The Biden Administration’s Fake “Ceasefire” Gambit Seems To Have Mostly Worked
No longer are the daily horrors coming out of Gaza seen as the fault of the President. Instead, they are something more abstract—and authorless.
Pressure on the White House to stop arming and funding the ongoing, increasingly brutal mass killing and displacement campaign by Israel in Gaza has ebbed to an all new low. Protests remain scattered throughout the country, but a combination of colleges going on summer break, police crackdowns, and clever P.R. on the part of the White House has removed meaningful pressure from the Biden administration. The issue of US complicity—or the broader conventional wisdom that Biden could end the carnage with a phone call—has faded from the front burner of American politics. A creeping normalcy has set in, even within liberal-left spaces, due largely to a clever strategy by the White House to obscure, co-opt and ultimately deflate activist anger.
Beginning in late February, and capping off with the President’s deeply cynical May 31 speech, the White house has successfully co-opted the concept of a “ceasefire” in Gaza by rebranding the term to mean something else entirely. As I’ve noted in these pages and elsewhere, what used to be called a “temporary pause” for the purposes of hostage exchanges is now being called a “ceasefire.” And what used to be called a “ceasefire”—actually ending the war, removing Israel from Gaza, ceasing the bombing—is simply no longer an option presented by our media or mentioned much at all. It’s become a total nonissue. Because of the US’s successful rebranding campaign, the burden for an actual ceasefire that actually ends the “war” has been shifted from the Biden White House to a nebulous, open-ended “diplomatic” process between Israel and Hamas that is always ongoing but never progressing. US officials have, by sleight-of-hand and media complicity, washed their hands of the brutal death still appearing on our social media timelines daily. Let us take a look at media framing over the past week: US complicity is no longer the issue, the problem is a mysterious diplomatic loggerheads between the right-wing Netanyahu and Hamas, with the US as third-party peacemaker:
New York Times: U.S. and Israel Voice New Optimism About Cease-Fire as Gaza Talks Resume (7/4/24)
Politico: Biden speaks with Netanyahu as Israel and Hamas move closer to cease-fire (7/4/24)
Washington Post: Amid muted optimism, Israeli-Hamas talks resume, then adjourn again (7/5/24)
Axios: CIA director to travel to Qatar for Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal negotiations (7/6/24)
CNN: Gaza hostage-ceasefire deal faces new hurdles as Israel sets conditions. Here’s what to know (7/9/24)
The basic facts of the genocide haven’t changed—the US continues to ship weapons, provide intelligence, and diplomatic cover and military support to the Israel military. But the media narratives, muddled by preformative Diplomacy Theater and rhetorical trickery, have largely embraced the White House’s Orwellian formulation that it is nothing more than a powerless, third-party, neutral arbiter.
And this is exactly what the White House set out to do. The first and most essential element of this burden shift required the White House to reframe a “ceasefire” as “Israel wins the war and eliminates Hamas.” As I detailed last month, there never was an “Israeli ceasefire deal,” nor was there ever really a US ceasefire deal, since the US—like Israel—contended that any ceasefire deal must require Hamas to effectively surrender. (This was, conspicuously, not a feature of Biden’s May 31 speech, but quickly through follow-up statements became the official White House line.) This is nonsensical on its face: Why would one party ever agree to a ceasefire deal that required its political and military dissolution? This isn’t a ceasefire, it’s surrender. If Hamas made this demand of Israel, it would be dismissed as unserious, but Israel and the US doing this to Hamas is simply taken as a logical, sober, and sensible condition.
The broadly understood definition of a ceasefire, as advocated for by over 500 Biden campaign alumni, OxFam, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, 25 Arab and Jewish peace groups in Israel, and 18 United Nations agencies for months, was not “Hamas loses.” It was that the US signal to Israel it would stop backing Israel unless they wrapped up their bombing, siege, and invasion of Gaza within a matter of days, with a political solution to follow in the coming weeks and months. The general idea—and one echoed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken behind closed doors in January—was that defeating a guerilla military force was impossible and would only lead to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The reason this was the definition of a ceasefire and the commonly understood mechanism to end the unspeakable human suffering is that it was the precedent set by all previous Israel bombing campaigns and was actionable and immediate.
This commonly understood definition has all but faded from media discourse, and now the ball is perpetually in Israel and Hamas’ court despite the fact that the US is the sole patron of one party and could end their genocidal campaign with a single phone call. This has lead to absurdist headlines and chyrons like this graphic from CNN last week:
Let’s examine this more closely: A “ceasefire agreement” which permits one side to “fight until all [of its] objectives have been achieved.”
This is not a ceasefire as the term is commonly understood, and certainly not one outlined in Biden’s May 31 speech that repeatedly demanded an “end to the war.” This is, again, a temporary pause for hostage exchanges, and an affirmative assurance the siege and bombing of Gaza will go on indefinitely—likely years. This is not the demand of over 500 Biden campaign alumni, OxFam, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, 25 Arab and Jewish peace groups in Israel, and 18 United Nations agencies. Their demand, their universal cry, has been entirely removed from popular discourse and replaced by a totally new framework, bizarrely called “ceasefire talks” of: Does Hamas surrender on pain of hundreds of Palestinians continuing to be killed a week or not?
So long as the White House claimed to support something called a “ceasefire” our media largely ran with it, regardless of the fact that both the US and Israeli definition of a ceasefire did not, at all, resemble what anyone would recognize as a ceasefire.
This rhetorical sleight of hand was sufficient to successfully reframe the White House not as the primary patron of mass death, an active party responsible for the maimed children, bombed schools, and hospitals, but an Aw Shucks, relatively powerless, neutral arbiter promoting a “peace process” that never goes anywhere and is defined entirely by bad-faith, absurd demands of unconditional surrender by one side. So long as this Diplomacy Theater provides cover, the White House will hide behind it. Meanwhile, the weapons shipments continue unabated, Palestinians continue to starve, live in terror, get bombed at random, and the death train churns on without anyone noticing, doing anything to stop it, or even those steering it being made to feel the least bit ashamed or embarrassed. After all, didn’t you read in The New York Times that Biden is working towards a “ceasefire deal”?