel Leahy Vetting Forum to cut off aid to certain Israeli military units may have convinced the Administration that it could no longer supply them with weapons and then turn a blind eye as to how the weapons are used. According to an Axios scoop, the Secretary of State is poised to withdraw support from Israel’s Netzah Yehuda battalion which has close relations with the ‘Hilltop Youth.’ Netanyahu immediately called the possibility of sanctions “the height of absurdity,” while Ben Givir said it is a “red line” and Smotrich denounced it as “complete madness. ” Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, warned that it would set a “dangerous precedent.”
With President Biden eager to sign the new $26 billion Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act into law, there appears little chance that the Administration will pause its massive arms shipments to Israel, a course of action which even The New York Times editorial board had once recommended. Its editorial appeared on April 13, just hours before the Iranian strike on Israel put Israel’s ‘security needs’ on the front burner.
“The war in Gaza felt extreme at first,” wrote Dahlia Scheindlin in Haaretz on April 18, “but it is drifting into normal rather than formally ending. In the West Bank, Palestinian attacks and Israeli state (or state-backed) violence have escalated drastically before and after October 7 — but all of it seems like background noise. On the Israeli side, is Israeli mob and vigilante violence, extrajudicial killing or sheer terrorism becoming routine and forgettable?”
The staying power of this new ‘normal’ will depend on whether the US and former western colonial powers continue to permit Israel the impunity it has enjoyed for nearly 76 years.