Photo: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
As Beirut burns under Israel’s bombs, it is obvious for anyone who is paying attention that America has long incubated the emergence of the worst possible version of Israel. Decades of U.S. foreign policy have rewarded and accelerated a downward trajectory of genocidal politics and actions in both Israeli society and government. And now, with the full backing of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Israel is driving wave after wave of escalating violence in its ongoing push to eliminate any opposition to the continued expansion of a Jewish state in lands where millions of Palestinian, Lebanese, and other people already live.
The Israel that we see today is the worst of all potential outcomes, a chauvinist, racist, and genocidal country that perceives Christian and Muslim Arabs as bodies to be crushed and destroyed. This ugly reality is the direct result of decades of massive military subsidies and political support by the United States. Without this support, Israel would have had to compromise with their neighbors years ago.
U.S. support for Israel has totally insulated Israeli political elites from any consequences for their actions. As a result, Israeli society has now become a horrifying case study in the politics of genocide. Today, Zionist Israeli officials even call Palestinian infants “terrorists,” while Israeli snipers in Gaza put bullets in Palestinian children’s hearts and heads. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers openly daydream about Zionist colonization of Palestinian and Lebanese land. And as a reward for driving these genocidal politics, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has achieved newfound popularity among voters.
At every step along the way, Biden and Harris have rewarded these political developments with more weapons and supportive pro-Israel propaganda. The most recent utterance of support for Israel came during Harris’s interview on the U.S. news program “60 Minutes,” when she once again repeated her empty talking points about Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
The latest waves of destructive violence can all be traced back to recent U.S. efforts to shape a new geopolitical reality for the Middle East that lacked any real democratic support from the societies affected. Under the framework of the Abraham Accords, both the Trump and Biden administrations have sought to build public alliances between Israel and the neighboring oil monarchies of the Middle East.
This ongoing effort has come at a real cost to Palestinians. If Israel could establish full diplomatic relations with its neighboring dictators, it could get away with continuing its destruction of Palestinian society without any regional diplomatic cost. Of course, the only society that had any say in this matter was that of the Israeli electorate that put Netanyahu in office. Every other government in the region that participated in the Abraham Accords — including Morocco, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates — is fundamentally undemocratic.
It was in the context of this Palestinian marginalization under the Abraham Accords that Yahya Sinwar of Hamas launched the violent October 7 attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. Because the U.S. pushed an Abraham Accords agenda that would further enshrine apartheid, Hamas played the only real card that it holds: attacking Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Israel then began mass bombardment of Gaza, which it quickly escalated into a full-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, with a stated goal of destroying both Hamas and the Palestinian people. Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis responded along the way by staging their own attacks on Israel and Israeli interests. Israel’s further escalations — killing Hamas political leader Ismael Haniyeh inside Iran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon — drove two calculated rounds of Iranian missile attacks on Israel.
The ultimate driver for all of this violence is U.S. foreign policy. There are many actors in the Middle East with their own agendas, and Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas all have blood on their hands, including for what Iran and Hezbollah separately perpetrated in Syria. But the violence we see today across the Middle East is fundamentally driven by U.S. interventions in the region. These interventions, ranging from diplomatic initiatives like the Abraham Accords to the never-ending blank check of U.S. military support for Israel, all serve to protect Israel from the pressure and costs it would normally face for its oppression of Palestinians.
The simple reality is that U.S. foreign policy remains just as bloody and horrific as it has always been. In earlier decades, “acceptable” losses included the 1 to 2 million civilians killed in Vietnam, another million dead in Indonesia, the carnage of U.S.-backed dictators across Latin America, and the hundreds of thousands killed during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Today’s U.S. military and diplomatic interventions in the Middle East are no different.
To end Israel’s horrific actions in the Middle East, we must change the politics of America itself. This is no easy task, given the robust power and influence of pro-Israel — and pro-war — networks, donors, and lobbying groups inside the U.S. But it is the task at hand, and it should be the focus of every person of conscience, both within and outside the borders of the United States. As has been true in other regions of the world, U.S. foreign policy is the fundamental obstacle to justice, democracy, and peace in the Middle East.
