US Secretary of State Antony Blinken penned an editorial in The Washington Post titled "Defending Israel is essential. So is aiding civilians of Gaza" on 31 October 2023. While making sure that Israel's interests are not compromised, the editorial seeks to defend Israel's continuous aggression and massacres in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories.
Blinken ignores the fact that Israel, the occupier of all of Palestine since the Great Catastrophe (Nakba) of 1948, is killing civilians in Gaza and controlling the entire region. Benjamin Netanyahu is portraying Vladimir Putin in the context of two distinct geopolitical aggressions and wars; these details are also omitted from the article, as is Israel's role towards the Palestinians. Blinken did not point out that Israel is now acting as the neo-Nazi terror hub of the world by committing Palestine Holocaust.
Blinken describes funding for Israel and Ukraine as ‘essential to America's national security,’ but he does not denounce Israel's ongoing indiscriminate bombing of besieged Gaza since Hamas' attack on October 7. As of 6 November 2023, there have been 97,770 deaths from the Palestinian holocaust. Over 18,000 tons of bombs were dropped by Israel between October 7 and October 31, 1.5 times more than that were dropped on Hiroshima of Japan during the World War II, according to a report by the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees. A total 32,500 buildings were completely demolished by Israeli bombs and missiles – thereby destroying 200,000 houses. The UN also stated that the Israeli bombing severely damaged 230 schools, 12 hospitals, 3 churches, and 47 mosques.
US Secretary Blinken deftly sidesteps responsibility for Israel and assigns the blame for Gaza's problems to Hamas, stating, "They are its victims." Since international law recognises the resistance of oppressed nations, political science suggests that most blame should be placed on the occupying and aggressor states. Many academics and scholars have argued that violence is an occupier's tactic, and the Zionist movement has played a major role in the resistance movement against Israel. This resistance theory is a product of the work of Frantz Fanon, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Talal Asad, and Ilan Pappe.
Palestinians still carry mental wounds from the massacre of their people during the establishment of Israel. Aggression and possession will only exacerbate the injury and not heal it. Israel is developing, testing, and deploying lethal weapons and surveillance technology in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza. Israel uses the civilians of the Gaza Strip as test subjects for developing weaponry and anti-human surveillance technology that it then sells to governments across the globe, according to Antony Loewenstein's book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation. Rights groups accuse Israel of grave human rights violations; China, India, and Myanmar are involved in the purchase of these weapons from Israel.
The US administration recently launched the Abraham Accord, deliberately avoiding addressing the Palestinian issue, following Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital despite the international community, including the UN, recognising East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. The Israeli government is building on land that it regularly occupies, disregarding laws, regulations, and other international norms. Palestinian dwellings are being bulldozed down or occupied as the process of European Jewish settlement in Israel continues. Israel's misdeeds are openly supported or tolerated by post-colonial Europe, which has opened the agency of human rights despite its brutal colonial legacies. The irony is that the ongoing pogroms in Palestine and that of the Jewish people are similar, but the West refuses to acknowledge this.
Secretary Blinken repeated the Israeli narrative of pathetic justifications for genocide in the OP-ED. Israel has not made any effort to preserve the lives of defenseless Gaza residents. Although Hamas is described as using civilians as human shields, it was founded by Israel to apply the 'divide and rule' strategy during the height of Yasser Arafat's Fatah's popularity, according to VOX. After the Gaza people elected Hamas, Israel designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation because it did not use Hamas when necessary and because it used its military branch to launch resistance.
Today's Gazans are mostly descendants of martyred family members who were driven from their homeland since 1948 by Israel's ruthless persecution. Why should Hamas's responsibility fall on the shoulders of Gazans? It is not necessary to use phosphorus or carpet bombs to kill people randomly in order to defeat Hamas. Rather, this barbaric state initiative to impose collective punishment might increase support for Hamas. Blinken, who is also a citizen of Israel by his birthright as a Jew, wants to blame Hamas for attacks on civilian places of residence, including hospitals, but never once spoke of a head-on war against Hamas by combining Israel's latest weapons and surveillance technology. Instead, Israel gave in to suspicion and attacked mosques, hospitals, residential buildings, schools, even Christian churches, and the Al-Maghazi refugee camp without considering this psyche. The Zionists' inability to lure Jews from other nations, including Europe, to Israel with fictitious assurances of security may prevent them from discussing the precarious state of Israel's iron dome anti-missile system.
In contrast to the Biden administration's policy, Blinken advocates for acceptance of the "Humanitarian Pause" process in this article. If he had intended to end the war for humanitarian purposes alone, he would have started the 'ceasefire.' Nevertheless, just as President Biden "talked about humanitarian aid, not stopping the war," Blinken said as much. Israel's repressive policies must end in order to eradicate Hamas, and Palestine's right to exist as an independent state on its territory must be ensured. Blinken's statement that "preventing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is vital to Israel's security" is stated for Israel's security rather than out of humanitarian sympathy for the besieged population.
The Biden administration's failure to offer Palestinian citizens equal support was not criticized in the opinion piece. The US superpower's reputation as the moral authority in the world is being severely damaged by the Biden administration's refusal to give Palestinians the same financial support and sympathy as Israeli citizens. In order to ensure that aid does not end up in the hands of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, Blinken's editorial focuses on providing humanitarian aid to Gaza while respecting Israel's interests. He does not, however, elaborate on how he would make sure that Israel's indiscriminate bombardment targets only Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Pressure from strong Zionist lobbies to support Israel and criticism from US taxpayers for supporting genocide committed by IDF has left many in the current US administration—including Blinken—in mental agony. Blinken's writing does not tackle the problem of Israel's colonialist mindset, which was established in 1948 through the murder of native Palestinians and the confiscation of their property, according to Jewish scholars like Ilan Pappe and Norman J. Finkelstein. Why Israel still evicts Palestinians, burns or plunders their crops, destroys their homes with bulldozers, and uses police and military force to kill them is not addressed by him.
The purpose of Blinken's opinion piece is to defend Israel's interests and brainwash the American public. The Zionist lobby group is always active in influencing US foreign policy, according to Dr. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. There is no alternative but to create, accept, and put into effect laws protecting the oppressed for the sake of peace in order to free the US from the influence of Christian Zionist and Zionist lobby groups.
Taking charge of the world is not an easy task, and no superpower can endure being narrow-minded, repressive, or indifferent to the pleas and cries of the oppressed. The way that the United States of America responds to oppressors in the calling of oppressed people to save humanity will determine its ability to maintain its position as the world's dominant power. The Palestinian people are the litmus test for all humankind, including the US and EU leaders. Suppose, they will not take the necessary steps to ceasefire right now and save civilians of occupied Palestine from being exterminated by Israeli forces. In that case, history will put their names beside Hiter and Netanyahu, two notorious war criminals.
The writer is a researcher
Messenger/Alamin
