The White House on Thursday said it was exploring a series of pauses in the Israel-Hamas conflict to help people safely exit Gaza and allow humanitarian aid to get in, but reiterated its opposition to a full ceasefire.
National security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that such pauses should be temporary and localized, and insisted they would not stop Israel from defending itself.
“What we’re trying to do is explore the idea of as many pauses as might be necessary to continue to get aid out and to continue to work to get people out safely, including hostages,” he told reporters at a regular White House briefing.
If the US helps get people out of Gaza, and Israel eventually blocks their return, then the US has directly participated in ethnic cleansing. I mean, I think we are already culpable in Israel’s multifaceted war crime factory, but this is a remarkable escalation of that policy. I suppose that I’d have more respect for the US if it didn’t try to cloak its support of apartheid and genocide in feel good bullshit rhetoric like “democracy” and “defense” and “humanitarian pause”. In reality Israel is fascist ethnostate, this is a genocide, and we are facilitating ethnic cleansing. The Biden administration is monstrous.
I’m genuinely curious, what course of action here could the US do that you wouldn’t criticize? If the US helps citizens evacuate a war zone, you call it ethnic cleansing. If the US instead didn’t do this and supported keeping them in Gaza, you’d say America is forcing them to be bombed to death.
I can’t help but think that you’re fundamentally always going to criticize the US and then find a justification for it afterwards.
Any time the US (or any other major world power) does anything I’m going to question the motive, as it’s likely motivated by greed. However, in a hypothetical where I could make the US do whatever I want in this one specific time and place, I would force a regime change in Israel to one that is, at the very least, less bloodthirsty. At the most, one that would initiate a peaceful retreat of Israeli settlers from all native Palestinian land.
Israel is a sovereign nation, initiating a regime change would be a massive overreach of power. The US of the 21st century doesn’t do that to it’s allies.
Hmmmm
I agree with everything you said.
And simultaneously, I’m thinking about how that’s going to be used as a bullet point for GOP activists to push their campaign next year, and there’s a decent chance it’ll be Trump. If Trump was still calling the shots, he’d be screaming at his generals to send half of our B-52s to carpet-bomb Gaza into dust.
I hate that we are forced to choose between “participating in ethnic cleaning” and “enthusiastically participating in ethnic cleansing” for our national leadership.