palestine | Breaking Big Money's Grip on America

On this Yom Kippur, Israel, the United States, Iran and much of the Arab world must repent and change course.

The current war between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran is just the latest chapter in a conflict that has been going on at least since Israel was established by United Nations Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947. Under that resolution, the British protectorate of Palestine was to be divided into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The Arab countries surrounding Israel opposed the resolution and went to war against Israel in 1948.[1]

Israel won that war which resulted in over 700,000 Arabs being forced from their homes in the new Jewish state.[2] It has won several other armed conflicts with their Arab neighbors since then. But the Six-Day War in June 1967 was a turning point. Israel captured the West Bank during that war, and it has been under Israeli military occupation as a national security measure to this day.[3]

While six Arab countries, beginning with Egypt in 1979, have made peace with Israel[4] and normalized relations, hostilities continue with a number of others led by Iran. Backed by a huge amount of U.S. funds and armaments, Israel has been able to deter Arab assaults over the years, with the exception of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

Since then, Israel has gone on the offensive. Its goal now appears to be the complete elimination of all terrorists that threaten Israel. As a result, many thousands of innocent Arabs in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, a great many of them women and children, have been killed, plus thousands more maimed or starved to death, in Israel’s widespread attacks to wipe out its enemies.[5]

The only problem is Israel will never be able to do that militarily. Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari has even admitted as much when he said that Hamas cannot be made to “disappear.”[6] The bottom line is that as long as the Palestinian people are denied their own state as promised in the 1947 U.N. resolution, the fighting will continue.

Unfortunately, the current Israeli government has no intention of agreeing to a two-state solution. It would rather continue killing thousands of innocent Arabs, leave its hostages in the hands of Hamas, have its own people live in constant fear and danger, and be isolated from the rest of the world except for the U.S. Implausibly, the American government seems helpless to do anything to stop this madness despite the fact that it supplies Israel with the means to keep this cycle of death and destruction going.

Meanwhile, 99 American doctors, nurses and other medical personnel who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7, 2023, are urging President Biden and Vice President Harris to “end this madness now.” Estimating the Gaza death toll at over 118,000, they wrote, “Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered by our bullets.”[7]

Consequently, they are demanding of Biden and Harris: “A ceasefire must be imposed on the warring parties by withholding military support for Israel and supporting an international arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups. We believe our government is obligated to do this, both under American law and International Humanitarian Law.”[8]

There’s practically no chance that the Biden administration would agree to this demand. It could, however, immediately halt shipments of all offensive weapons to Israel to pressure Jerusalem to agree to a ceasefire and begin negotiations for a real two-state, lasting peace. While that may not convince Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to change course, it may move the Israeli people to demand elections for a new government.

The Arab world recently made a strong offer that’s gotten little attention but could open the door to those negotiations. Two weeks ago, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi responded to Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is surrounded by those who want to destroy it. Safadi announced at the United Nations that 57 Arab and Muslim countries would unequivocally guarantee Israel’s security if Jerusalem ended the occupation and agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state.[9] Of course, the U.S. would as well.

While getting there will be very difficult, Harris should now state that as president, she would strongly support and work to implement the Arab proposal while continuing to protect Israel. On the anniversary of the October 7^th massacre, Harris affirmed that “We must work to ensure nothing like the horrors of October 7 can ever happen again.”[10] Ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state is the only way to ensure that critical goal.

Bruce Berlin

A retired, public sector ethics attorney, Berlin is a former U.S. Institute of Peace Fellow and the founder and former executive director of The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He is also the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America. (See breakingbigmoneysgrip.com.). Contact him at breakingbigmoneysgrip@gmail.com.

Subscribe to this blog at https://breakingbigmoneysgrip.com/my-blog-3/.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/Arab-Israeli-wars

[2] https://mondediplo.com/1997/12/palestine

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_occupation_of_the_West_Bank#:~:text=The%20West%20Bank%2C%20including%20East,during%20the%20Six%2DDay%20War.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_relations#:~:text=After%20several%20Arab%2DIsraeli%20wars,Morocco%20and%20Sudan)%20normalized%20relations.

[5] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-children-killed-gaza-israeli-military-any-other-recent-conflict; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/10/4/live-israeli-bombs-rain-down-on-lebanons-beirut-gaza-occupied-west-bank

[6] https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/20/middleeast/hagari-netanyahu-destroy-hamas-israel-intl/index.html

[7] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/05/gqob-o05.html

[8] Ibid.

[9] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-10-02/ty-article-opinion/.premium/jordans-foreign-minister-told-israelis-and-inconvenient-truth/00000192-4dc3-d2cc-a5d7-edff907e0000

[10] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/10/07/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-marking-one-year-since-hamas-october-7th-terrorist-attacks/

As a college student in the 1960s, I became so appalled at our government’s prosecution of the Vietnam War that I joined the protests against the war. On April 15, 1967, hundreds of thousands of us marched from New York’s Central Park to the United Nations on the East River in the biggest anti-war rally up until then.[1] But as the war grew, so did the protests. On November 15, 1969, the Moratorium to End the War staged an even larger demonstration in Washington.[2] I was among the protesters at the Pentagon that the police teargassed that day.

Today, as then, college students are spearheading the protest movement against America’s involvement in a costly war. And, similar to President Johnson back then, President Biden is now the primary target of the students’ wrath.

True, there are very significant differences between the two conflicts. Most importantly, no Americans are fighting and dying in Gaza today. Over 58,000 American service people lost their lives in Vietnam.[3]

On the other hand, the Administration’s unconditional support for one side is very similar in both wars. Then the United States was all in with the South Vietnamese. Today, our government fully backs Israel. At the same time, a large segment of the American Jewish community as well as Muslim Americans oppose Biden’s position, making his re-election campaign that much more difficult.

In both cases, however, resistance to our government’s handling of the war grew. By March 31, 1968, the opposition was so great that President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election that fall.[4] While President Biden does not appear to be considering withdrawing his candidacy in this year’s election, the protests on college campuses and beyond have increased, though not to the extent of the Vietnam-era demonstrations; at least, not yet.[5]

The Democrats will hold their National Convention in Chicago this coming August. Ironically, that’s the same city where the Democrats gathered in 1968 to nominate their presidential candidate, and it didn’t go well. Anti-war protesters clashed with the police on national television reminding the voters of the Dems’ responsibility for the quagmire in Vietnam.[6] The Democrats ended up losing the election to Richard Nixon. We could very well see a repeat of that tragic scenario later this year if Biden fails to take decisive action soon to stop the slaughter in Gaza.

Despite the growing protests, as well as the increasing death toll in Gaza, Biden just signed a bill providing another $26 billion for Israel’s war effort. Included in that Israeli figure is over $9 billion in humanitarian aid to Gaza.[7]

At the same time, 55% of Americans now disapprove of Israel’s military actions and only 27% approve of Biden’s handling of the Middle East conflict, according to a March Gallup poll.[8]

While the war is not one of the top concerns of the electorate, in a close election as this year’s is likely to be, Biden could lose critical swing states due to his continued support for Israel’s military aggression. Given this distinct possibility, it’s puzzling that Biden hasn’t done more to stop the slaughter of thousands of innocent Gazans, mostly women and children, and the destruction of their homeland.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently offered this path forward for Biden: stop sending Israel offensive weapons. Kristof noted, “…that would get the attention of the Israel Defense Forces very quickly.” He argued for suspending “the transfer of offensive arms to Israel, pending food actually being delivered to Gaza to end this starvation, and some indication of dialing back the more reckless side of the bombing in Gaza and then push immediately for some kind of a cease-fire and hostage release and, likewise, then try to use that for some kind of an arrangement for a Palestinian state.”[9]

Kristof explained that Biden was right to call out Hamas’s October 7^th attack on Israel as “barbaric and intolerable. But if you only care about human rights for one side in a conflict, then you don’t actually care about human rights. And if you regard the deaths of children on one side of a conflict as a tragedy, as unacceptable, but deaths of children on the other side of the conflict as regrettable, then there is something profoundly wrong not just with your geopolitics but with your moral compass.”[10] While it remains to be seen whether Biden actually gets that, we can only hope that he changes course soon before it’s too late.

However, there is something you can do here at home to try to advance peace between Israel and the Palestinians. At 11:15 a.m. on May 12, a live-streamed Joint Memorial Ceremony will be viewed at the Jean Cocteau Theater in Santa Fe as part of an international event in support of efforts to end the violence and bring freedom and justice to all in the Middle East. I hope to see you there. For more information about the Memorial, go to https://www.afcf.org/2024-joint-memorial-day-ceremony.

Bruce Berlin

A retired, public sector ethics attorney, Berlin is the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America (See breakingbigmoneysgrip.com.), the founder of New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics, a former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow, and the founder and former executive director of The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He can be reached at breakingbigmoneysgrip@gmail.com. Subscribe to this blog at https://breakingbigmoneysgrip.com/my-blog-3/

[1] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/massive-anti-war-demonstrations/

[2] https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/nov-15-1969-anti-vietnam-war-demonstration-held/#:~:text=all%20Historic%20Headlines%20%C2%BB-,On%20Nov.,and%20towns%20across%20the%20country.

[3] https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics#:~:text=April%2029%2C%202008.-,The%20Vietnam%20Conflict%20Extract%20Data%20File%20of%20the%20Defense%20Casualty,casualties%20of%20the%20Vietnam%20War.

[4] https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/lyndon-b-johnsons-decision-not-to-run-in-1968

[5] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pro-palestinian-seders-planned-new-york-other-cities-college-campuses-simmer-2024-04-23/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-mounting-antiwar-protests-on-college-campuses/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=wp_post_reports

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention_protests

[7] https://apnews.com/article/congress-ukraine-israel-pacific-glance-0af96be97c47496f88506a21ebe1ddab#:~:text=%E2%80%94%20About%20%2426%20billion%20for%20supporting,amid%20the%20Israel%2DHamas%20war.

[8] https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx

[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/opinion/biden-morality-gaza-israel.html?action=click&module=audio-series-bar&region=header&pgtype=Article

[10] Ibid.