Gaza, Biden’s Aphasia

What’s happening in Gaza, what’s happening in Israel, what will happen in the Middle East? For five months now, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has escalated into a new, unprecedented war. Both in terms of duration and absence of an exit plan. For Prime Minister Netanyahu, the exit strategy has only one outcome: the destruction of Hamas and the annihilation of any Palestinian ambitions for creating a state of their own. Netanyahu’s tough stance takes into account his personal political fragility, which makes him almost certain to concede the first postwar electoral confrontation. Initiating predictable legal consequences against him for policies even before the unprecedented October 7 Hamas attack.

But if the continued offensive against Hamas militants, which is costing the lives of a frightening number of civilians, including thousands of children, is seen by the Prime Minister as the only way to stay in power, is alarming the astonishing inability to be influenced by those abroad who have supported him over the past twenty years.

The United States and the European Union have accepted the drift that has led a country with democratic traditions, such as Israel, down the slippery slope of extremism. Beginning with the death of Rabin – assassinated by a right-wing extremist at a time when a two-State agreement was within reach, nearly half a century ago – Israeli parties have been attracted to an increasingly fundamentalist conception of the Arab-Israeli question. In parallel with the strengthening of the role of orthodox leaders and the development of settler settlements. A dynamic that is reaffirmed even at this dark moment in the history of a country that has been looked upon with admiration in the past.

If Leon Poliakov, in his cyclopean work on anti-Semitism, taught what purgatory Jewish communities have been subjected to over the centuries, the news of recent years gives us a crude and militaristic interpretation of the establishment of an Israeli State. Abraham Yehoshua’s efforts at clarification, which fifteen years ago still helped to understand those “concepts to be clarified,” which were and are Jewish, Israeli, Zionist, today struggle to reconcile with hostility and prejudice.

The denial of the other in a contested space works in the mind, secular or otherwise, against the just cause of the security of the Jewish people and their state. Half a century ago, Poliakov got to the bottom of the origins of the Jews’ happy introduction into the social fabric of the United States, which encouraged them to cultivate “their remarkable and sometimes aggressive boldness, their flattering image of themselves, and their unreserved adoration, with spontaneous naivete, of their new motherland”.

In today’s Europe, locked in a straitjacket of crossed vetoes and latent fears of a pro-Nazi resurgence or Islamic terrorism, there is the occasional voice of some governments, such as Spain’s, that threaten to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. But the most authoritative voice capable of calling a self-righteous prime minister like Netanyahu to order will be, more than ever, America’s voice. The voice of Washington. But Biden’s White House, despite urging from authoritative voices in the Democratic Party, is speaking out late and weakly. And, above all, with alternating current. Occasional criticisms of Netanyahu have been followed by major decisions, such as his repeated veto at the UN of a ceasefire in Gaza.

The Israel lobby has a very strong influence on American politics, argued two prestigious historians from Chicago and Harvard, such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in an insightful 2007 essay. The partisan controversy that followed the publication helped spread the book without affecting the historical reconstruction at its core. One of the hundreds of quotes provided applies to everyone, this one by Henry Kissinger: “I ask Rabin to make concessions (to the Palestinians – ed.), and he says he can’t because Israel is weak. So, I give him more weapons, and he says there is no point in making concessions because Israel is strong.”

Fifty years have passed, from Nixon to Biden, from Rabin to Netanyahu, but Washington’s “shyness” has remained the same.