The announcement on Thursday that Hamas leader Yahiya Sinwar was killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza has spurred some to speculate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might “take the win” and finally negotiate a prisoner exchange and ceasefire deal for the Gaza Strip. That belief bolsters the hope raised for some by a letter released earlier this week from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant asking Israel to ease its ban on food and other life-sustaining materials from entering Northern Gaza, lest there be “implications” for the rapid pipeline of massive armaments from the United States to Israel.
Those who have raised such hopes have apparently not been paying attention for the past year.
From the beginning of Israel’s genocide project in Gaza, there have been massive violations of international law and human rights abuses as ugly as any in history. These have been documented with a clarity that is unprecedented during a genocide, largely due to the fact that Israel has made no secret of them and their soldiers have been consistently and proudly broadcasting their crimes.
That has not impeded the flow of arms to Israel in the slightest. Even when the United Kingdom cut just a few military contracts or when France’s president called for an end to offensive arms shipments to Israel, the weapons from Washington (and Germany as well) continued to flow. Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly broken U.S. law, including having Blinken mislead Congress about Israel’s facilitation of aid transfers to the people of Gaza, and may well have doomed its own political party to defeat with its insistence on sustaining the worst genocide of the 21st century.
More requests without consequences for refusal
This letter from Lloyd and Blinken is nothing more than political theater. It is meant to communicate to the voters who may not vote for Democrats in November that they are doing something to address the worst of Israel’s crimes in Gaza. In fact, it does nothing of the kind.
Blinken and Austin wrote a letter that, as usual, poses little threat of consequences. They do take a baby step forward, stating that Israel’s failure to comply with the terms of the letter “may have implications for U.S. policy under NSM-20 (this is the National Security Memorandum that Biden issued in March requiring reporting on recipients of military aid’s compliance with U.S. and international humanitarian law) and relevant U.S. law.”
By saying it “may have implications,” there is a clear inference: failure to comply may not have any effect at all on the tidal wave of weapons for Israel. Given the history of not only American, but specifically Biden’s relationship with Israel, it is far more likely that there will be no consequences.
This is reinforced by the fact that the letter gives Israel 30 days to comply with its conditions. There is nothing in the letter that requires that much time to implement. But, given that the letter is in response to an Israeli threat to starve the people of Northern Gaza into submission, 30 days is enough time for maximal harm to be done.
Blinken and Austin’s letter lays out an extensive list of specific requirements for Israel to meet in order to pass the standard they are setting. With any other entity, such a list would demand that each condition be met or that entity provide an explanation of why efforts fell short.
With Israel, though, what this list provides is a way for propagandists like State Department Spokespeople Matthew Miller and Vedant Patel and White House mouthpieces Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby to claim that Israel is trying to “meet their obligations under very difficult circumstances,” or some such double talk.
Indeed, on Wednesday, Israel allowed 50 trucks of humanitarian aid into Northern Gaza, after weeks of allowing absolutely nothing (and compared to the 500 trucks a day that were entering Gaza before October 7, 2023, which still wasn’t enough). Miller pointed to this as progress and took pains to point out that Israel had opened some of the crossings into Gaza and taken steps toward some of the other conditions laid out in the Secretaries’ letter.