Biden’s Indifference to Palestinian Lives Is Sending the Middle East Into the Abyss

In the face of growing international pressure, the Biden administration has continued to double down on a policy of blanket support for Israel, even as it presses ahead with a possible military offensive against the town of Rafah that many observers have warned could trigger the largest humanitarian crisis of the war so far. This week on Intercepted, co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict with Thanassis Cambanis, director of the foreign policy think tank Century International. Cambanis explains how Biden’s policy toward Israel is pushing the entire Middle East to the brink of a regional war that could inflict far greater suffering than we have seen to date, in an area which U.S. policymakers claim to be trying to exit.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

JS: Maz, as always, these days, there’s a lot to talk about. Just a couple of thoughts, though, on what we’ve been witnessing at university campuses across the United States.

Of course, there’s this massive demonstration that has broken out in encampment at Columbia University, and you’ve had a pretty heavy-handed response, from not only Columbia’s administration, but the attempt on the part of the university to use the New York Police Department to crack down on the students who are gathering to protest against Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians of Gaza.

And I’m not going to say his name, but there’s one assistant professor at Columbia University who identifies himself as a rabidly pro-Israel Zionist, who has, for months, been trying to make himself the story at Columbia University. You know, throwing tantrums, trying to provoke students into some action against him.

The reality is that if you look at narratives throughout history — particularly the history of the United States — when protesters are engaged in direct action or are protesting, the universities of the day, their administrations, the major media outlets, they all poo-poo the protesters. You can go back and look at articles that were written about Dr. Martin Luther King, not just his work on the civil rights movement, but also his work on the antiwar movement and in opposing the war in Vietnam.

Martin Luther King, when he died, his popularity was at its lowest. He was being targeted by major media outlets, by both political parties. You had liberal activists who were being carted out under radio and television to denounce him as being too radical. And we’re seeing that kind of narrative right now. So, what I would say to the students is: history is on your side.

But I wanted to make a different point, and it refers back to this assistant professor who’s trying to make everything all about him. The reality is that, with the focus on the demonstrations on the college campuses, it’s important to remember that the students themselves keep saying, don’t make us the issue, the issue is the suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza, and Israel’s unjust war against the Palestinians. But, clearly, the rabid supporters of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza want to distract from the facts that anyone with eyes to see is witnessing in Gaza. They’re trying to make it that, somehow, you have Hamas and Hezbollah taking over American universities.

And they don’t like to talk about the inconvenient fact that many Jewish students at these universities are some of the main organizers, or are providing many of the actual students that are in these encampments. They want to make it seem as though these protesters are somehow in the pay or under the influence of Hamas or Hezbollah.

In a way, also, this situation that Israel created by bombing the Iranian consulate in Syria, knowing that the Iranians would be in a position where they’d have to respond, this was an attempt — in part, I’m not saying this was exclusively what the Israeli strike in Damascus against the Iranian consulate was about, but in part — it clearly is an effort to shift the attention away from the horrors that are playing out in Gaza. And when we are focused, then, on this fake debate about antisemitism on college campuses — I’m not saying that there’s not antisemitism that exists — but the notion that there’s this epidemic of antisemitism on campus, rather than, there is a mass popular uprising on campuses against Israel’s scorched-earth war against the Palestinians, what we’re not talking about then is the fact that there are mass graves being discovered at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where at least 300 bodies have been retrieved in recent days.

We’re not talking about the fact that the Israelis appear to be moving forward with a ground invasion of Rafah. There is satellite imagery indicating that, in recent days, tents have been erected in Khan Yunis to the north of Rafah, which has already been utterly devastated. We’re not talking about the fact that the Biden administration is setting itself up now to greenlight even more weaponry to go to the Israelis.

A word of caution, just to people from studying history: this is an effort to shift the narrative, because the narrative is going very, very bad for this war that the Biden administration has bought into fully, and is promoting politically, and is facilitating with nonstop shipments of weapons.

MH: That’s really well said. And oftentimes you see in cases like this, when it’s impossible to win the debate on the merits, you see suppression, changing the subject, censorship.

And I will point out that gentleman you mentioned at the Columbia University — and not just him, but also the head of the ADL and, recently, certain members of the Senate — have called on the National Guard also to be called in to target these students. And you look at the history of the United States and the Vietnam War, what that implied and the consequences of that, it’s a very, very dire situation that’s developing in the U.S.

And you said it perfectly: at the time, the most indefensible things are being discovered in Gaza. We’re having a very concocted and very calculated debate to reframe things, to create a crisis in the United States that does not exist. To change the subject, and also to send a message that this subject will be censored by force, potentially in the very near future. It could be with the destruction of people’s personal lives, physical violence targeting these students.

It’s a very, very grave situation, and it’s something that we’ve seen play out again in the past in the United States, and we did not like it when it happened in the past before. And to see the same playbook deployed again, unironically, to these students is very, very ugly. It’s something we should speak out very forcefully about, before what could happen, does happen.

JS: Yeah, just one final point on that, let’s rewind back in time, to when we were told that all these conservatives were really standing up for free speech and against cancel culture. And some of those individuals, including some of the most prominent ones, are really at the forefront now of a totally dishonest narrative to smear, collectively, so many of these students, including students who are Jewish students protesting, saying that, “what Israel is doing is not being done in my name.”

MH: Yeah, it’s sick. It’s very, very revealing cynicism and hypocrisy, which is being played out every single day at the moment.

JS: Well, Maz, we’ll continue to pay close attention to what’s happening at Columbia University and other campuses across the country. And always remember to keep it in the context, as the students said, of why they’re actually there, and why they’re gathering.

And that’s actually what we’re going to talk about today, the situation not just in Gaza, but the broader geopolitical context, and the role of the United States.

MH: To discuss this with us today, we have Thanassis Cambanis. He’s the director of the foreign policy thinktank Century International, an author and journalist, and his work focuses on U.S. foreign policy, Arab politics, and social movements in the Middle East. He’s currently working on a new book about the impact of the Iraq war on the international system.

Thanassis Cambanis, welcome to Intercepted.

Thanassis Cambanis: Great to be with you, Maz.

MH: So, Thanassis, there have recently been reports in the press that the Israeli government is preparing for an assault on Rafah. And, obviously, this has been a phase of the war that’s long been feared to generate perhaps the greatest and most acute humanitarian crisis when it finally commences. The Biden administration has been under pressure from the international community and sectors of the press and civil society to ensure that either this operation does not happen, or happens in a way that minimizes humanitarian impact on Palestinian civilians. But it seems very difficult for that to be accomplished.

Can you talk about why this attack is so consequential, potentially, and what the implications could be for Palestinians in Gaza?

TC: The focus on the Rafah assault is, in some ways, an indication of the failure to do anything to regulate or modulate the Israeli assault on Gaza overall. So, in a way, I don’t want to minimize how awful a ground invasion of Rafah will be, but let’s not forget, as you know well, there’s already famine underway in the Gaza Strip, right? There’s already more than a million people displaced from the North to the South. There are routine attacks on food deliveries and so on. So, we’re already talking about a sort of cataclysm of almost unimaginable degree for civilians in Gaza.

Now, as bad as it is, a land invasion of Rafah, among other things— One, it attacks the last remaining quasi-safe zone; and, again, I don’t want to exaggerate. It is not a safe place to be, Rafah has been bombed throughout the campaign, even during periods when it is not specifically the focus of the Israeli assault.

Secondly, it’s the border, right? It’s the border with Egypt. And so, if and when there’s an invasion of Rafah, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of literal pressure on the civilians who are sheltering there to flee into Egypt. And this is, for the United States in particular, a “red line.” And I say this with scare quotes, because we all know that red lines are declared in order to be introduced.

But this is something that the international community — largely Egypt, the U. S., and others — have said cannot happen. Civilians cannot be forcibly displaced across the border into Egypt. That is somehow too much even for an international community that’s been willing to countenance a series of war crimes and extreme actions by Israel. That is why the Biden administration has, on at least this matter, been somewhat robust in discouraging Israel from moving forward.

But all that is in a context in which I think the U.S. and others have misunderstood what Israel is doing. Or, rather, have willfully chosen not to read the very clear signs that Israel has given of what its campaign in Gaza is all about, which is a pretty well-planned and well thought out military operation to make Gaza unlivable. And, ultimately — at least in the words of many members of the Israeli leadership — with the intention of reducing the population of the Gaza Strip, whether it’s through death and disease, or through displacement, or voluntary or forced expulsion from Gaza to Egypt.

That’s the thing that Israeli officials have said, right? This isn’t a conspiracy theory or some kind of reading of the tea leaves. This is stated intentions of people who are helping make Israeli policy. And that’s why I’m afraid we’re somewhat missing the point when we focus on these efforts to delay or restrain the operation, because the Israeli government — or at least key stakeholders in it — have said this is what they want and plan to do. And I’m afraid and also expecting there will be an Israeli land operation in Rafah, and the question will be, how maximalist will that military operation be? Will people ultimately be pushed over the border? Will they swarm the border and flee over it, because otherwise they face certain deaths?

And, if and when that happens, how much will that escalate this conflict and the regionalization of the conflict into yet another unfathomable phase.

JS: I’m wondering, also, why we even pay lip service to the notion that the Biden administration is sincere in any of this stuff on Rafah?

If you want to take them at their word, what have we seen for the past several months? We saw the building of this narrative, oh, Biden is growing impatient with Netanyahu. Oh, he’s getting really upset with Netanyahu. You know, there’s a lot of leaking about how Biden is dissatisfied, Biden is upset, Biden is losing patience. And then you had Biden, according to his advisors, he misspoke when he said it was a red line. Then they started to say, no, there are no red lines regarding Rafah. 

Then they come back, and now there’s a little bit more of a nuance. Well, they wanted the Israelis to come to Washington and discuss what the terms of such an operation in Rafah would look like. And now we’re at this position where the U.S. seems to be projecting this notion that they’ve reached or brokered some sort of an understanding with the Israelis of what ground operations will look like in Rafah.

At the same time, we’ve seen for seven months the United States continue to rush emergency shipments of replenishment for the Israeli arsenal, offer them political support when they’re acting at their most extreme, giving preemptive cover to lay siege to hospitals when the Biden administration not only cosigned the narrative about this Hamas Pentagon being under al-Shifa hospital, but then said we have U.S. intelligence to indicate this.

And now we arrive at this moment where the Israelis bombed the embassy in Damascus, they killed a number of [Iranian] military and civilian officials. Even though the Israelis portrayed it as an attempted apocalypse raining down on Israel, I think, by all reasonable standards, what the Iranians did was calculated. It was telegraphed in advance, it was not using their most sophisticated weaponry. It was a very calculated, the Iranians believed, proportionate response, even though they didn’t kill large numbers of Israelis; I believe there was one death that occurred, as a result of shrapnel, of a child.

But the point I’m getting at here is that it seems as though the Biden administration is interested in domestic political consumption and projecting a certain image globally while, at the same time, providing the Israelis — certainly in the form of the aid pack, the military package that’s going through Congress right now — with everything they need to continue this scorched-earth campaign. And Israel does what it wants and, maybe later, Biden grows more frustrated.

So, I’m wondering if you can unpack all of this. There’s a lot there but, basically, it boils down to, why should we believe anything the Biden administration is saying? Because seven months indicate that the actions mean more than any words or leaks about frustration.

And, on the second level, how this politicking from Biden relates to the response we saw from the Iranians to the Israelis blowing up, attacking what, actually, under law, is sovereign Iranian territory, albeit in Syria.

TC: Jeremy, I think you’re exactly right in focusing on actions, not words. And when I try to analyze and understand the administration’s policy, I almost entirely ignore the rhetoric, right?

When Biden uses profanity on the phone with Netanyahu and has that leak to the press, that is spin, that’s an attempt to manage the domestic politics around this war, it is not an indication of what our policy is. So, you raised a lot of really important interrelated issues, and I want to talk quickly about Israel first, and then the regional picture second.

So, on Israel, the U.S. has three pressure points: that’s weapons supplies, the U.S. veto at the U.N., and the third is humanitarian aid. So, when we want to look at what U.S. Policy towards Israel is, I think we look at almost exclusively at those three things, actions on those three things. Not on statements, even semi-important things like discussions with visiting Israeli officials about what a Rafah invasion plan could look like. Those aren’t unimportant, but those are not the central pillars of the policy.

On the central pillars of the policy, the U.S. has been consistent, and consistently, I think, wrong and destructive. So, on weapons, not only as you mentioned, has the U.S. been express-shipping the weapons necessary to engage in this really escalatory and destabilizing — not to mention on a human level, deadly and awful — military campaign, it has also ignored existing U.S. laws, the Leahy Laws that would, if properly enforced, require the U.S. to stop these shipments, make a finding about whether they’re being used in the commission of war crimes. And, in fact, then it would have to find that these weapons are being used in the commission of war crimes, and suspend delivery. This would not require, by the way, any new rules or laws or any kind of special treatment of Israel. It would just involve observing and enforcing existing law.

So, instead, this administration— as, I think, most past administrations have done since, I think, George H.W. Bush was the last president to enforce any U.S. rules restricting Israeli conduct, and that was on financing for settlements, not on weapons shipments. So, here we are, not only ignoring existing law about the use of the weapons in war crimes, but also doing kind of shady, mob-style accounting, where the weapons shipments are being cut up into smaller parcels in order to be below notification thresholds. And these are really rinky-dink ways of subverting U.S. values and U.S. laws in order to keep arming Israel. So, weapons could do a lot, [but are] doing nothing.

Second, on a role at the U.N., there was one moment a couple of weeks ago where the U.S. allowed a ceasefire resolution at the U.N. Security Council, and then proceeded to immediately undermine that by saying it wasn’t a binding resolution. And, in fact, not only undermine that resolution, but undermine a whole body of U.N. law that used the same kind of language historically that we all understand to be enforceable international law. And now, the U.S. position seems to be, with certain weasel words, things security council resolutions don’t count.

And the third one is aid, where on this, it’s almost embarrassing to have the U.S. as this global superpower and sole guarantor of Israel, not insisting on the free flow of food and medicine into Gaza, which it could have been doing from day one, right? Gaza is not in some remote, hard to reach place. It is surrounded almost entirely by Israeli territory. There’s a container port nearby, there are highways running in and out of Gaza. It is not hard to get as many hundreds or thousands of truckloads of anything you want into Gaza any day of the week, even during this war. It is purely an Israeli choice to prevent that, and it is purely an American choice to pretend that this is something that they have to negotiate and plead for with Israel.

I find it astonishing and embarrassing, even in private, to be in conversations with senior American government officials who talk as if it’s a big deal to get the number of truckloads up from single digits to dozens. You know, it’s a joke, except it’s not a joke, because people are dying by the thousands as a result of this.

So, in all the ways that America could be modulating the Israeli campaign— So, this isn’t even about stopping the war. This is just about making it less murderous, less deadly, less likely to escalate. The U.S. hasn’t done any of those things.

So, the policy is, essentially, genuinely, the bear hug, right? It is: enable Israel to do whatever Israel sees best, and defer making American judgments about what’s in America’s interest in the Gaza war, and in the regional war.

So, secondly, the regional war. This is the part where the U.S. is most guilty of incompetence and policy malpractice from day one. And, on this score, I think the U.S. was genuine in saying it did not want to have a regional war inside Palestine. It seems like maybe senior government officials in the U.S. don’t really value Palestinian lives, I think that’s unfortunately clear.

When it comes to the region, the U.S. does value regional calm, right? There are all kinds of security and economic interests, political interests at stake. The U.S. does not want a regional war. And yet, from the beginning, the things that it could have done, first by restraining Israel, and second, by restraining itself, it has not done.

So, we’ve ended up with the U.S. in a direct war with the Houthis over Red Sea shipping. So, this is international shipping, it is a shared global international interest. Why is the U.S. trying to police this in a one-on-one, essentially? OK, there are a couple of allies helping, but it is basically one of these coalition of the willing led by the U.S., so the U.S. is in a shooting war with the Houthis.

Let’s imagine what would happen if the U.S. were approaching this as a sane global power, one among many. It would have invited the Chinese to enforce whatever the Chinese were willing to enforce, and no more. Because, again, this is a shared global interest, not some kind of parochial U.S. interest.

So, we dive into this period of really reckless escalation. So, the U.S. being attacked by Axis of Resistance factions in Syria and in Iraq. There’s a war going on between Israel and Lebanon, which we don’t focus on too much because it’s much less deadly — although still very significant and deadly — than the one going on in Gaza.

And so, after months and months of this, Israel has understood that the moral hazard provided by the blanket U.S. protection no matter what Israel does, that lesson has been absorbed. Israel comes to understand it can do whatever it wants, and the U.S. will help it clean up afterwards.

So, when the strike happened on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, this is something that anyone could tell you was very high-risk, a very high-risk escalation in a situation where there’s already been so much back and forth that any Iran expert would tell you Iran has been pushed to the limits of how much it’s able to restrain itself without responding to establish some kind of deterrence. And so, Israel does this.

According to press reports, there was a last-minute notification to the U.S. In my read, this is a U.S. malpractice, right? So, even if these press reports are true — which I suspect that there was more notification than that for a strike like this — but even if the notification was half an hour, the U.S. should have said, don’t do it. And, if you do it, we will publicly disavow it and not have your back. You cannot do this in a situation, again, in which the U.S. is trying to avoid direct war with Iran, and is already in direct war with the Axis of Resistance factions in multiple countries.

This is a crazy amount of instability, right? We’re in a regional war that involves Iran, Israel, the U.S., Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon. And some of the best trained and most experienced infantry fighting and militias and militaries in recent history. So, this is highly unstable, very dangerous, a threat to wellbeing and human life around the region.

Even if you don’t care about that, let’s say a U.S. policymaker who just does not care about Arab and Muslim lives around the Middle East, you do care about economic stability, strategic stability, and not having the U.S. drawn into a very complicated multi-front regional war in the Middle East while it’s trying to manage this actually important war in Ukraine. On the management of the regional war, this administration has really done a poor job, a surprisingly poor job. Even on things I disagree with them. I think they tend to operate with some amount of intent and competence and, on this, I can’t see any read in which they are being competent or intentional.

MH: Thanassis, this issue of regionalization is something that me and Jeremy have talked about in the past, too. It’s a very acute fear of many people observing the situation.

It seems like on October 6 there was a very fragile status quo that maybe was optimal for Israel and even the United States, managing the conflict with the Palestinians and keeping the rest of the situations under lid, so to speak. But now that status quo is effectively shattered.

And it’s not just the Axis of Resistance countries — or Iran, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and so forth — but even Egypt and Jordan, their stability is very threatened by the situation. I think Egypt has said that if there are refugee inflows into Sinai from Rafah, they could suspend the Camp David Accords. They didn’t specify what that means specifically, but the Camp David Accords, of course, are the accords which keep the peace between Egypt and Israel. And Jordan’s stability is also threatened by what’s happening in the West Bank.

It seems that the Arab countries, the Gulf Arab countries and the Sunni Arab countries, they’re also very endangered by the situation. And it seems that whatever status quo existed before, it also worked for them well enough, but it’s very difficult to recreate that now that this war in Gaza has happened. And I know from talking to people in the region — I’m sure you have as well, too — this profound anger about what’s happening in Gaza. Not just at Israel and the United States, but also what local governments perceive to be involved.

And, you know, I talk to people in Lebanon pretty often and, notably, when I talk to them on the phone now, I can hear Israeli drones. It’s a very common aspect of our conversations now, which were very mundane in the past. It’s very palpable the extent to which the war is spreading.

How bad do you think the situation could get? And what offramps potentially exist that the U.S. could incentivize Israel [with], even at this late stage?

TC: From the beginning, we’ve said — and we’ve written this and published this at Century International, and this is almost banal — the main and only solution here is to stop the war in Gaza, right?

Some of these escalations are self-serving opportune [actions], like, I’d say, the Iraqi resistance factions are opportunistically using this conflict to pursue some aims of their own. But, on the whole, the instability is a response to Israeli extreme violence in Gaza. So, stop the war in Gaza, you solve the regional problem. Don’t stop the war in Gaza, you actually can’t resolve the regional problem.

In terms of fixing it, the U.S. has sometimes done a decent job trying to sort of do cleanup work. I mean, after the strike on the Iranian consulate, the U.S. really pulled out all stops to mediate with Iran, to convince Iran to have a muted response, which Iran had its own incentives to do as well, and then to pressure Israel to respond to the response in a way that would end the escalation.

So, that’s the kind of thing that can be done, but it is trying to manage a forest fire. You can’t do it, actually. So, you can do your best, and get lucky sometimes and prevent these things from spreading but, ultimately it’s going to spread, because it is an unstable equilibrium involving really core matters of interest and identity.

How bad could it get? I shudder. I shudder. I don’t even want to speculate about it, because I had been until recently mostly worried about an open war between Israel and Lebanon, and what that would look like, in the amount of death and destruction of civilian life. Mostly in Lebanon, but I would expect Israel would suffer more effective targeting of its territory than it has yet. But now, I’m worried about a war directly involving Iran, because Israel is acting as a maximalist spoiler.

So, we’re used to analyzing — or, at least, I’m used to analyzing and hearing people analyze — these conflicts in the Middle East where you’re worried about, essentially, the mismatch between a state that fights some kind of nonstate actor that has asymmetric power, and also sort of has nothing to lose, right?

So, usually, we’re talking about the risks that come with trying to do battle with an ISIS, or another nonstate actor that, in the end is willing to do maximalist extreme destabilizing scorched-earth techniques in order to achieve its interest, and it even wins when it loses, right?

Now, we’re suddenly in this twilight period where the actor that’s behaving this way is Israel. Not a small nonstate actor with nothing to lose, but a state, a nuclear-armed state with an incredibly modern, powerful military, with incredibly long-range strike power. And this state is willing to risk everything, including its relationship with the United States, without which, I don’t understand how Israel imagines it would function or operate and retain its military edge without the unqualified backing of the United States.

But it’s willing to gamble that and, so far, it has won on its own terms, and it is willing to provoke direct war with Iran and essentially set the whole region on fire. In order— I don’t even know what it expects to accomplish by this, because all these measures, as I see it, make Israel less safe. And, again, just trying to look at things from Israel’s perspective, I don’t understand how they see this buying them any kind of security in the region in which they are trying to exist and coexist. 

I’m very alarmed by the evidence which points to highly risk-taking behavior by Israel. It seems like a really deep interest in starting a war with Iran, a war that it hopes will bring in the United States and the Gulf powers. And this is where — to go to the question of what can be done — this is where the Gulf and the U.S. need to really put the brakes down, remove the creation of a moral hazard, and say, we will not join a war with Iran.

And this is really a sort of Saudi and U.S. decision. They have the power to really put the damper on this, but they have not. And this I find inexplicable and really risky, given what Israel’s been doing.

JS: I wanted to shift to talk a bit about the issue of Palestinian statehood.

The Biden administration, in the midst of the horrors of the past seven months, some weeks ago started to really make much more public this push for a two-state solution, and then that caused a flurry of articles, and then reiteration by European powers and other global powers. And then at the United Nations recently, of course, the United States vetoed the moves to recognize the Palestinian state, and the U.S. had its own sort of discombobulated answer for why it did that; I don’t really want to make the focus of this.

Tareq Baconi, the great scholar on Hamas, had a piece recently in The New York Times — he’s written a series of pieces, actually, for The New York Times and other publications that are worth reading in the context of the post-October 7 reality — but in this piece, the headline was quite provocative, it was an April 1 piece called “The Two-State Solution is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy.” And, in this piece, Tareq Baconi writes, “Repeating the two-state solution mantra has allowed policymakers to avoid confronting the reality that partition is unattainable in the case of Israel and Palestine, and illegitimate as an arrangement originally imposed on Palestinians without their consent in 1947. And, fundamentally,” Tarek Baconi writes, “the concept of the two-state solution has evolved to become a central pillar of sustaining Palestinian subjugation and Israeli impunity. The idea of two states as a pathway to justice has, in and of itself, normalized the daily violence meted out against Palestinians by Israel’s regime of apartheid.” Tareq Baconi also notes, “The vacuity of the two-state solution mantra is most obvious in how often policy makers speak of recognizing a Palestinian state without discussing an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.”

You guys have also published some pieces on this as well. I’m just curious for your thoughts about this entire discourse, but specifically what Tareq Baconi is arguing here.

TC: We’ve just published a series of pieces on what a shared future for Israelis and Palestinians look like, and the whole framework of that series of pieces was borrowed from Tareq. So, actually, I tried to get him to write for us, but he helped me shape these ideas, so I’m borrowing his thinking, which I find persuasive, for talking about what, one, a more honest look at what the present actually is, and two, an honest appraisal of what the future looks like.

So, the idea here is to stop with the wishful thinking and sort of delusional talking about two states. I mean, the first time I went as a reporter to Israel/Palestine and actually drove around the West Bank and went to Gaza, just obvious, reasonable questions; like, how would this work? How would Gaza and the West Bank be put together in a state without a capital in Jerusalem, and without territorial contiguity? 

And the folks who were on the two-state con would say, don’t worry, everyone understands how this is going to work at the end of the day. It’s just a matter of getting political buy-in. And that wasn’t true. There actually isn’t a way that this works. And that was in 2005, long before the completion of the barrier wall around the West Bank, and various other land grabs and changes that have really made it an impossible reality.

So, now, we look at what there is. What there is, is a form of partition, and a form of at least two classes of people — or three classes of people, citizens and non-citizens — that live under Israeli control. So, it’s not a question of, how do we get to a two-state solution, it’s a question of, what is actually possible in this setup?

If I follow the framework that Tareq has laid out, and just sort of apply common sense and a read of history to the present and the potential future, I see that we have one set of options, which are an extension of the status quo. Where, essentially, Israel maintains full control over the lives of everyone who lives between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And, because of its desire to have a Jewish state as defined by its current governing majority, that means it will be some form of apartheid state where Palestinians — and maybe others, [as] I see an extension of the status quo means that the many Jewish Israelis who object to the status quo have suffered rights-stripping as well — it’s clear to me that we have a sort of emerging authoritarian approach to dissent.

So, I could see an extension of the current partition, in which Palestinians have no rights, and in which Jewish Israelis who dissent have fewer rights than Jewish Israelis who support this order. So, that’s one set of options.

The other is just what we know from the way the world works. If you want to have equal rights, Palestinians get equal rights, and that leads to some form of shared sovereignty. It could be one state, it could be a confederation, along the lines of Belgium. There are other solutions that people have worked out. In none of these outcomes do Jewish Israelis get to preserve dominance over everyone who lives in that territory. And that is something that, at this stage, Israel and Israelis are not willing to consider.

And so, what I find really helpful about Tareq’s way of framing this is, if you want to support this, OK, just be clear that what you’re supporting is a religious ethnocracy, in which people who are of the wrong religion or race or ethnicity simply don’t have rights. They have conditional partial rights extended to them, and often taken away violently by a ruling, a religious ethnocracy. And if that’s what one wants to support, one should have to call it by its name, and acknowledge the really disturbing implications of that.

And this is sort of the problem with the Tom Friedman discourse. You know, how can Israel be Jewish, democratic, and whatever else he says? And it’s like, well, it can’t be all those things, right? You can’t have an identity-based state in which people of one identity get all the rights, and also have equal rights for everybody. It’s either, everyone has equal rights or everyone doesn’t.

MH: One very, very revealing thing in the last few months has been looking at the reaction from the international community to the current conflict; not just Western countries, but also the Global South countries, so to speak. China and Russia and so forth, South Africa. Ireland you could put in the Global South, perhaps.

Their response to the conflict and the perception of it, at least in public, is very, very different from that of the United States. And if you look at the U.N. voting patterns, the U.S. is very isolated alongside Israel in defending certain Israeli policies, standing against international consensus on how this conflict should be resolved according to national law. And, basically, the U.S. is a very indispensable ally and patron for Israel, without which it could not continue to operate the way it is. And it seems, for that reason, the U.S. is a very huge enabler of the continuation of this terrible conflict, and now it’s exacerbation, perhaps, to a broader regional conflict.

I’m curious on your perspective on how the situation can be ameliorated somehow. Because, obviously, there are huge, very — I would say a very — big global majority of countries and individuals who are against the status quo and like to mediate it in a different way. But, somehow, they’re not able to influence the conflict in the way that they should be able to, to bring it to a conclusion. Because of this U.S. role, and kind of the U.S. monopoly on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Can you talk a bit about the way this could potentially be internationalized in the future in a way that could be more constructive diplomatically? Because I think there is a potential there, now that U.S. power is in relative decline globally. How could that be accomplished, and can’t be accomplished?

TC: I mean, the big caveat here is, it only takes one major power that’s willing to stake itself on a bad regime to prop up that regime. And we saw that in Syria where, really, with not that much resources, Russia was able to tip the balance in favor of Assad.

So, if the U.S. is willing to keep staking itself on Israel, even in a period of multipolarity that comes with its relative decline, it could do that. So, I just want to start with that because I think the evidence of how these kinds of conflicts work militates in favor of humility about the slim potential for better outcomes.

That said, you referred to the sort of feeling in the Global South, and I’d put it differently. I think there’s a large and growing consensus of people and some governments who are no longer willing to accept what they see as a completely unjust situation in Palestine and Israel. So, some governments have followed their people; South Africa, Ireland, you mentioned some others on that list. The United States is a place where I think a decisive majority of people under 40, maybe even under 50, do not in any way support the U.S. policy towards Israel. And this is across the board, right? This is Arabs, and Muslims, and African Americans, and Jewish Americans, and all kinds of other demographics, right? It’s not some kind of parochial interest.

So, that will ultimately change the policy. When it becomes bad politics to support Israel, the government and policy will belatedly catch up. It will be too late for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who have died as a result of this bad policy, but that’s how the U.S. policy is going to change.

In terms of internationalizing, I think that helps set the stage for a better disposition in the end, but that’s not going to actually happen until the U.S. shifts and becomes unwilling to be Israel’s protector of first and last resort. When that does happen, there’s going to be, I think, an interesting kind of struggle. Because there are other regional and international powers at play in the Middle East who are just as bad for the Middle East as the United States has been; among [them] leading, I think of Russia and China. These are not good powers. It can be useful when they help create a balance so no one can dominate the region, but these are not powers that are going to help.

And, frankly, the E.U., which could have been a sort of a force for rule of law and some kind of equality agenda in Palestine and Israel, has not taken that role. Some member states of the E.U. have, but the E.U. as a whole has been more like the United States than like Europe on this issue, unfortunately.

So, I hope when the moment comes that America finally releases its sort of lockjaw fixation on supporting extremist Israeli policies that international players and countries that actually are interested in equality, equal rights, rule of law, and justice — countries like South Africa and Ireland, and not countries like the U.S., Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia. These aren’t going to be guarantors of some great outcome for Palestinians, either. So, I’m wary of investing too much hope in what internationalization can bring, but I view it as inevitable and desirable, because the U.S. ownership of this issue has been terrible.

And, by the way, not only has it been terrible for Palestinians and for all the civilians who have suffered in Palestine, it’s also been terrible for Israel, because it’s helped turn Israel into a fully Praetorian militarized state that has gotten used to — maybe addicted to — a security cycle of wars and an accelerating timeframe as a way of defining its entire national agenda. So, this is for those Americans who support the idea of a Jewish state or a Jewish homeland in Israel, U.S. policy has enabled Israeli policies that have been terrible for Jewish Israelis.

So, a diminishing of American hegemony over the Israel Palestine conflict will be beneficial to all.

JS: Just to push back on one thing, though. I certainly understand your point with regard to Russian military operations in the context of Syria. China, on the other hand, if I — maybe you can clarify what you meant by this — but China is not running around dropping bombs all over the Middle East. I think you’re referring more to China’s approach to basic liberty, freedom, etc., democratic values.

But, just to be clear, China did not launch the war against Iraq, and is not bombing Syria.

TC: To be clear, I was talking about the future. Not counting on China in the future to be a benevolent force for good in the region. Absolutely, China has not been a toxic problem in the Middle East the way the United States absolutely has, and the way Russia has.

JS: The point you’re making there, I think, really makes clear, in many ways, this has been a mask-off moment around the world.

If you just look at it on an Israeli domestic policy level, there’s a tendency now to try — and this is certainly almost official U.S. policy — to kind of put all of the bad stuff onto the bad ship Netanyahu. And, like, let’s sink that ship. You know, what we really need is Benny Gantz in power.

But if you read Israeli public opinion polling, it’s really horrifying the level of outright support there is for the known level of civilian death in Gaza right now, for the policies of the Israeli state. The U.S. is obsessed right now — particularly Democrats are obsessed — with blaming Netanyahu, as though the problem is this man. I mean, that really is what they’re projecting.

And I think, to go back to what Maz is saying about Ireland, Spain, other countries that have become vocal about this issue in an unprecedented manner. Yes, it’s coming from within their populations but, also, on a governmental level, there’s a split in the E.U. right now. And I think many European nations are really disgusted with the posture that Germany in particular has taken on this war.

Germany is currently engaged in a campaign of state repression against people who are speaking in defense of Palestinians. They recently raided a gathering in Berlin — the Palestine Congress — while Salman Abu Sitta, a survivor of the Nakba, was speaking, the Berlin police came in, they broke up the gathering. There have been thousands of people issued citations for so-called antisemitic speech and, when you start looking through the actual charges, no reasonable intelligent person would believe that the things people are being cited for are actually antisemitic. The posture of some European governments is really a confrontation of a multi-decade U.S. posture on Israel.

Domestically, in the United States, there’s the uprisings at campuses that all of us are following very closely. But, also, you’re starting to see a fracture within the Democratic Party. Yes, it’s slow moving, but it is happening, and the status quo doesn’t seem like it’s going to sustain. It seems like there’s a new day for discourse and discussion around what the Israeli state is, what its actions are, and what the U.S. role in those actions has been.

But what I wanted to ask you, because you’re in discussion at times with some of these people, what on earth does the Biden administration think it is doing right now? You have Biden, he repeatedly says, oh, I’m a Zionist, he talks about Golda Meir. You have John Kirby, Jake Sullivan, and Antony Blinken, it’s like pulling teeth to get them to express any sentiment that recognizes Palestinian lives. And, when they do do it, it feels so staged, like they are seeing not only the same image as we are, but they’re seeing more than that.

And what they have projected, the message they have projected, is that there is no crime too grave that the Israelis could commit that we will cut them off. And I think reasonable people can conclude, this is proceeding pretty much how they’ve wanted it to proceed. Because leaking stories to Politico or Barak Ravid a million times a week about how upset Biden is becoming with Netanyahu — that’s not a policy.

I’m sorry. I think I’ve reached the conclusion months ago, this is going how Biden & co. wanted to go, or they would have done something, actually, to stop it.

TC: I think your beginning observation helps answer your question about what the Biden administration is thinking.

So, although it’s convenient for some Americans to pretend this is a Netanyahu problem, what Israel is doing is the product of Israeli consensus. This is an Israeli political culture that long ago stopped considering Palestinians human beings, and stopped treating them as such. A state that is not interested in a two-state solution or even in coexistence, but is interested in dominion by a really extreme, identitarian set of politics over another population.

So, that is the consensus. If Netanyahu disappeared politically tomorrow, the Israeli policy would be much the same, and we’d be still forced to reckon with a lot of extremism in Israeli policy. That’s the Israel that the U.S. is supporting, right? It is, as I said before, a religious ethnocracy that views the Palestinians as a problem to be managed, not as a group of human beings under their sovereign control.

And so, when we ask what on earth is the Biden administration thinking, it’s pretty clear that the president knows this file well, and has come to a series of unsettling and wrong conclusions. He has bought into this narrative that is essentially a hate narrative about Palestinians being “human animals,” to quote one member of the Israeli cabinet. The sort of nostrum that, by the way, the U.S. has pursued in other venues like Iraq, which is the, in scare quotes, again, “these people only understand force,” right? That’s the approach. Not the approach of people living under the control of a state. 

So, what is the U.S. doing? I think the president is actually steering this policy. So, this is not Obama’s Syria policy in which advisors were making arguments and things were being experimented with. This president knows what he’s doing. What he’s doing is incorrect, in my view. It’s wrong. It’s wrong-headed, and nearsighted, and destructive to U.S. interests, as well as the interests of Israelis and Palestinians. But it is being done with knowledge, with intent, and with familiarity. Deep familiarity.

Now, one piece of the answer is that Biden’s out of step. He’s thinking of Israel as Israel was during the Yom Kippur War. Surrounded by hostile states, hanging by a thread, in need of American help in order to preserve its experiment. Well, this isn’t 1973.

JS: He may actually believe Golda Meir is still the prime minister.

TC: Well, let’s talk about racism. I think racism is a big part of this as well, right? 

How is it that our administration is not horrified by the loss of life, by the loss of civilian lives? I’m distressed by the loss of any civilian life, starting with the Israelis who were killed by Hamas on October 7. The murder of civilians is unacceptable, intolerable. It’s wrong. Why are we not shocked and disgusted? 

Well, unfortunately, reluctantly, I’ve come to the conclusion — and this is from the policies, and also from the ways in which senior administration officials talk about it, even in private — they do not see Palestinian lives as of equal value. That’s an awful realization, and it’s a really hard and horrible thing to try and walk back from. That is one of the only ways I can understand the continuation of these horrific policies.

MH: Thanassis, I want to ask you one last question, looking forward at what could happen in the months and years to come.

Obviously, Israel is a state which is very similar to South Africa and Rhodesia in the past, in the sense that, it was a state which was very much at war with the broader region around it, and its values and policies had put it at odds with millions of people. It’s a numerical minority against a larger majority in the region.

In Israel’s perspective, it seems that whatever conciliatory or pragmatic political leadership may have existed in the past or contested for power has now been marginalized, is becoming more and more marginalized. You see a more radical stream of Israeli politics emerging as a dominant stream. And I totally agree with Jeremy and you that Benny Gantz and people like this are by no means any less radical than Netanyahu, and there are even more radical forces who seem to be waiting in the wings as well.

At the same time, it is a country with nuclear weapons, has a very powerful air force, intelligence apparatus, and it perceives efforts to put pressure on it, or to concede equal rights to Palestinians, or even create a Palestinian state as an existential threat, against which it may choose to fight to the death. And it also feels that it has a superpower backing it, at least for now, in order to do that.

From your perspective, given that the U.S. is so important in this situation, it’s actually fostering a situation where these very potentially apocalyptic scenarios come to pass, what can the United States do today beyond putting an end to the Gaza war to restrain a country which could lead it into not just a regional war, but even a broader war than that. And even if Americans don’t care about Palestinians, or care about Arabs, people in the region, why is it in America’s interest now to stop the trajectory of Israel, which seems to be leading it towards a place which is very, very dark?

TC: Well, from a very sort of crass and Machiavellian perspective, it’s not in America’s interest to be implicated in endless unending regional wars in the Middle East.

Of course, you could take that central proposition and say, maybe it’s OK for the Middle East to be a terrible place for people who live there as long as the U.S. isn’t directly involved. Maybe that’s one scenario where the U.S. just finds a way to disengage from the region, but actually really disengage, meaning disengaging from Israel as well.

But if the U.S. is going to stay engaged as it is right now by treaty, by not only its military protection of Israel, but of Gulf states and its partnership with Egypt, and its interest in the oil markets, if it’s going to be involved, then it needs and wants a Middle East that is not a resource suck, as it has been for decades now. And electively so, right? Since the invasion of Iraq through this war in Gaza, all of the major conflagrations of the Middle East have been entirely elective, extreme overreactions in the case of, after October 7 or a sort of crazy own goal in the case of the U.S.’ illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

So, what is the way out? The way out is for the U.S. to start treating Israel as a normal ally. Which means help the ally when the interests overlap, when it’s in America’s interest, detach or discourage the ally from destabilizing a region in which the U.S. has a plethora of other core national interests. And, if that happens, Israel is not going to disappear. Jewish Israelis are not going to be annihilated. Israel will be a powerful military state, one of the most militarily capable states in its region.

It is, we’ve seen through these wars, of and part of the region, right? Israel is not some kind of Switzerland grafted onto the Middle East. It is absolutely a Middle Eastern country, it is part and parcel of its neighborhood, and it will learn to coexist in equilibrium with its neighbors only when the U.S. withdraws this blanket infinite backing, which essentially has created decades of moral hazard, which has enabled this kind of expansionism.

One last note is on the question of eliminationism, right? There’s a lot of eliminationism in the discourse around this conflict by the people involved. So, we have some Palestinian groups and some Israeli groups that openly wax philosophical about an outcome in which the other group ceases to exist in their territory. And ultimately, all the eliminationists have to be pushed out of political power, because there are plenty of Israelis and plenty of Palestinians who do look for a shared future. They might not like each other, and they might wish things were different, but they are absolutely talking the political discourse of coexistence, not of eliminationism. 

That’s what we need in the future. An Israeli government that is not eliminationist, a Palestinian leadership that, like Fatah and the P.A., is not eliminationist. The considerable inroads have been made towards that, more on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side right now — 30 years ago, maybe it was the other way around — but that’s where it’s going to have to end up.

It’s either that, or it’s perpetual apartheid and cycles of war, like the ones we’ve seen for the last 20 years.

MH: Thanassis Cambanis, thanks for joining us on Intercepted.

TC: Really great to talk to you. Maz, Jeremy, thanks for having me on.

MH: That’s Thanassis Cambanis, the director of Century International.

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Our great producer is Laura Flynn. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review is done by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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JS: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.