My fellow Americans:
Effective immediately, the United States will no longer be supplying offensive weaponry to the state of Israel to prosecute Prime Minister Netanyahu’s nihilistic, sanguinary war. This means no tank ammunition, tactical vehicles or mortar rounds. We will continue to supply defensive weapons, including interceptors for the Iron Dome air defense system, which saved so many lives during Iran’s April 13 barrage of missiles and drones. Does this contravene the 10-year Memorandum of Understanding, in which the United States committed that “the acquisition of additional U.S.-produced capabilities and technology provide the best means to ensure Israel preserves its Qualitative Military Edge (QME)”? Lets let the courts decide. Does this contradict my widely-reported embrace of the Prime Mister in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on October 18, 2023? I would argue the negative, if you factor in the quantity of Palestinian blood that has been shed in the global arena, between then and now.
The IDF killed 274 Palestinians and injuring hundreds more on Saturday, in the raid freeing four Israeli hostages. By that reckoning, a single Israeli life is roughly 68 times that of a Palestinian life. What an infernal mathematics this is! And profoundly against the principles of our nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal:
The state of Israel has no greater friend than the United States of America. Soldiers of the United States Seventh Army liberated Buchenwald and Dachau. Our great nation was the first country to recognize the provisional government of the state of Israel in 1948. And we stood with Israel at the United Nations in 1975, when the authoritarian majority passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. My former colleague and friend, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan embraced Ambassador Chaim Herzog during debate on General Assembly resolution 3379. Further, cumulative U.S. foreign aid to Israel in military and economic assistance since its founding, adjusted for inflation, is about $310 billion. It goes without saying that we have been there for Israel in its darkest moments.
But we must separate Benjamin Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war against Hamas, which has drawn the collective opprobrium of the community of nations and human rights observers, from our longstanding friendship with the state of Israel. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloodthirsty prosecution of the war, according to the United Nations and the Gaza health ministry. And it befalls us, as friends of Israel, the task of telling our allies that this war is spiraling them down a dark and dangerous road from which they may never recover.
“Bibi” has been a personal friend for over 30 years. And, believe me, it has not been a easy. He is not the easiest man with which to get along. Prime Minister Netanyahu first achieved office in 1996, when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he has held the position off and on since then. We have weathered many storms. I was friends with the Prime Minister in 2014, when his disrespect — and there is no other way to describe it — towards then-President Obama precipitated red hot tensions between our two nations. It does not have to be that way with allies, but with Benjamin Netanyahu, unfortunately it often is.
We will not speak here of the Prime Minister’s legal difficulties, because it is our longstanding belief that we don’t interfere in the domestic politics of allies. And yet, we cannot fail to note, that this common diplomatic courtesy has not stopped the Prime Minister from all but campaigning for Mitt Romney in 2012. Nor did it stop the Prime Minister from praising my opponent in 2020, on the eve of that election. And, I suspect, it will not stop him from -- how does one put it? — “informally participating” in November’s democratic election. Perhaps the Prime Minister of Israel would like to register as a Republican in 2024? Folks, what’s that line about “friends like these”?
I don’t need to tell you that we live in dangerous times. In Darfur and in the Ukraine, where the use of chemical weapons are becoming normalized. The echoes of World War One and World war Two reverberate in the Mahgreb, in Myanmar, in the Congo and Yemen. No truer words have been spoken than Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He said that in 1905 and, quite frankly, it appears as if the entire planet has been trapped in Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence ever since. We must break this deadly cycle of megadeaths, of trench warfare, of famine and of the targeting of civilian populations. It is a cycle that cannot be broken without the implementation and enforcement of international law.
There is no one in American politics that can make the claim that our steadfast support of Netanyahu, thus far, in the prosecution of this war, has been entirely in the cause of political gain. Thirteen percent of the Michigan primary vote was for Uncommitted, a critical swing state. There have been many on my left who refuse to see what Hamas perpetrated on October 7 as an act of pure and simple terrorism, which, under international law, are to be dealt with by states. Who among us can deny that that is precisely what Hamas did when it killed roughly 1400 people in a surprise attack on a single day, the largest slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust, while also kidnapping around two hundred people as hostages? So quick -- too quick -- were my friends to my left to condemn Netanyahu in his initial prosecution of the war that I wonder if they fully grasped this reality …
On the day that I hugged Netanyahu, what many mainstream media outlets failed to note was that I also warned him against overreaction. International law does not provide a blueprint on how to deal with terrorism. Use a scalpel, I told Netanyahu, rely on international law, which, on October 8th, was on the side of Israel. As late as October 17, Europe was pretty much united behind Israel. Indian Prime Minister Modi said his country stood “in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour.” Japan and Poland also condemned the attack. Nearly eight months of indiscriminate bombing later, Ireland, Spain and Norway have recognized Palestine. Slovenia’s parliament formally recognized Palestine last week.
Like Netanyahu, I, too, have been in public service for a long time. Some say, rather loudly to pollsters, too long. But in my many years in government I have gained a certain wisdom, from watching at the margins the mistakes of other administrations. I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu about our own failures as a nation in prosecuting the War Against Terror in the wake of September 11th. He proceeded to disregard my warnings -- and, worse, Santayana’s.
And now center on the global stage we have a far-right Israel, all-but-alone, disdaining of international law. The Global South — the majority of the world — rising against every bombing, every human rights violation on brown people in protest. And those voices of protest will continue to grow in number and in volume around the world and within democracies should Netanyahu continue his operations in Gaza with a hammer and not with a scalpel, as I advised. A scalpel is used in restrained, precision cuts while a sledgehammer is an instrument of demolition, entirely immune to the cries of Palestinian children, who no longer smile, according to Pope Francis, or even the ravages of famine and cholera. For that is how the trap — turning global opinion decidedly, definitively against Israel — is sprung. Against Netanyahu by Hamas and now by Russia and China against us as his enablers.
In retrospect, perhaps I was overly cautious, too enmeshed in the trappings of my decades old friendship with the Prime Minister, to see clearly the danger that lay ahead. That is something my predecessor and opponent in November will never admit, but it is something that all decent parents teach their children. To admit error when errors have indeed been made …
Much has been made of my age, which is 81. I was born in 1942, three years before the end of World War II and six years before the founding of Israel. I grew up hearing my father speaking of the silence of the international community as Hitler rose to power; I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, stained by the darkness. I have met with every Israeli Prime Minister, starting with Golda Meir in 1973. I am, as I have said many times before to colleagues, a “Zionist in my heart.” If I was overly cautious in my approach to Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is because of my history. “But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed,” wrote the poet Louis Macneice wrote. “The woven figure cannot undo its thread.” I am a product of Americans who stood up against authoritarianism and taught their children to never let it happen again. Sometimes we get things wrong, but I stand by the rightness of the cause. And I will have to answer as a leader to my Creator for our role in the Palestinian blood shed during these terrible months since October 7.
And so today we are here, re-affirming our commitment to a two-state solution. It is apparent to us now that Benjamin Netanyahu is not a partner of goodwill in that project. Perhaps, as my friends on the left surmised, he never was. Whatever the case, it is now up to the people of Israel to decide whether or not to continue with the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. We will not interfere with the democratic elections in the state of Israel, a longtime ally. But neither will be provide offensive weaponry anymore to that effort that is only adding to the obscene volume of Palestinian blood staining the planet.
Thank you. And God bless America.
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“If you go back and you look at the regular mainstream press and magazines about politics in 1952, 1953, early 1954, it is impossible to believe that you are not reading about Trump: The way they are freaking out about an antidemocratic, popular, fast growing, factually unhinged, sort of un-American movement, ascending on the American right that is going to swamp American politics. And that if the Republican party doesn’t figure out a way to police itself in terms of the extremism that is now permeating its ranks, the American Republic is going to fall. I think it’s helpful to know that these fears have existed before. It’s helpful to know it tactically, in terms of how other people fought these things and how they were beaten and why the worst fears didn’t come to pass. But it’s also helpful to know that we have a recurring problem with this in the country, and if we don’t figure out that it recurs, we’ll never figure out how to stop it from recurring.” (Rachel Maddow/Vanity Fair)
“The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak. This is a strange, haunting little book. Slimak is an archeologist. He has spent his life crawling about Eurasian caves in search of Neanderthal artifacts. He has found many, but not enough. His poetic humility, after a lifetime of bruised knees, is staggering. We simply don’t know very much about why the Neanderthals, our closest human cousins, disappeared. But they did evaporate, in most places, shortly after contact with us, Homo sapiens sapiens. One clue: Slimak has found thousands of Neanderthal tools and weapons, but no two are exactly alike. He considers this an artisanal form of genius. I’m not sure: it may be just a sign of relative stupidity or, more likely, just a different sensibility that we can’t begin to imagine. One thing is very clear about Homo Sap-Sap: We perfected and then replicated tool making and weapon making—and propulsive weapon making, like arrows—in the pre-historic era and we excelled at killing other species. This gave us a comparative advantage…” (Joe Klein/Sanity Clause)
“In the lead up to the First World War, most European armies had focussed on offensive doctrines. Described as the Cult of the Offensive, this was a situation where military theorists and senior military leaders believed that an attacking force would be successful regardless of the defensive regime established by a defending force. In its ultimate manifestation, this thinking led to strategies that neglected defensive approaches and resulted in an imbalance in thinking and capability that was biased heavily towards ‘the attack’. As we know, this didn’t work out so well in the early years of the First World War. The profound changes in technology brought about by the Second Industrial Revolution, which included the mass manufacturing of weapons and munitions and the changes in lethality brought about by improved machine guns and artillery, saw mass casualties during attacks by both sides. Eventually, the defensive become the dominant military strategy. This situation persisted until at least 1917, when the Germans, French, British, Canadians and Australians began to experiment with new forms of offensive operations which included infiltration and embraced much tighter coordination between the combined arms on the battlefield. The current situation in Ukraine mirrors this in some respects.” (Mick Ryan/Future Doctrina)
“Harry Sisson might be the biggest TikTok creator backing President Joe Biden with his whole chest. And, as he’ll tell you, it’s not the most receptive audience these days. ‘I gotta be honest, it doesn’t feel good,’ Sisson said of watching a contingent of young liberals turn against Biden. ‘It doesn’t feel good at all.’ The 21-year-old college student’s TikTok account, which has more than 890,000 followers, is a mix of snappy updates breaking down political news, dunking on former President Donald Trump, and defending Biden. He even got to meet the president last month. (‘I hear a lot of great things about you,’ Biden told the creator as the two shook hands.) Sisson isn’t the sole Biden defender left on the app, but his particular brand of sustained pro-Joe content is a rarity on the platform. TikTok was already considered relatively hostile territory before the president signed a bill that would force the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell it or face a national ban; TikTok officials said that since November, there’s been twice as much pro-Trump content as pro-Biden content on the platform.” (Caroline Anders/semafor)
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