Photo: Amos Ben-Gershom(GPO)/Handout/Anadolu/Getty Images
For anyone paying attention, it is now abundantly clear that the U.S.-led Gaza ceasefire talks have become a tool for the perpetuation of Israel’s genocidal war. What began as a liberatory demand by Rep. Cori Bush and grassroots peace advocates has now been fully co-opted by President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The so-called ceasefire negotiations are a form of camouflage that is being deployed by Biden and Harris to distract from the reality of their support for Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza.
To even use the word “ceasefire” to describe what the Biden administration is pursuing is itself a form of linguistic violence. The latest draft “ceasefire” proposal announced by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken essentially endorses continued Israeli occupation of Gaza with no permanent cessation of war. But even this was apparently too much of a concession for Netanyahu, which is why he reportedly continues to undermine it. Meanwhile, it was just one week ago that the State Department announced the sale of another $20 billion in U.S. weapons to Israel.
The bad-faith terms of the latest proposal are just the beginning. Hamas is unlikely to agree to the terrible new conditions that Blinken has put on the table, and that rejection will in turn enable Biden, Harris, Blinken, and Netanyahu to further blame Hamas for “rejecting peace.” This will then buy Netanyahu more time to continue bombing, starving, and killing Palestinians. Then the cycle will repeat itself again, with Blinken soon returning to the Middle East for yet another round of so-called ceasefire negotiations, while the U.S. continues to send Israel even more weapons for its war.
Breaking this cynical cycle requires getting honest about Biden and Harris’s roles in this blood-soaked charade. While Biden is ultimately responsible for America’s full-tilt support for Israel’s violence, Harris has repeatedly supported the president’s continued arming of Israel. And through a fraudulent and never-ending ceasefire negotiation process, both Biden and Harris have enabled the broader Democratic Party to avoid acknowledging the horrifying reality of their own leaders’ responsibility for a genocide.
One of the worst examples of this came earlier this week, whenm progressive icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood at the podium of the Democratic National Convention on Monday and wrongly praised Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.” Ocasio-Cortez offered Democratic voters the seductive fiction of Harris as a vice president who is doing something other than enabling the continued supply of U.S. weapons for the daily massacre of Palestinian civilians. By doing so, Ocasio-Cortez became a willing political accomplice to the Biden/Harris policy of supporting Israel’s genocidal war.
One driving force for all of this is the pro-Israel lobby, with its vast network of high-net-worth donors. Many politicians stick to the lobby’s talking points in order to avoid its guillotine. They would rather pretend that something positive is happening than face the wrath that Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush experienced when that same pro-Israel donor network deployed millions of dollars to defeat them in their recent Democratic primaries.
These pro-Israel lobbying groups and donor networks have built a bipartisan reality of pro-Israel U.S. politicians who now enable the worst impulses in Israeli politics, culture, and society. Israel does not have to come to terms with its own genocidal mania because its sugar daddy, the United States, will protect it from all consequences. And despite this, or perhaps because of it, Biden and Harris are able to continue to posture as brokers of peace while sending billions of dollars in weapons to Israel’s soldiers. To believe that Biden, Harris, and Blinken can (or will) push for a real ceasefire is to accept the fantasy that they can be advocates for peace when they are already the primary enablers of genocide.
This fantasy has deep roots that go back to the so-called Oslo peace process, which gave Israel decades of time to steal Palestinian land and expand its borders by building Jewish Israeli settlements across the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani recently spelled all of this out when he described the current ceasefire talks as “an Oslo process for genocide … Just as Oslo served as the essential fig leaf enabling Israel to intensify settlement expansion and annexationist policies, while Washington ran interference for Israel with a ‘peace process’ designed to go nowhere.”
Peace advocates who continue to call for a ceasefire now risk becoming props for the Biden/Harris playbook. The broader American public will likely find it difficult to differentiate between an activist demand for a ceasefire and the politicians who nod in duplicitous agreement while enabling the opposite. By using the same abused word, the difference between what peace advocates are calling for and what the Biden administration is actually doing becomes harder to understand.
To believe that Biden and Harris push for a real ceasefire is to accept the fantasy that they can be advocates for peace when they are already the primary enablers of genocide.
The blunt reality is that Biden and Harris must be pushed to enact a full arms embargo on Israel and end U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That may seem too politically difficult to achieve, but to continue to talk of ceasefires is to unwittingly enable Israel’s genocide by failing to accurately describe what the U.S. is actually doing.
So long as Kamala Harris and her surrogates have the freedom to stand at a DNC podium and pretend that they are pushing for peace, it will be easy for Biden and Harris to continue supporting the slaughter of Palestinians. If Harris is elected as the next president of the United States, no one should expect that U.S. foreign policy will magically change. Without external pressure, a Harris White House is likely to continue supporting Israel’s destruction of Palestinian society, all while proudly waving the banner of “peace.”