Lies, Threats and Warnings

Everyone knows (including the politicians) that politics is a messy business. When you couple politics with war, it gets even messier, especially when you have a president who’s trying to walk a tightrope between the country at war (Israel) and his own Progressive party. And the situation is getting uglier by the day.

As I see the situation, Israel is doing its best to be assertive and focused in destroying Hamas. It’s even tried to use a military grid to create “deconfliction zones,” to give Palestinians warnings to leave certain areas before intense fighting is begun. Although it has had mixed results, it confirms that Israel is trying to avoid killing civilians.

But according to the Biden Administration, Netanyahu is not doing enough.

This war in Israel has been plagued with lies told by people on social media as well as by Joe Biden:

Today, the images and videos circulating, especially across social media, are offering a very poor representation of the truth of what happened on Oct. 7 in Israel. This is partly due to the Israeli government’s understandable efforts to protect the privacy and dignity of the victims, and abstaining from publishing evidence of the atrocities committed to the public. At the same time, the content that is flooding social platforms now reveals that something is fundamentally broken in how millions of people around the world are consuming information about the events of the Hamas Massacre and the subsequent Israel-Hamas War. Rightly, there is ample heart-wrenching footage from Gaza across social media platforms amidst significant civilian casualties; but there is also sadly rampant misinformation fomenting anger, and extremist antisemitic and Islamophobic hate alike, on those platforms.

Biden has also made accusations that jeopardize Israel’s reputation, success and strategies. He accused them of conducting indiscriminate bombing in Gaza (which the White House had to walk back); he believes that they should remove members of the Knesset because they are conservative and part of the Israeli War Council; and he insists that the Palestinian Authority, which supports Hamas, could govern Gaza after the latter is defeated. No one seems concerned that he is trying to meddle in Israel’s domestic issues, and that the P.A.’s Fatah brags about participating in the October 7 massacre.

Although Israel has chosen to initiate some recommendations/demands made by Biden, the Israelis are unwilling to relinquish their military strategy to the U.S., and implicit in the U.S. demands are that they could limit their support to Israel. The latest “demand” by Jake Sullivan:

National security adviser Jake Sullivan pressed Israeli leaders to shift from a reliance on airstrikes and ground assaults in Gaza toward targeted military operations and warned that a protracted conflict would make the Palestinian territory harder to govern after the war, U.S. officials said.

Sullivan’s meetings with Israeli political and military leaders Thursday seemed to have made little headway addressing the growing rift between the U.S. and Israel over civilian casualties, the length of the conflict, flagging international support for Israel’s campaign, and the future governance of the Gaza Strip.

The U.S. is undertaking a full-court press in the region for the Israelis to begin to wrap up the conflict. U.S. officials have said privately the U.S. wants to see the fight end in weeks, not months, though the Biden administration continues to support Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas’s ability to wage military operations or govern Gaza.

‘I want them to be focused on how to save civilian lives,’ Biden said Thursday afternoon, “not stop going after Hamas, but be more careful.”

This demand is wrong on so many levels. Since when does the U.S. have the right to tell Israel how to fight the war? How does Sullivan know that this change in approach will be more effective in destroying Hamas? In fact, what if “targeted military operations” prolong the war or result in more deaths? Will the U.S. take the blame for that outcome?

The international pressure based on the lies and threats that are being made (let’s not forget that Hamas has said it would repeat the October 7 massacre over, and over, and over again) must be considered carefully. No one wants more than the Israelis for their war with Hamas to be over. But whenever possible, each one of us should try to counteract the U.S. meddling, misinformation and distortions that they seemed determined to pursue. Israel has quite enough controversy to manage with the fighting, the holding of hostages, and the pressures for a cease fire.

When World War II ended, General Eisenhower knew that people would never believe the events of the concentration camps:

80 years ago, when Allied troops liberated the emaciated, diseased skeletal survivors of Nazi concentration camps, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower insisted on having international press see the horrors of the Holocaust with their own eyes to preempt the propaganda of historical denialism. As Eisenhower wrote, “the visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me sick… we made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’

Israel is doing its best to be transparent on the evidence of Hamas activity and Israel’s, too.

Let’s support Israel in managing the war in the best way they can, and call out those who jeopardize Israel’s successful outcome to the war.