In a landmark piece of reporting out this week in New York magazine, the journalist Suzy Hansen observes that,
The Democrats allowed themselves to be dragged into lawlessness by Netanyahu and his virulently racist Cabinet members like [Finance minister Bezalel] Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Even as the U.S. undergoes a reckoning about [President] Biden’s age, few have asked how his senility affected his direction of U.S. policy in Gaza. Instead, administration veterans keep repeating that the one area in which Biden remained engaged was foreign policy, as if those policies were actually good ones and not flawed, cataclysmic, or potentially criminal.
Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken lent unconditional support for a mass slaughter that has, since October 7, 2023, taken the lives of over 56,000 and wounded another 127,000. But those conservative estimates are those of the Gaza Health Ministry. The medical journal The Lancet estimates that the death toll could be as high as 186,000.
Keep in mind that is far short of the goal set by Smotrich of starving 2 million Palestinians to death.
The silence with which Democratic lawmakers have met the genocide has been deafening. (On the Right opposition to Israeli aggression has been mainly confined to independent media figures such as Tucker Carlson and the stalwarts of the Libertarian anti-war movement—National Review, The Dispatch, The Bulwark and the rest of the neocon gang can’t seem to wallow in enough blood, while so-called “national conservatives” or nat-cons have been just as bad.)
Now into the mix comes Israel’s illegal and unjustified sneak attack on Iran.
The official story being floated by the Trump administration is nonsensical. We are to believe on the one hand that, as the dual-hatted Macro Rubio put it, the US was “not involved” in Israel’s “unilateral” strikes on Iran. On the other hand, the President told ABC news that “We gave them a chance and they didn’t take it.”
So, which is it—were we or were we not involved?
Frankly, no one believes that Israel possesses the capability to carry out such strikes in the absence of US military refueling, targeting, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support. The attacks prove, if nothing else, that the neocon influence within the administration, in spite of reports that the NSC was being purged of Iran hawks and obvious Israeli operatives, remains a powerful one.
It is true that the President is beset from all sides by a powerful band of pro-Israel voices that includes his son-in-law; media thugs such as Mark Levin and Rupert Murdoch; donors such as Miriam Adelson (who donated $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign); and virulently pro-Israeli operatives in sensitive positions inside the State Department (one in particular on the Policy Planning staff). Allowing them to drown out more sensible voices, the President risks repeating the one mistake each of his predecessors since 1992 have made: That of equating the demands of the Israeli far-right (and its wondrously well funded lobby here in Washington) for the American interest.
Yet he seems in the process of making just that mistake. At a meeting of the G7 in Calgary on Monday Trump pointedly refused to sign a statement by the leaders urging Israel to de-escalate. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is calling for the elimination of the Iranian Supreme Leader while Iran is urgently seeking a return to talks.
Which side seems more reasonable?
If America First is to mean anything, Mr. Trump must pull Washington and, importantly, Netanyahu, back from the abyss of another Middle East war of choice.
Reprinted with permission from Realist Review.
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