Gaza and American politics

This essay by Annelle Sheline, a State Department official who resigned in protest over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy, raises indirectly a number of practical questions:

Across the federal government, employees like me have tried for months to influence policy, both internally and, when that failed, publicly. My colleagues and I watched in horror as this administration delivered thousands of precision-guided munitions, bombs, small arms and other lethal aid to Israel and authorized thousands more, even bypassing Congress to do so. We are appalled by the administration’s flagrant disregard for American laws that prohibit the US from providing assistance to foreign militaries that engage in gross human rights violations or that restrict the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The Biden administration’s own policy states, “The legitimacy of and public support for arms transfers among the populations of both the United States and recipient nations depends on the protection of civilians from harm, and the United States distinguishes itself from other potential sources of arms transfers by elevating the importance of protecting civilians.” Yet this noble statement of policy has been directly in contradiction with the actions of the president who promulgated it.

President Joe Biden himself indirectly admits that Israel is not protecting Palestinian civilians from harm. Under pressure from some congressional Democrats, the administration issued a new policy to ensure that foreign military transfers don’t violate relevant domestic and international laws.

Yet just recently, the State Department ascertained that Israel is in compliance with international law in the conduct of the war and in providing humanitarian assistance. To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians.

Some have argued that the US lacks influence over Israel. Yet Retired Israeli Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick noted in November that Israel’s missiles, bombs and airplanes all come from the US. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting,” he said. “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Those who agree that the Biden administration’s policy in re Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza is indefensible, and that another Trump administration’s policy would be even worse — it’s hard for me to imagine how any progressive can disagree with either of those propositions — face a conundrum: How far can criticism of/resistance to the Biden administration’s policies in this area go before they begin as a practical matter to become radically perverse, by making it more likely that Trump will be re-elected, with disastrous consequences not only for America in general, but for America’s Israel/Palestine policy in particular?

The easy answers here are:

(1) You can’t let practical political considerations interfere with protesting/resisting a moral atrocity on the scale of what’s now happening in Gaza every day.

(2) You can’t let outrage over the moral atrocity happening in Gaza right now interfere in any way with the overwhelming importance of the goal of making sure Trump isn’t re-elected.

These answers are easy and also wrong.

The right answer — criticizing/resisting the Biden administration’s indefensible ongoing support of the invasion/occupation, while doing so in a way that doesn’t go too far in terms of making it more likely that Trump will be re-elected — is easy to put into words, and very difficult to put into action.

Annelle Sheline is trying to answer that question in a concrete way.