As Israel’s air and ground war in Gaza entered its 10th week, Gaza health officials report that nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, with over 50,000 wounded since the conflict began on Oct. 7, following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that killed 1,200 men, women and children and abducted 240 hostages.
On Dec. 15, three Israeli hostages were killed in Gaza by Israeli soldiers. The three were reported to have been shot while walking toward the soldiers despite carrying a white flag and yelling for help in Hebrew. Elsewhere, Palestinian Authority Health Minister Mai al-Kaila has called for an investigation into reports that the Israeli military used bulldozers to crush and bury Palestinians alive, as they raided Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Human Rights Watch has accused the Israeli government of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, depriving Gaza’s 2.3 million residents of food, water, and fuel. Intensive negotiations are underway at the United Nations on a resolution calling for a halt to hostilities to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. On Dec. 12, President Joe Biden departed from his previous public statements by warning that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Samer Badawi, a Palestinian-American writer and a contributor to +972 Magazine. Here, he talks about the power President Biden has to pressure Israel into accepting a ceasefire in Gaza and end the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
SAMER BADAWI: Two-thirds of Americans do not support Israel’s propagation of this war or America’s support of it. And a staggering 70 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 support an immediate ceasefire. This is across the political spectrum in the United States of America.
The reasons why that gap exists, I think, between our lawmakers and the general public come down to a long-held belief that Israel—despite what we’re seeing on our screens today, be it through social media or through the mainstream press—is the only democracy in the Middle East. This is our line of choice when it comes to America’s relationship with that particular country. And this fight has been so ingrained in the psyche of American politicians that anything short of 100 percent backing of the state of Israel is viewed as a betrayal not only of Israel, but of our values as an American people.
And what’s remarkable about this is that what Israel is doing today in Gaza and in the West Bank is actually in direct contradiction to what we stand for as a country.
SCOTT HARRIS: Samer, I did want to ask you about Joe Biden. Just about a week ago, President Biden said very clearly that Israel’s indiscriminate bombing in Gaza is costing Netanyahu and Israel support. And it’s not only Israel that’s losing support, it’s also Joe Biden himself. What power, if any, do you believe that Joe Biden has to force Israel to stand down, just out of humanitarian concerns? Not to mention Biden’s own personal political future.
What do you think Joe Biden could do right now to force a ceasefire and in the long term, get serious about addressing the root causes of this conflict, which go back some 75 years?
SAMER BADAWI: Well, there are two things. The immediate stop that the Biden administration can take is to end all arms supplies to Israel, period. This is not a big stretch into imagination either as as your listeners may know, and I’m sure you do. I mean, there’s a budget stalled in Congress today over funding for two wars—the war in Ukraine and the war on Gaza.
And for the Biden administration to relent on its insistence of sending arms to a military that it has already accused of indiscriminate shelling, that would actually help him politically in terms of his negotiating position, vis a vis Congress in passing this all-important budget. You’re not just talking about a defense budget here. We’re talking about the entire budget of the U.S. government, which has been stalled.
And there are immigration issues as well that we can get into. But the ending those arms sales will have an immediate and dramatic effect on Israel’s ability to perpetuate the killing. When I talk about 14,000 artillery shells, we’re talking about in a context where Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza in the course of two months than Russia dropped on Ukraine in the entirety of that war. And more than the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan in the worst years of that war.
So the Israelis are, to put it quite simply, running out of ammo. And for the United States to cut off, to turn off the spigot would have a dramatic impact on Israel’s ability to continue this war. That’s Number One.
Number Two is that the Biden administration needs to come to terms with the fact that despite what happened on Oct. 7 and we all deplore violence against civilians. I mean, I as a Palestinian, you can imagine I’ve been asked this hundreds of times over the course of the last two months, and I’m sick of repeating it. We deplore the violence.
However, you cannot continue. And, you know, our defense secretary was just in Israel repeating the mantra that Hamas needs to be destroyed.
To destroy Hamas, I mean, it’s clear, it’s evident to everyone now, there’s no path to doing that without destroying the entirety of Gaza and a significant proportion of its people. So we need to let go of this maximalist position and think of ways to to deal, quote unquote, with Hamas from the American position politically, diplomatically and in concert with the Palestinian Authority, which exists in Ramallah today.
So this is the wise way to handle things and it’s the way to immediately put an end to this war.
The problem is that when you insist on destroying Hamas in a context where the Israelis themselves—I mean, if you actually listen to the Israeli media, you’ll hear them saying we are no closer to debilitating Hamas, much less destroying it, than we were two-and-a-half months ago.
And in effect, the only thing the Israelis have to show are all of these deaths on the civilian side. And so, our government to continue to insist that this is the end game is both unrealistic and it’s frankly perpetuating the horror that we all see. So nobody wants to admit, of course, that with American weapons and the largest military in the Middle East that happens to be a nuclear power, they cannot take on this band of 30,000 fighters in Gaza.
But you know what? The same thing happened in Afghanistan after 20 years. So it’s not a stretch of the imagination for us to look at that situation and politically be a little bit more realistic and talk about dealing, quote unquote, again with Hamas over the long-term through a realistic peace process that does not sideline the people of Gaza, but rather puts them at the heart of that process.
And that has been the problem up until this point—is that any talk of Gaza deprives the people of agency, the very people who are being bombed today have no voice in their future. And so long as that continues, we’re going to be back to this starting point again no matter how much the Israelis destroy the place and no matter how many people are killed, because this has happened before.
As I said, I’ve seen it myself in 2009, 2012, and 2014. You always come back to the same place if we deny agency to the people who have the largest stake in seeing a peace emerge from all of this bloodshed.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Samer Badawi (27:24) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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