The US Enables Israel’s Man-Made Famine in Gaza

 

The latest victim of the man-made famine in Gaza was a seven-month old child, Fayez Abu Ataya

by Daniel Larison 

Posted onJune 2, 2024

A veteran State Department official, Stacy Gilbert, resigned from the department this month to protest the administration’s policy and the department’s false claims that Israel isn’t blocking aid. She spoke to Akbar Shahid Ahmed about her resignation:

“It drives me crazy when people say, ‘You’re so principled for resigning,’” Gilbert said. “You can’t work in the government that long and be completely principled but I’m practical. I understand compromises and that there are trade-offs. But in the end, I know the difference between right and wrong. What happened in this report is wrong, and this report is being used to justify continuing to do what we’ve been doing.”

It was obvious that the department’s conclusions in the report were wrong. No one could look at the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza for months and then honestly say that it has not been blocking the delivery of aid. If the department had followed the evidence and the recommendations of its own experts, it would have had to admit that Israel was violating international law and it would have had to conclude that U.S. arms transfers could not continue. As Gilbert says, the department leadership chose to twist the facts and make a “patently, demonstrably, quantifiably false” claim that Israel isn’t blocking aid when everyone could see that they are.

The National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM-20) report was the result of a process that the White House created as a sop to Democratic critics in Congress. Like Biden’s so-called red line, it was set up to create the false impression that there was some limit to what the administration would tolerate from the Israeli government. In both cases, the president had no intention of imposing any penalties, and the administration has done whatever it could to avoid reaching conclusions that might lead to penalties. As Sarah Harrison correctly pointed out when the process started, “it isn’t obvious how, in the context of Israel, this policy avoids being another performative measure, creating additional processes that keep policymakers and lawyers in the bureaucracy busy while maintaining the status quo with respect to arms transfers.”

The final report confirmed that the entire exercise was a farce. The administration asked the Israeli government for assurances that they weren’t violating international law, the Israeli government duly gave its non-credible, unreliable assurances, and the administration accepted them at face value. Faced with a mountain of evidence that Israel’s assurances were meaningless, the administration simply ignored it. No wonder more people are resigning in protest. What is the point of putting in the work of documenting violations when the leadership is going to give Netanyahu a pass anyway? Gilbert commented on the department’s whitewash, “It just doesn’t matter… We could have AI write the report because it is not informed by reality or context or the informed opinions of subject matter experts.”

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2024/06/02/the-us-enables-israels-man-made-famine-in-gaza/