When Democrats and Republicans Agree on Foreign Policy, Violence Often Results

Before a multi-course dinner at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented President Donald Trump with a copy of a letter nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize. “He is forging peace as we speak,” Netanyahu remarked to the TV cameras.

Earlier this year, Trump likewise praised Netanyahu “for pursuing the peace process.” He did not endorse him for an award, but he often compliments his “good friend” on his efforts to create a better world.

The affection both men apparently have for each other is rivaled only by the love Netanyahu demonstrated to former President Joe Biden during an address to a joint session of the US Congress “for his efforts” to broker a hostage deal. After nearly two years, hostages are still languishing in captivity.

Biden reportedly gave Netanyahu a signed photograph of himself. The inscription on it is said to have read “I love you, Bibi, even though I don’t agree with a damn thing you’ve said.”

As touching as this festival of manly mutual admiration appears to be, it is cynical and grotesque political theater. Behind the Trump and Biden playacting is a long bipartisan practice of frequently underwriting allies’ violent crimes against defenseless populations, all in violation of international humanitarian law. Providing diplomatic cover has been a common service for favorites ranging from the Somoza family in Nicaragua to the Shah of Iran.

The proxies’ religious affiliation is immaterial. For Washington DC, the issuing of blank checks to those whose interests align with those of the United States is simply policy. There is no limit to the number of corpses that could ever trigger those checks to stop coming unless the clients become inconvenient or display disobedience.

It is important to note that in his inscription, Biden only disagreed with what Netanyahu said, not the acts that his government has authored. The doddering Biden, like the execrable Trump, prefers that we live in an upside-down world where hideous crimes are not named at all. They should instead be described as occasionally friendly disagreements in the tireless pursuit of peace. George Orwell and Franz Kafka could scarcely have imagined it.

Gaza now has the largest population of child amputees in the world. As of January, there were 4,000 of them, but that was seven months ago. Many have since died excruciating deaths. Others have more recently become amputees. Many of them will also die soon for lack of food, water, and medicine, which have been severely restricted by something like an imperial decree.

Over 5,000 Gazan children were diagnosed with malnutrition in May, and more than 600 suffered from severe acute malnutrition that month. That is the stage of hunger right before death, and many have already perished from starvation. If they had living parents, mothers and fathers witnessed their wasting.

As I mentioned, this is all unambiguously illegal. The Geneva Conventions, a set of international laws that govern nations’ actions in time of conflict, state that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.” It also forbids “attack[ing], destroy[ing], remov[ing] or render[ing] useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, … crops, livestock, [and] drinking water installations.”

Punishing the civilian population was announced from the start and has been done explicitly for almost two years to people who were not a party to any crimes against Israelis on October 7. It is difficult to imagine what terrorist acts thousands of men, women, and children who have nothing to do with Hamas may have committed, but they are nevertheless punished in ways that defy imagination.

Collective punishment and forced population transfers are also grave crimes under international law, yet both are enthusiastically championed from the White House, where, during that dinner, Netanyahu complimented Trump on his “vision” to forcibly remove two million starving, suffering people to an undetermined location. Perhaps they can live in a refugee camp on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Netanyahu called it a “free choice.” Incarceration in squalid detention or a slow death from starvation is, he would have us believe, a form of freedom. Again, this is language worthy of Orwell’s accounts of a dystopian society.

After a brief ceasefire ended last March, the Israeli Defense Forces have continued to bomb and shoot civilians. The United Nations reports that 50,000 children have been killed or injured since the beginning of hostilities, and over 100 are admitted for treatment due to malnutrition every day. Aid distribution sites have become killing fields. Despite the congratulatory rhetoric at the White House, peace is nowhere in sight.

Describing violations of law as debatable or antisemitic is absurd and testimony to an effective doctrinal system that both US political parties unceasingly maintain. Their collective and often contrived anger directed at those who describe facts on the ground in Gaza should tell us what they think about a humane foreign policy, a topic about which they spare no effort to lecture others.

With US support from both sides of the aisle, like Democrat Cory Booker, who sometimes raises feeble objections and often does not even do that, to Republican Lindsey Graham, who openly called for the evisceration of Gaza, as well as their respectively moribund political leadership, the dismemberment and starvation of innocent people continue unimpeded.

The contrast is striking. As two well-fed, corrupt old men dined at the White House and congratulated each other on their virtues, children starved to death in front of their parents.

History will not be kind to either US political party, whose major areas of agreement often deepen the suffering of vilified people.

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