President Biden, Meet Gaza’s Children. Then Will You Stop US Arms Sales to End “Cycles of Violence”?
US weapons sales kill Palestinian civilians and sustain the so-called “cycles of violence” the Biden administration claims it wants to end.
President Biden, have you met the children of Palestine? At least 11 of the 67 children killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in May were already receiving trauma support following previous bombardments. Among those who survived is two-month-old baby Omar al-Hadidi — he and his father are the only survivors in their family of an airstrike that killed Omar’s mother and four siblings. Also among Gaza’s survivors are two children who managed to save their pet fish from the rubble of their destroyed home. “And we want to go back to save the birds!’ the young girl, Nariman, exclaims in a video circulating online. Nariman’s words make me think of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “Here the Birds’ Journey Ends”: “Long live life, long live life.”
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on 20 May 2021, “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today.” Following a ceasefire, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel and the West Bank beginning on 25 May 2021. Did he make the trip to blockaded Gaza during his visit to the region? Did he go visit baby Omar in the hospital? He did not. Neither Blinken nor Biden are likely to do so any time soon. But why?
Despite significant domestic pushback, including congressional opposition, the State Department has granted Boeing an export license for a $735 million arms sale to Israel. The decision to proceed with a major arms sale, despite the civilian devastation in Gaza caused by the recent bombardment, is a disturbing sign from an administration that keeps emphasizing its commitment to ending the “cycle of violence.” At the same time, the US has promised $5.5 million in immediate disaster relief for Gaza, part of a commitment of approximately $112.5 million for development and economic aid in 2021, including for UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestine refugees). Blinken said the grand total comes to more than $360 million in support for the Palestinian people, including restoration of funds cut off by Donald Trump.
Funding is urgently needed for immediate services and reconstruction in Gaza, but this funding is not a sustainable solution to the long-term human impacts of life under blockade and cyclical decimation — especially as the United States’ latest weapons sale to Israel is worth more than twice as much as current aid for Palestinians, and the United States’ annual aid to Israel continues to stand at $3.8 billion.
President Biden, have you visited the refugee camps of Gaza? Have you met with the families whose homes have been demolished in East Jerusalem, or who are facing expulsion right now in Sheikh Jarrah? Have you talked with mothers whose unarmed children have been shot, or looked into the eyes of the young people who wait for hours to pass through checkpoints in the occupied West Bank to get to school? I implore you to go meet these people, President Biden. Our US weapons make their deaths possible. Then will you agree that the United States must stop weapons sales to truly end the so-called “cycle of violence” in Gaza? Will you agree that this cycle must end in Yemen, too, and in all places around the world where the US arms trade kills civilians? You speak about US gun violence as a “public health epidemic.” What about the epidemic we are exporting?
Have you tasted the tear gas used by Israeli forces in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank? (I have, and it is suffocating — but I do not have to breathe it in several times per week or more for the rest of my life, like the Palestinians residing in the camps do.) Have you tried not having enough water to drink, after that tear gas burns your throat? Like me, I am sure you would find it unbearable, but also like me, you can leave at any time with your American passport. Instead, try doing that every day for the rest of your life — unable to leave.
As Gaza was being bombarded by Israel and Hamas was firing rockets towards Israel — resulting in the deaths of at least 248 people in Gaza, including 67 children, and 12 people in Israel, including two children — world leaders including Blinken, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called for an end to the “cycle of violence,” a familiar refrain in statements by western powers regarding Palestine and Israel. (The statements did vary — Le Drian, for example, recalled France’s longstanding “total condemnation of settlement-building” as contrary to international law, while US statements on Sheikh Jarrah fell short of addressing the long-recognized illegality of settlement-building. Le Drian has also since stated that the status quo creates a “high risk of apartheid.”)
The problem with the phrase “end the cycle of violence” — beyond its ambiguity and lack of bite as a rhetorical device — is that western powers fuel this very “cycle of violence,” most prominently the United States through its more than $175 billion worth of annual arms sales abroad. It is long-overdue that the US government follow its own laws restricting the sales of weapons. These weapons worsen the world’s worst humanitarian disasters and sustain the very “cycles of violence” that devastate Gaza, Yemen, and all places where the US arms trade kills civilians — cycles that the Biden administration states it seeks to end.
It is also just over one year since the 30 May 2020 killing of Iyad al-Hallaq, the 32-year-old Palestinian man with autism who was shot by an Israeli police officer when he was completely unarmed and on his way, with his teacher, to a school for people with disabilities in Jerusalem. The senseless and brutal killing of Palestinians is constant and not confined only to the worst periods of violence.
The last US president to visit Gaza was Bill Clinton in 1998. At that time, Gaza had an airport. Clinton visited it. Today, that airport is in ruins, destroyed by Israeli forces during the second Intifada. Gaza is controlled by a land, sea, and air blockade. Even if you are a dying cancer patient, you are likely to be forced to die in Gaza, refused the right to exit to seek treatment.
I repeat: President Biden, have you met the children of Palestine? I don’t ask this question to suggest that President Biden literally needs to witness the well-documented injustice faced by Palestinians before immediately reforming US policy — the evidence stands on its own, and Palestinians have for far too long been unjustly asked to prove and perform their humanity.
I ask it because there are many Americans who would immediately retort that such a question is politically naïve for how it overlooks the fury that would be expressed by Benjamin Netanyahu and the dominant Israeli right-wing if President Biden were simply to visit an UNRWA school, or go see baby Omar al-Hadidi in the hospital. No, I do not overlook that at all.
What I do ask is this: What is wrong with Israel’s government that it would be outraged by a US president meeting some children whose school has been bombed (during the latest offensive, Israeli forces damaged at least 51 educational facilities), or visiting a two-month-old in the hospital? (Six hospitals and 11 primary healthcare centers have been damaged.) What is wrong with our government that these mere performances of sympathy seem impossible? Something severely wrong, indeed, for Israel’s government is committing apartheid and our US government makes that apartheid possible. (Israeli apartheid has been documented by Human Rights Watch, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, and Palestinian organizations such as Al-Haq.)
Netanyahu may finally be on his way out in the immediate aftermath of the Gaza offensive. The Israeli right wing will remain alive and well, however. The coalition challenging Netanyahu seeks to form a unity government that would be led initially by Naftali Bennett as prime minister. Bennett is an aggressive supporter of settlement expansion and Israeli annexation of the West Bank. US support for Israel will remain “ironclad,” regardless of Israel’s leadership, to quote US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price.
Blinken emphasized that the US will work to ensure that none of the aid sent to Gaza benefits Hamas, which the US government recognizes as a terrorist organization. And yet, US aid and weapons sales to Israel continue to increase even as Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has stated Israel likely committed war crimes during the latest period of violence. The UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on 27 May 2021 to establish an International Commission of Inquiry to investigate human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Mark Pocan introduced resolutions seeking to halt the now-approved $735 million weapons sale to Israel. Though the sale went ahead, the resolutions powerfully signal that the US public’s tolerance is decreasing regarding interventionism abroad via weapons exports.
The resolutions follow the Biden administration’s April 2021 decision to proceed with a $23 billion weapons sale to the United Arab Emirates, despite Biden’s announcement in February that he was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 12,000 civilian deaths as the Saudi and UAE-led coalition bombards the country in a war against the Houthi rebels. The coalition has been accused of widespread international law violations, including disproportionate and indiscriminate airstrikes that have killed thousands of civilians. UNICEF estimates that every ten minutes, a child dies from preventable causes. More than 24 million people (80 percent of the population) need humanitarian assistance. There is a severe lack of water access and COVID-19 has ravaged the country. Remnants of bombs made in the United States have been found at sites where scores of civilians have died from coalition airstrikes. Between 2015 and 2019, 73 percent of Saudi arms came from the United States.
On 15 May 2021, Israel bombed and destroyed the al-Jalaa building in Gaza City, which housed offices for the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, as well as other offices and residences. The Israeli military states that the building was a military target housing Hamas offices, but has provided no evidence substantiating this claim. Blinken said he has asked Israel to provide justification for the destruction of the building, but has received no information. Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières) has asked Fatou Bensouda, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), to investigate the destruction of the offices of 23 international and local media organizations as part of the ICC’s investigation of the Situation in Palestine. How does Israel’s use of US weapons to kill civilians, and Israel’s alleged destruction of the media’s ability to document and report on these attacks, square with US goals to end the “cycle of violence”?
The greatest hypocrisy of the US’s stated, and restated, commitment to ending “cycles of violence” is that not only does the United States supply weapons that massacre civilians — the United States has a history of fabricating the existence of weapons said to be in the hands of foreign regimes. Let us remember Ambassador Joe Wilson’s confirmation that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to falsely claim that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from Niger — a claim that facilitated the Iraq War. And, let us remember Trump’s recent pardons for US mercenaries convicted of slaughtering 14 Iraqi civilians. How do we end these “cycles of violence”?
US weapons are not only killing civilians in Gaza and Yemen. They are used to tear gas pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and to fuel racism and police brutality here at home. The tide is shifting, however. Backlash against defense contractor Safariland, which manufactured the tear gas used on Washington D.C. protesters following the police murder of George Floyd one year ago, was so severe that the company sold its crowd-control weapons unit.
I repeat my question. President Biden, have you met the children of Palestine? Have you met the parents in Yemen who are forced to choose whether to feed one child or take another to a hospital — who are forced to choose which of their children to save?
More than 1,900 people in Gaza are wounded. Many are children with permanent disabilities and injuries. Will they be able to run next time the bombs come? Will the newest class of traumatized children receive mental health support before some are inevitably slaughtered by US weapons? Will they continue to drink water that makes them sick and play in the dark when the electricity goes out — all while wondering if they are merely living in order to wait to die?
Empathy is not enough — the US weapons sales and military funding killing these children and their families must stop.
© 2021 Carly A. Krakow
Carly A. Krakow (@CarlyKrakow) is a writer, journalist, researcher, and activist completing her PhD in International Law at the London School of Economics, where she is a Judge Higgins Scholar. Her writing has appeared in publications including Al Jazeera, Jadaliyya, openDemocracy, Truthout, Opinio Juris, and the academic journal Water. Carly is Managing Editor for Special Projects and Environment Page Co-Editor at the online magazine Jadaliyya. She earned her MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on human rights, international law, environmental justice, the rights of refugees and displaced people, and Middle East politics. Over several periods of fieldwork in the Palestinian West Bank, she has investigated the law and politics of water access and exposure to environmental toxins. Her research has also included fieldwork in South Africa, analyzing the impacts of Cape Town’s water crisis on the city’s most marginalized communities, and in Greece, examining living conditions and access to healthcare for asylum-seekers and refugees. Read her writing and watch her public speaking appearances at www.carlykrakow.com. She is on Twitter @CarlyKrakow.
