The Biden administration takes a page out of the Mike Pompeo playbook:
The U.S. has deemed Israel in compliance with U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security memorandum stipulating that recipients of U.S. weapons must be in compliance with international law, nor may they block the provision of humanitarian assistance.
This is very much like what Pompeo did as Trump’s Secretary of State when he certified that the Saudis and the UAE were taking action to reduce civilian harm in Yemen. Everyone could see that Pompeo was lying, and there was plenty of evidence that the Saudi coalition was recklessly bombing civilian targets, but the certification allowed the weapons to keep flowing. In this case, the only difference is that the Biden administration first asked the Israeli government to provide assurances that they would abide by international law and then took their word for it when they gave the assurances.
No one paying attention to how Israel has waged this war can take these promises seriously. There is overwhelming evidence that the Israeli military has not been complying with international law in how it conducts its operations and how it uses U.S.-made weapons. There are numerous reports confirming that Israel has been impeding and blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid. 14 major NGOs have said that Israel is not in compliance. As Oxfam and Human Rights Watch documented at length, Israeli assurances are neither credible nor reliable. The Biden administration’s claim of Israeli compliance is nonsense.
Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International commented on the news:
Yet on the same day [as the UNSCR], @SecBlinken determines inexplicably that Israel’s behavior is in compliance with US law on civilian protection and humanitarian access. Whatever good the UN Resolution does is offset by this. Just mystifyingly incoherent policy.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
No matter who our Misleader In Chief is, they let Israel and Saudi Arabia off the hook. Biden may tell Netanyahu not to do this or that but he won’t cut off aid to Israel. Trump will say he approves of whatever Israel is doing and will continue aid.
Trump excused Saudi Arabia for killing Washington Post Journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden would have done the same thing.
Oligarchy.
Duh! I continue to insist that this genocide will only be stopped when Israel is militarily destroyed and all Zionists are driven out of the entire area of Palestine (and preferably killed).
Wow. Well, I wouldn’t want to be your enemy.
Correct.
I’m not really the killing kind of guy. It’s a dirty business that, while I am not above many human weaknesses, I definitely regard beneath me.
Zionism as such however (also beneath me) I regard as an evil that will inevitably go the way of institutions as slavery or colonialism and institutional racism, nazism, Apartheid and such as a clear undeniable evil that goes without saying is condemned unreservedly by any properly civil person. As was the case for each and everyone of those institutions in the past, a lot of impressive intellectual labor of well educated people was spend to uphold and defend the indefensible. This is regrettably still the case with Zionism. And equally this will lead to deep and learned analyses in the future as to how so many people could be so wrong for so long.
There’s always someone in power, and those at the top are rarely good under any system. India and China have nationalism. India wants to cleanse Kashmir, learns from Israel how to achieve that.
The most important lesson might be Elon Musk implanting a chip into a human brain. That’ll change the world. We might see an end to nationalism and even to humanity, replaced by something man-made. Is this better or worse? It’s just change, worse in my view though.
If dealing with just humans though, radical ideology tends to replace nationalism. It’s not necessarily better, just different. There are arguments for and against most any value or system.