In an eleven-minute video on his substack page, CUNY journalism professor and frequent news commentator Peter Beinart passionately picks apart Secretary of State Blinken’s responses on the Gaza war, during the exit interview conducted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro for the NY Times Magazine (in the YouTube recording, they begin to discuss Israel at moment 24:45). In what’s really a critique of the Biden administration’s relationship with Israel during this post October 7th period of war, Beinart effectively points out how lame US policy has appeared in exhorting humanitarian relief efforts for the people of Gaza while forgoing its obvious leverage as Israel’s primary arms supplier.
Garcia-Navarro’s tough questioning reflects how Israel is coming across to most of the world, as it witnesses Gaza’s destruction. Blinken and the Biden administration needed to do a better job convincing the world that they were not enabling this wanton destruction.
To be fair, the Biden administration has wanted both to support Israel at a genuine hour of need and to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe taking place in Gaza. This proved insufficient given the nature of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s extremist coalition government and the fanatical nature of Hamas, which is singularly indifferent to the suffering of its people.
But Beinart’s moral outrage is exclusively aimed at the United States and Israel, with not a word about the actions and nature of Hamas. Blinken seems most effective starting at about 38 minutes of the video when he laments:
… that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas. Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender — I don’t know what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on! Now, again, that doesn’t absolve Israel of its actions in conducting the war. But I do have to question how it is that we haven’t seen a greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.
Beinart has nothing to say about that. Take for example this segment criticizing Blinken for a lack of “context”:
… the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. …
Part of this is correct: “Palestinians don’t have freedom.” The “context” Beinart misses is that the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza has nothing to do with “freedom.” And Hamas has repeatedly used every opportunity to thwart Israeli efforts to resolve the conflict.
It was a wave of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror attacks, taking 60 Israeli lives in the heart of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv during the election campaign of 1996, which catapulted Bibi Netanyahu from 20 points behind to his first term as prime minister. Hamas and other terror groups ended Ehud Barak’s efforts with the start of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. It was the first Gaza war in January 2009, prompted by Hamas rocket and cross-border attacks, that led to Netanyahu’s return to power that year. Hamas-led violence defeated Israeli leaders — Shimon Peres in ’96, Barak in 2000, Olmert and Livni in 2009 — who wanted to conclude a two-state agreement.
As for the “peaceful marches” of 2018, one may criticize Israel for its use of live fire, but hostile protesters used incendiaries to attack the border fence and marched with the demand to “return” to family homes from 1948 — which mostly no longer existed and most marchers had never lived in. Hundreds were killed and injured, but this was an angry mob making an impossible demand that no functioning country would allow to storm its borders. It was not the armed invasion of October 2023, but it’s a stretch to call it “peaceful.”