Sec. Blinken Casually Admits Entire Gaza Strategy Is Premised on Pointless Mass Death

This should probably be a bigger scandal.

Buried in a recent, routine “mounting tensions between Netanyahu and Biden” piece (its own ass-covering sub-genre that we’ve seen dozens of times) was a fairly significant admission by the White House that has gone entirely unnoticed by mainstream media—but, I will argue, is objectively very important. 

NBC’s Andera Mitchell reported on Wednesday, recapping a recent meeting between the Israeli Prime Minister and the US Secretary of State Blinken: 

Blinken told Netanyahu that ultimately there is no military solution to Hamas, according to the officials, and that the Israeli leader needs to recognize that or history will repeat itself and violence will continue. But, the officials said, Netanyahu was unmoved. 

If the White House believes there is “no military solution” to Hamas, then why are they funding, arming, and backing a “military solution” to Hamas? Shouldn’t Mitchell have followed up this fairly startling admission with some more reporting? Or bigger questions? Clearly not, since Mitchell is a well-established White House stenographer. But others should probably pull on this thread a bit, given the implications of what Blinken is reportedly telling Israel officials.

The idea that Hamas will not be “eliminated” by bombing, starving, and collectively punishing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians is a point others have made for months, including on the Substack. The whole moral reasoning of the continued mass death in Gaza is that it is pursuant to some type of regime change operation designed to “remove Hamas from power”—that there was a greater good rationalizing all the unprecedented violence. If the White House thinks such a thing is impossible, that defeating Hamas—whatever this means—is not possible with shelling, bombing, starving, and besieging Gaza, then why is it continuing to back the Israeli military operations with regime change as its nominal goal? This isn’t to say the nominal goal would, at all, justify killing over 25,000 civilians, but now that our own leaders don’t believe it, shouldn’t this be a major political scandal? Not a throw away line in a bigger report? 

As I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s clear Israel’s true aim is not “hunting for Hamas,” but a combination of Bronze Age mass punishment as revenge and forcible population transfers. But the pretense that this was their goal, and this goal was shared across the US political system, from the White house to Bernie Sanders, was the only justification for the continued carnage. Otherwise, the end goal is either full-blown ethnic cleansing (still very much a threat), or a ceasefire with Hamas—or some Hamas-like entity still in charge of Gaza, at least what’s left of it. If the former is unacceptable, and the latter is inevitable then this raises the obvious question: What is the point of allowing Israel to continue killing hundreds a day until it’s hit some arbitrarily high number of dead Palestinian civilians? What is the point of not calling for a ceasefire two months ago, two weeks ago, or two seconds ago? What is the actual political aim, even if nominal, of any of this mass death? 

Pro-Israel liberals holding on to the “hunt for Hamas” fantasy may counter this by claiming there is a gray area between completely defeating Hamas and reducing their capabilities. Indeed, this is how Israel has justified its previous mass bombing campaigns targeting civilians. But, 14 weeks on, there’s no evidence Hamas’ capacity is at all dimensioned with hundreds of rockets firing from Gaza by the day. 

So what is the goal? What does Blinken hope to achieve here if he thinks “Hamas” has “no military solution”? What does a political solution look like, and why does it look any different on October 17 than it does on January 17? 

It’s the same nihilism embedded in President Biden’s now-viral response to a question about US bombing of “Houthi targets” in Yemen, where the President casually admits the bombing will likely not even achieve its alleged aims:

The most generous explanation for this thanatos-fueled stubbornness on the part of American officials—beyond racism and ideological commitment to apartheid—is that there’s a bigger principle, bigger than the lives of thousands of Palestinian children suffering amputations without anesthesia, which is “American credibility.” A rather vague dogma essential to our political elite that insists if the US commits to a path of gratuitous death and destruction it has to follow through on this commitment no matter how cruel, pointless, and damaging it is to their reputation, because to admit fault is to somehow hand a victory to the Bad Guys or some such. At this point, now that US officials have given up on faking that a military victory over the Houthis or Hamas is possible, our media should be asking: When does it end? When do even the most nakedly cynical officials stop throwing good money after bad? If the White House is openly admitting its policies are futile, based on their own logic, maybe those in prestige media, rather than writing another “mounting tensions” puff piece for the White House, should ask the administration why it keeps doubling and tripling down on its failed policy of mass death.