Deterring a regional war, if that is what US officials are most concerned about, is indeed a legitimate cause. Biden was also right to denounce the war crimes committed by Hamas on 7 October. The massacres of entire families inside their homes, of defenceless party-goers in the middle of a field, culminating in a death toll of more than 1,300, and the abduction of about 200 Israeli and foreign nationals, including children and elderly people – this should all be outright rejected by any decent person. The trauma of the Hamas attack has shaken everyone in Israel to our cores, for many also bringing up distant memories of other massacres of Jews in other places, in different times, and evoking deep fears of annihilation; in that sense Biden is right to reassure Israelis that they should not fear such a scenario.
But military aid and aircraft carriers do not offer long-term security, just as walls, tanks and the world’s most advanced surveillance systems do not – as we Israelis all painfully learned when Hamas broke out of Gaza earlier this month. After showing condolences and sympathy, Biden – and any influential friend of Israel, for that matter – should really be focusing on three basic tasks: holding Israel to account for its own war crimes against Palestinians; reflecting on how those crimes contribute to the lack of security for Israelis themselves; and demanding that Israel go back to peace negotiations, this time ensuring equal footing for Palestinians in a way that would truly guarantee an end to apartheid.
Biden need only live up to his own previous statements. “I believe Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity and democracy,” he said in May 2021. This vision is far from the cruel reality Palestinians are facing when the region is not on the front pages of the international press. Living under a regime that local and international human rights groups and UN reports have described as “apartheid”, Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens within Israel itself, are subjected to a racist and brutal military regime in the West Bank, and are suffocating in the world’s largest open-air prison in the besieged Gaza Strip, which is also routinely bombarded by Israel. The current far-right Netanyahu government has but exacerbated the policies of its predecessors. Palestinians have been getting everything but an “equal measure” of anything under this criminal system….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/19/israel-president-joe-biden-violence
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
No Path to Ending Bloodshed If Palestinian Rights Continue to Be Denied
We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza
Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself
Netanyahu’s deliberate extremism has failed
Haaretz Editorial: Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War
Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Belgian Minister Says What Biden Won’t: Israel Is Wiping Entire Palestinian Villages Off the Map
After the truth-shower 