Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
On any given day during the long war in Gaza, a Biden administration official could be expected to assert any of the following: a cease-fire was around the corner, the United States was working tirelessly to achieve one, it cared equally about the Israelis and the Palestinians, a historic Saudi-Israeli normalization deal was at hand, and all this was bound up with an irreversible path to Palestinian statehood.
Not one of those pronouncements bore even a loose resemblance to the truth. Talks about a cease-fire dragged on, and when they fitfully bore fruit, the resulting understandings quickly fell apart. The United States refrained from doing the one thing—conditioning or halting the military aid to Israel that kept the fire from ceasing—that might have made it happen. Taking that step was also the one thing that might have demonstrated, beyond platitudes, a U.S. commitment to protecting both Israeli and Palestinian lives. Saudi Arabia kept repeating that normalization with Israel depended on progress toward a Palestinian state, and the Israeli government consistently ruled such progress out. The more time went on, the more U.S. statements were exposed as empty words, met with disbelief or indifference. That did not stop them from being made. Did U.S. policymakers believe what they said? If not, why did they keep saying it? And if they did, how could they ignore so much contrary evidence staring them in the face?
The falsehoods served as cover for a policy that enabled Israel’s ferocious attacks on Gaza and hailed the most modest, fleeting improvement in the situation in the Palestinian enclave as the product of American humanitarianism and resolve. Israel’s brutality worsened under the Trump administration, but those earlier falsehoods had paved the way. They helped normalize Israel’s indiscriminate killings; its targeting of hospitals, schools, and mosques; its use of access to food as a weapon of war; and its continued reliance on American weapons. They laid the ground and there was no turning back.
The deceit was not new. Its roots stretch back well before the war in Gaza and extend well beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It became a habit. For decades, the United States dissembled about its stance toward the conflict, posing as a mediator when it was an outright partisan. It dissembled when it helped put together a “peace process” that did far more to perpetuate and solidify the status quo than to upend it. It dissembled when it portrayed its broader Middle East policy as promoting democracy and human rights. It dissembled when it claimed success even as its efforts yielded serial disaster.
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