Episode 214: Fake Ceasefire Talks and Feigned ‘Concern’: How US Media Helped Distance Biden From the Gaza Genocide
Citations Needed | December 11, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: And this is going to be our final full-length episode of Citations Needed for the year 2024. What a year indeed. What a time to be alive. We’ve now been doing the show for about seven-and-a-half years. We are well into our eighth season of Citations Needed and just cannot thank you all, our listeners, enough for the ongoing support, for listening to and sharing the show, for writing reviews on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere. Really so much gratitude from the Citations Needed team to all of you.
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Nima: Yeah. So sending all the mirth and merriment, especially at this time, and especially with what we cover on the show, we do hope that you have some rest and restoration over the holidays. And we will be back in early 2025. We’ll see you in January for new episodes of Citations Needed. But now on to the show.
[Music]
Nima: “White House frustrated by Israel’s onslaught but sees few options,” reports The Washington Post. “White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video,” announces Axios. “Biden Works Against the Clock as Violence Escalates in the Middle East,” asserts the New York Times.
Adam: Since October 7, 2023, we’ve heard seemingly endlessly that the Biden White House disagrees with the violence in Gaza, but simply can’t do anything to stop it. A number of hindrances frustrate the administration, we’re told. There are limits to the United States’ influence and power. President Biden is secretly, and behind doors, furious and anguished at Israeli leadership and high civilian deaths. The administration is working around the clock towards a ceasefire, which, we are repeatedly told, will come any day now, but somehow never does.
Nima: As everyone from the Brookings Institution to the Financial Times, to Israeli officials and generals themselves make clear, Biden has been able to and still can end Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza whenever he wants. The United States has dispositive leverage over Israel, leverage that President Biden and his administration have repeatedly ruled out using.
Adam: The stark reality is that President Biden simply doesn’t want to stop Israel. And while he may have complaints about excesses here and PR problems there around the margin, he largely agrees with the outline of Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Nima: To obscure this central fact, American media has now spent over a year pushing out three White House- and Israeli government-curated media genres of handwringing deflection. One: Helpless Biden. Two: Fuming and Deeply Concerned Biden. And three: the Third-Partying of Ending the Genocide.
Adam: On today’s episode, as Biden is set to step down next month, we will go over the media covering Biden for the last 15 months. We’ll examine these fictitious reporting genres designed to distance him from the carnage in Gaza, and look at how they take a page from a decades-old White House PR playbook in an attempt to minimize responsibility and absolve US officials from their involvement in the genocide being livestreamed for 15 months.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Dalia Hatuqa, a multimedia journalist specializing in Israeli-Palestinian affairs and regional Middle East issues. She has also written about religion, minorities, and immigration in the United States. Since 2000 she has divided her time between the United States and the West Bank, covering a range of political, economic, and cultural issues for print, TV and radio. Her work has been featured everywhere, from Al Jazeera to the BBC, The Washington Post to NPR and Time, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and the Atlantic.
[Begin clip]
Dalia Hatuqa: I would say that since at least 1967, Palestinians have tried everything to kind of end the Israeli occupation. So they’ve tried armed resistance. They’ve tried unarmed resistance. They’ve tried neoliberal economics. They tried diplomacy. And everything pretty much either got them trouble or threats from Israel and the United States. Washington has long brokered these peace negotiations under the flawed premise of two equal sides vying for the same piece of land, and that’s the crux of it, really.
[End clip]
Adam: So this episode is based on an article that I wrote along with a researcher and writer who goes by the pseudonym Othman Ali. We published this in November. It’s part of a broader project where we examine center and center-left media’s role in promoting and covering for the genocide in Gaza, what Amnesty International calls a genocide if you need any more liberal buy-in, I guess.
Nima: Now that one of the former heads of the Israeli intelligence services has also called it ethnic cleansing, we can start to use these because when, you know, Palestinians say that themselves, it doesn’t count.
Adam: Right. The idea that the US would be directly involved in a genocide, or any quote-unquote “war” that has indiscriminate and involves dozens and dozens of documented war crimes, again, streamed over people’s TikToks and Twitters, necessarily is going to need some, again, where the person in charge, in this case, President Biden, is not budging, is going to need a meta-discourse to emerge and emerge fairly quickly, because clearly that’s not acceptable. The US can’t do those evil things. So there has to be an excuse-making regime that emerges to explain why what you see in front of your face is not real. Why you should not believe your lying eyes. And there are two conditions for that to be a necessary step. Number one, the administration in question has to be not Donald Trump, right? It’s got to be, although I think we’ll get into this, I think there’ll be elements of this under the new Trump administration, but it really has to be a kind of liberal administration, which is to say an administration that has as part of its broader PR regime, human rights, democracy, freedom, all these kind of lofty ideals that supposedly justify why the US has 800-plus military bases, right?
Nima: And in a human-rights context, rather than a freedom-spreading context, right? So it’s distinctly different from a neocon administration, although it contains every single element of that, it’s almost a full-circle Venn diagram, but there’s this element of liberal NGOs, and there’s Human Rights Watch. That’s why this excuse regime needs to exist.
Adam: And the second condition is that the war or genocide or whatever it is, has to be very unpopular, because obviously, if a genocide or war is popular, you don’t really have to distance yourself from it, right? This is why Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t do this shtick within Israel, because Israel largely supports the genocide in Gaza unfortunately. It really only exists, there’s two conditions. Number one, you have this liberal, high-minded human-rights rhetoric, liberal administration or centrist administration. And number two, the images that are coming out, the carnage that’s coming out, are just deeply unpopular. When those two conditions are met, what you have is the perfect storm for why you would need this elaborate excuse-making regime, which we’ll detail in this episode.
Nima: Now while this is largely, Adam, I think, a post-Cold War phenomenon, you know, the idea of the US being the world’s policeman, needing to maintain these high-minded ideals publicly, and its propaganda and PR about who the United States is, what the United States does around the world, and why , there is historical precedent for this before the early ’90s. Many useful examples actually come from coverage of the Nixon administration during the Vietnam War, which, like the genocidal onslaught of Gaza today, was tremendously unpopular at the time, and which spurred yearslong superficially anti-war White House PR campaigns.
So in 1968, while running for president, Richard Nixon campaigned in part on ending US violence in Southeast Asia, pledging, quote, “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” end quote, in a very famous ad campaign at the time. After Nixon won the election, some members of Congress rallied around him, repeating his campaign promises.
A syndicated Associated Press article published on November 25, 1968, just 20 days after Nixon was elected president, announced the following with this headline, quote:
“Ford is optimistic Nixon will end war in Vietnam.”
End quote. The Ford referred to is Gerald Ford. And the article explained that Gerald Ford, who was then House Minority Leader, stated at a black-tie dinner for the Radio Television News Directors Association, that President-elect Nixon would quote, “be in a position to do much like Ike did during the Korean War” in a, quote, “new atmosphere not bogged down by conflicts of the past.” End quote.
We now know, of course, that Richard Nixon had no intention of ending the war in Vietnam.
Adam: Still, press announcements about Nixon’s commitments to ending the war would continue, but would incorporate warnings that the US only had so much power to do so. From May of 1969, The Boston Globe wrote, quote, “Nixon to End War in Vietnam One Way or Another, Asia Told.” Unquote. It went on to report that Nixon’s Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, had been touring Asia to make the following argument. Quote, “The United States is limited in its resources and what it can do in Asia, so the Asians will have to do quite a lot more for themselves.”
Unquote. So here, here we have the US is now limited, and it’s limited in the things it can do. It is effectively a third party standing by, trying to mitigate it with this treaty and peace process.
Nima: In a January 1972 interview with Reader’s Digest, President Nixon stated this, quote,
What we want is a ceasefire throughout Indochina and the return of all prisoners. If we get these, there will be a total American withdrawal from Vietnam. Lacking this, we have to take a longer road retaining enough strength to be a bargaining counter for our prisoners.
End quote.
We heard then everything we still hear today: ceasefire, a return of prisoners, we have to take a long view, we have to maintain strength, we have to support our allies, because without those conditions being met, the US just has its hands tied. It can’t move forward with the inevitable outcome. It has to maintain this facade. And the media fanfare around that backed up those assertions consistently, just as they do today.
Adam: Because the goal is to be shipping the bombs, blowing people up, killing people, while presenting oneself as an agent of peace. That way you can have your cake and eat it too.
Nima: That’s right, the arsonist and the firemen.
Adam: Indeed, it’s the best place to be. You’re never out of work. Now cut to the late Obama administration. In 2015, 2016 we saw a similar playbook play out with the US support for Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen that killed tens of thousands, starved hundreds of thousands, was a humanitarian disaster, was the largest humanitarian crisis for several years.
Nima: Yeah, made cholera great again.
Adam: Yeah, the bombing of Yemen began in earnest in March of 2015. Obama left office in January of 2017. So about 22 months, it was under Obama’s watch. And during that time, the Obama administration offered more than $115 billion in weapons and other military equipment and training to Saudi Arabia. According to Reuters, this was the most funding offered to Saudi Arabia by any US administration in the then-71-year-old US-Saudi Alliance. And the US could have stopped the Saudi bombing of Yemen whenever it wanted to. As Bruce Riedel at the Brookings Institution noted, quote,
Barack Obama could have stopped the war at its start in 2015 by cutting off military, diplomatic, and intelligence support for the Saudi-led coalition that imposed a blockade on Yemen and began deadly air strikes on civilian targets.
So enter, then, the PR campaign as the carnage in Yemen gets worse and worse, blowing up school buses, targeting funerals, targeting weddings. There was an example in October of 2016, the US launched air strikes against Houthi rebels withstanding a Saudi bombing campaign. The Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr not only omitted the US and Saudi complicity, but also speculated about Iranian involvement with no evidence. I want to listen to the clip right now. Again, the goal is to obscure the US role in supporting its client state in Saudi Arabia.
[Begin clip]
Barbara Starr: The US is not saying if there is intelligence showing direct Iranian involvement in the attempted attacks. Tehran announced its own deployment of warships to the region, the Pentagon making clear it’s ready for more action.
Peter Cook: Should we see a repeat, we will be prepared to take appropriate action again at the appropriate time.
Barbara Starr: If there is further provocation us, officials say the next round of potential targets could include rebel missile sites and small boats serving as spotters. This time, officials think the Yemeni missiles were fairly old, but had been outfitted with highly lethal warheads, the kind al Qaeda and Iran know how to make.
[End clip]
Nima: Trump, of course, only continued this same policy just a few months into his first term. In May of 2017, Trump inked a $110 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia and a commitment to a total of $350 billion over the next decade. And Trump could have stopped this, instead of continued funding it, at any time. So again, enter the media PR campaign. A September 2017 documentary entitled The New Barbarianism, produced by the think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of our very favorite weapons-contractor- and Gulf-state-funded think tanks, CSIS, emphasized how the US was allegedly grappling with its own role in the crisis, and argued that giving more military and intelligence funding in the form of training and radar systems to Saudi Arabia would actually be the humane thing to do, as it would curtail civilian deaths in Yemen.
Adam: Right, so this is an early version of the Bear Hug theory, that Biden has to supply weapons and training and diplomatic cover to Israel, because if he doesn’t, they’re going to go elsewhere. And so there was an early iteration of this with Saudi Arabia, where the humanitarian disaster became so clear and so grotesque. And obviously the Saudi regime is not exactly a sympathetic ally, right? There had to be some other kind of 11-dimensional chess play at work here. And so CSIS, which again, is funded by weapons contractors, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, they, they said, actually, you know, what the US needs to do is they need to sell Saudi Arabia more weapons, because the problem is the weapons are not precise enough, which is, to be clear, a total myth. The weapons that Saudi Arabia uses and used back then were plenty precise. That was not the issue. They were trying to blow up the school bus. They were trying to blow up the wedding. They were just trying to kill civilians, because they’re a bunch of dictators. They don’t really give a shit. And there was this idea that the US could somehow sell them more precise weapons, and I guess, be in the room with them when picking targets? And this, again, plays into this idea that the US somehow has to arm and fund war crimes, because if they don’t, the country for whom they apparently have no leverage over, right, despite the fact that they provide all their weapons and military support and intelligence, that if they don’t support them, they’ll somehow be more barbaric, so they have to sort of keep them on their leash.
Nima: Exactly. So for the sake of this humanitarian credibility, the documentary, again produced by CSIS, featured an interview with the Washington, DC Humanitarian Director of Human Rights Watch, Sarah Margon. Let’s listen to that clip.
[Begin clip]
Sarah Margon: You had almost half the Senate coming out against the sale of these munitions. And that is a remarkable sea change. It has to do not only with a question of regional dynamics, but it has to do with what’s been happening on the ground, the absence of any accountability, the absence of an acknowledgement that all these civilians are dying, and that that actually might not be in the interest of the United States and the coalition long-term.
Narrator: Proponents of the larger arms deal to the kingdom argue that several hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to the training of Saudi forces and radar systems will curtail civilian casualties. That’s, of course, just one aspect of the increasingly complex landscape of the war in Yemen as Washington continues to debate its own role.
[End clip]
Adam: Right, so here, we don’t want to become the barbarians of the Orient. We are better than them, even though we’re doing the thing that we say they do. And what we need to do is, again, is sign another $180 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia so we can sell them more precise weapons and training. And again, where have we heard this script before? With police, right? Police shoot people. What do they get? More money for training. It’s the way you have your cake and eat it too. It’s the way you look like you’re liberal and you’re concerned while you still pump money into the death machine. And so another, another element of this was, of course, just obscuring the US’s role altogether, just ignoring it all together. As I wrote about in FAIR in January of 2018, there was a 60 Minutes segment that outright ignored the US role in the crisis in Yemen when they did a gut-wrenching segment on mass starvation in Yemen. The segment was entitled, “When Food Is Used As A Weapon,” and they would portray the US as not only not helping starve the people of Yemen by providing the weapons and the blockade that’s killing them, but they actually painted them as the savior. Again, where have we seen this before? We’ll get into that with Israel.
The segment featured David Beasley, the director of the UN’s World Food Program, the organization coordinating humanitarian aid. 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley narrated this, quote, “The US is the World Food program’s biggest donor. So the director is most often an American. Beasley was once the governor of South Carolina.”
Unquote. And Beasley would go on to obscure the US’s responsibility in a puff piece interview, stating, quote,
You see, it’s chaos, it’s starvation, it’s hunger, it’s unnecessary conflict, strictly man-made. All parties involved in the conflict have their hands guilty. The hands are dirty. All parties.
Which, again, is the line that the US government wants to push. Because if it’s all parties, it’s no parties, namely not the United States. The piece did not mention US support for Saudi Arabia once, and this was something 60 Minutes did a few times. Now, the Washington Post did this a few times, where they would talk about the starvation in Yemen, they would mention Saudi responsibility, but they would do a kind of both-sides, Saudi and Houthi, blah, blah, blah, but they would completely ignore the US’s role in it all together because it was inconvenient to a specific narrative.
Nima: This narrative has not only re-emerged when it comes to the Biden White House and Gaza, but it is ubiquitous across media. Adam and Othman have written about this in The Nation, as Adam mentioned at the top of the show, and I’m going to describe the three genres of handwringing Biden defense from that article. The first is Helpless Biden. So this refers to any report analysis or opinion that describes President Biden and his administration as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the slaughter overall. This is typically framed as a question of the limits to US power, often accompanied with a picture of Biden looking overwhelmed, sad or doddering.
Adam: He’s just kind of unable to really change the course of history. So 10 prominent examples:
November 2023, Washington Post. Quote, “White House frustrated by Israel’s onslaught, but sees few options.”
Nima: November 6, 2023, The New York Times said, “Biden Confronts the Limits of U.S. Leverage in Two Conflicts.”
Adam: Also November 2023, Politico. Quote, “Why the U.S. isn’t stopping this war, and other Middle East realities.” Unquote.
Nima: March 2024, The Washington Post said, “How Biden became embroiled in a Gaza conflict with no end in sight.”
Adam: April 2024, also, the Washington Post. Quote, “Six months into Gaza war, Biden confronts the limits of U.S. leverage.” Unquote.
Nima: Later that year, in September of 2024, The New York Times wrote, quote, “Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War.” End quote.
Adam: Ah, can’t stop it. September of 2024, The Washington Post. Quote, “As Israel escalates in Lebanon, US influence is limited.”
Nima: Just a few days later, in early October 2024, Politico wrote, quote, “Biden confronts the limits of his influence over Israel.” End quote.
Adam: October 2024, Washington Post. Quote, “How Joe Biden lost his grip on Israel’s war for total victory in Gaza.” Unquote.
Nima: And on October 7, 2024 The New York Times wrote, quote, “A Year Later, Biden Faces the Limits of U.S. Influence in the Mideast.” End quote.
Adam: We did a source analysis, which is to say that I literally went through and looked at every source, added them up. 93% of the sources in these articles are either Israeli officials, Biden aides, typically anonymous, or Biden allies in the think tank world. The three most common sources that were cited were, quote, “[White House/U.S.] officials” (47), “Israeli officials” (10), or “aides” (8).
And so these are articles that are fed to reporters by the White House and other Israeli officials who are trying to get progressives, anti-war activists, and the general popular sentiment against the war off their back by acting like the issue of US support is, in fact, a non sequitur, and also reinforcing the premise that Biden actually wants to end the war but simply can’t, again, a premise that is completely false by Biden’s own statements. Just to give one example, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in September of 2024, he had this headline, quote, “Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War.” And in the piece, Cohen writes, quote,
The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Biden. But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms.
Unquote. So one is compelled to ask, then, because this is not saying why he can’t do it. It’s saying why he doesn’t want to do it. So why is the headline “Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War,” and not “Why the United States Doesn’t Want to Stop the Middle East War?” And this conflation of can’t and won’t is a recurring theme one sees in all these articles, and trust me, I read them all. The Washington Post headline was, quote, “White House frustrated by Israel’s onslaught but sees few options,” and like Cohen, this article acknowledges that these limits are entirely self-imposed, but reduces this fact as some subjective opinion of quote, “many Arab and Muslim Americans,” unquote.
The Post would go on to say, quote,
But administration officials and advisers say the levers the United States theoretically has over Israel, such as conditioning military aid on making the military campaign more targeted, are nonstarters, partly because they would be so politically unpopular in any administration and partly because, aides say, Biden himself has a personal attachment to Israel.
Unquote. Again, that’s tautological. You’re just saying he can’t do it because he won’t do it. But that’s just him not wanting to do it. And this is a recurring, again, theme. See the extent to which they acknowledge the US has dispositive leverage, they’ll say they have dispositive leverage, but they’re not using it. But then the headline and the general framing and every quote is saying they can’t change it. He’s helpless. But he’s only helpless because these are the limits he puts on himself.
And I was trying to explain this to Mike Casca on Twitter, the Chief of Staff for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And he said, because I was criticizing her saying Biden and Harris were tirelessly working for a ceasefire, because I said they are not tirelessly working for a ceasefire because if they wanted one we would have had one months ago. It is a lie, it is a fiction. And I was trying to put it in terms he understood, because I know he’s a Dodgers fan. And I said, if Dave Roberts, the manager of the Dodgers, benched Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, right? And the entire starting nine, and then put in the Triple-A team to play the first round of the playoffs against the Braves or Padres. And then I said, Dave Roberts is tirelessly working for a championship. You would think that was absurd. You would think I was insane, right? He never got back to that point. He never responded. But the point is, if you’re preemptively forfeiting their leverage, then you don’t really want something. You’re certainly not tirelessly working for something. You clearly agree with it. You clearly don’t care. Or in Dave Roberts’s case, that would be evidence that you probably put $10 million on the Padres to win the World Series on FanDuel, right? This would be something that would be highly suspect. If someone said they were working tirelessly for something but forfeited their only real leverage, that would obviously be absurd. But this is the rigmarole in theater that we’ve been asked to endure for the past 15 months.
Which brings us to number two, which is Fuming or Deeply Concerned Biden. These are any story that alleges, behind closed doors or on some scripted call, that Biden is very mad at Netanyahu. Conversely, or oftentimes in conjunction, he’s very concerned with civilian casualties, and he’s very sad. He’s very sad about it, and he’s also very mad at Israel. And these articles are a dime a dozen, as I’m sure you’ve seen them non-stop over the last 15 months.
Nima: So we’re going to read just some choice selections from this particular genre of media coverage. From November 15, 2023, NBC News wrote, quote, “The gap between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government over Gaza’s future is widening.” End quote.
Adam: December, 2023, CNN, quote, “Unprecedented tensions between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel.”
Nima: January of 2024, Axios wrote, quote, “Biden is running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days.” End quote.
Adam: February of 2024, Washington Post. Quote, “Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over war in Gaza.” Unquote.
Nima: March 2024, CNN wrote, quote, “How a brief exchange in a call explains the strained Biden-Netanyahu relationship.” End quote.
Adam: March 2024 Associated Press. Quote, “Biden cajoles Netanyahu with tough talk, humanitarian concerns but Israeli PM remains dug in.” Unquote.
Nima: Also March 2024, Politico wrote, quote, “From ‘I Love You’ to ‘Asshole’: How Joe Gave Up on Bibi: After decades of building a ‘close, personal’ friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli prime minister. Now he’s hitting him hard — and it may be working.” End quote.
Adam: May, 2024, New York Times. Quote, “The Long, Tortured Road to Biden’s Clash With Netanyahu Over Gaza War.”
Nima: June 2024 in Axios. Quote, “White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video.” End quote.
Adam: August 2024, New York Times. Quote, “Killing of Hamas Leader Fuels More Tension Between Biden and Netanyahu.” Unquote.
Now, our source analysis for this particular genre of these top 10 articles, and again, there, there are dozens more of them, found that 98% of the sources of these articles are either Biden aides, typically anonymous, or Biden allies in the think tank world, or Israeli officials or ex-officials. The most popular source for these articles, was, you will be surprised to learn, were White House or US quote-unquote “officials,” with 50, Israeli officials, 12, and President Biden himself, 12. The most consistent stenographer for this particular genre, by far, was Axios’s Barak Ravid. We counted 25 different versions of this, and we had very conservative criteria, so it’s probably more, where he’s either quoting US officials directly or a string of anonymous officials. They’re typically presented as scoops, like he’s got a big scoop.
Nima: Yeah. Breaking news!
Adam: Yeah. Affirming that the White House and Biden officials are some variation of, quote, “breaking with Netanyahu,” quote, “increasingly frustrated,” quote, “running out of patience,” or, quote, “deeply concerned about civilian casualties.” These are all direct quotes from his articles. Ravid himself is a former member of Unit 8200, Israel’s secretive cyberwarfare unit. For his suite of fuming Biden deeply concerned Biden articles, he was actually awarded the White House Correspondents Association for Journalistic Excellence in April during which he glowingly posed with President Biden, who, again, they’re all getting along because his reporting is not adversarial. He’s just laundering whatever the White House wants him to say, which in this case is that Biden is secretly mad, secretly angry, and secretly sad.
But the status quo, of course, never changes. The analogy Othman and I use in our Nation article is in Theater 101, you’re taught the difference between a plot and a sketch, right? A plot moves forward. It progresses. Characters grow. Things change. There’s beat changes, right? In a sketch, it’s the same gag over and over again. Nothing ever changes, by definition, and you use that to draw up the absurdity of the particular situation. So typically, three or four times is kind of the number, right? We are now on 15 months and dozens of articles of what is effectively a sketch. Biden being very sad or very mad at Israel, while nothing changes, right? There’s never a beat change. There’s no escalation, no weapons are ever taken away. They supposedly stopped giving them 2,000-pound bombs for a minute, but then they said, actually they have enough to last them a few years anyway. So then that was kind of just purely superficial, which the White House was quick to affirm. So nothing ever changes. So you would think that after, like, the 40th, 50th, 60th ‘Biden’s upset’ article–
Nima: ‘He’s almost completely, totally fed up, almost. There’s a break coming.’
Adam: Yeah. You would think an editor would be like, What’s the news value in this? How is this news? Because it’s not news, right? It’s a story. It’s supposedly, again, self-serving, anonymous official-fed, court intrigue, theory of mind and a bunch of guesswork as to people’s personal feelings. What difference does it make to the average Palestinian in Gaza if Biden’s supposedly upset? It makes no difference. It has no material significance or consequence. It’s not a change in policy. And they kind of realized this early on in the genre, within a few months. And so to make these Fuming Biden stories, they would always sort of allude to some imminent break, right? That Biden was about to break with Netanyahu. But of course, we now know that never happened, because it was never going to happen, because it’s fake. It’s not real. It’s a fake thing. And none of the people who supposedly alluded to or even sometimes explicitly said they were about to break have ever mentioned this again. They never go back and say, Well, I was wrong, or I was too credulous, because the goal is to just get liberals off your back.
And if it looks like Biden’s about to either, you know, lock down a ceasefire or break with Netanyahu, then you can kind of, they go, Well, maybe I won’t show up to the protest this week, or maybe I won’t get mad. I’ll just sort of move on. And that’s the function they serve. They’re a pressure valve. That is all these articles are. They’re a fucking pressure valve. And it worked pretty well.
One of the more egregious examples was Peter Baker, the dullard at the New York Times, who does this news analysis where he kind of prints whatever the Biden White House wants him to print, so long as he’s protecting his left link. To the extent to which Baker is critical of Biden. it’s from the right, namely, over his Afghanistan pullout. And he had a pretty egregious version of this in May. On May 11, 2024, Peter Baker did a whole Fuming Biden story where he said, quote, “To some degree, the Israelis have responded. Despite more than three months of vowing to invade Rafah, they have yet to actually do so beyond limited strikes.”
Unquote. And then in the article, he says that Biden, quote, “has finally had it with an Israeli leadership that he believes is not listening to him.” Unquote. And he says he thinks that this strategy is working.
Nima: Then, just three days later, after Baker’s report, the Israeli military entered the center of Rafah, quickly turning the city that once had held nearly 300,000 residents into, as NBC News put it, quote, “a ghost town.” End quote. And as of August of 2024, data from the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group showed, according to Bellingcat, that quote, “almost 44% of all buildings in the Rafah government in southern Gaza had been damaged or destroyed.” End quote. So even the most pro-Biden analysts really now agree that Netanyahu steamrolled through what was then seen as a handwringing, Fuming and Deeply Concerned Joe Biden Rafah red line.
Adam: Peter Baker never followed up again. He says he thinks it’s working. They haven’t invaded Rafah. Then they invade Rafah three days later, and this is never talked about again. So one has to ask themselves the question, What is more likely, that Peter Baker was reporting on an actual underlying reality of a meaningful break with Biden and Netanyahu, or was he providing PR distance from what Biden knew was going to be horrific images coming out of Rafah in the coming days, because Biden knew Israel was about to invade central Rafah, which they of course did? And of course there were many reports of war crimes. So which of those scenarios is more likely? Is Peter Baker doing public relations for the White House, or was Peter Baker accurately reporting and representing an underlying reality?
Nima: We may never know.
Adam: The third trope is one that’s so ubiquitous it can’t really be analyzed, because there’s just literally thousands of it, which is third-partying, which is presenting the US as a third party in the conflict, rather than the country providing the bombs killing 99% of people. An active participant, a defender of the UN, a disparager of the ICC and ICJ, a disparager of Amnesty International, a provider of military intelligence, provider of aircraft carriers.
Nima: It’s kind of the mirror, opposite of how Iran is described routinely in US media, right? Everything is Iran-backed.
Adam: Right.
Nima: The, you know, mullahs in Tehran are secretly, you know, puppet masters behind everything that the US or Israel doesn’t particularly like, and yet, the US who actually provides billions and billions and billions of dollars in weapons, in diplomatic cover for war criminals, is always seen as outside the fray, not influencing policy, not actually an active participant in violence, the way that, say, “Iran-backed” does the work for the kind of sinister, evil Iranians all the time. So this is what we mean by third party.
Adam: Yeah, so the US is presented as a humanitarian force that is trying to mitigate Israel, and the fact that they have dispositive leverage, and can end it whenever they want, is just ignored altogether. It’s just not talked about. So you have constant talk about, March 2024, “Biden Expresses Hope on Cease-Fire Talks, but Hamas Appears to Reject Latest Offer.” These are all from the New York Times.
Nima: April 2024, quote, “Biden Team Sees Narrow Window for Deal on Cease-Fire and Hostages in Gaza.” End quote.
Adam: Quote, “Blinken Turns Up Pressure on Hamas to Accept Gaza Cease-Fire Deal.”
Nima: June 2024, quote, “Biden’s Push to End the War in Gaza.” End quote.
Adam: July 2024, “U.S. and Israel Voice New Optimism About Cease-Fire as Gaza Talks Resume.”
Nima: August 2024, quote, “U.S. Push for Gaza Cease-Fire Falls Short on Key Points, Officials Say.” End quote.
Adam: September 2024. “Biden Works Against the Clock as Violence Escalates in the Middle East.” He’s working around the clock. Around the clock, he’s literally working 24 hours a day, even though we just found out he has to go to bed at 8 pm.
Nima: October 2024, quote, “Hamas Says Its Demands Are Unchanged as Biden Pushes for Gaza Cease-Fire.” End quote.
Adam: So Biden’s constantly pushing for the ceasefire. But again, he could assert one whenever the fuck he wants. This whole thing is fake. It’s all fake. It’s not real. What they mean to say is he’s pushing for a ceasefire within the limitations of, again, sitting Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, the starting nine of the Los Angeles Dodgers. So within that narrow framework of starting the Triple-A team, he is really, really working to get a championship, but he just can’t manage to figure it out, and the absurdity of the situation is just never commented on. Let’s look at one example, after Kamala Harris became the nominee, and after the US killed Sinwar, the head of Hamas, in October of 2024, Kamala Harris told reporters two phrases just seconds apart that are in direct contradiction, and this goes to the heart of what they mean when they talk about ceasefire. When the US says they’re pushing for a ceasefire, what they’re pushing for is a reiteration of surrender demands. Historically, the word ceasefire means two parties cease firing, and then they, to open up space for negotiation. It is not simply saying you surrender over and over again, which is what the US and Israel mean by ceasefire. She said, quote, “The killing of Hamas leader Sinwar gives us an opportunity to finally end the war.” This was immediately followed by, “It is time for the day after to begin without Hamas in power.”
Nima: You’re already dictating the terms that happen after negotiations, which happen after a ceasefire.
Adam: Right, that’s not a ceasefire. That’s just you asserting the other side has to surrender, and then again, with the implicit threat, they’ll keep killing civilians. And this has been Blinken’s line, Biden’s line, for months, which is Hamas cannot remain, have any role in postwar Gaza. Well, okay, if you believe that, own that. Say what Israeli leaders have been saying, which is, We’re just going to keep bombing and killing civilians and shredding toddlers until Hamas finally gives up, or anyone, not really Hamas, per se, but anyone with a gun, gives up and surrenders and allows Israeli occupation to have, you know, full reign over Gaza.
But that’s not what they’re saying. And so we constantly get these supposed ceasefire talks, even though the US official position contradicts the basic premise of a ceasefire, which is that Israel must 100% win the war, unconditionally, win the so-called war, right? The other side must completely surrender, hand over their arms and go flee somewhere else. And then what the other way they weasel it is, also by “ceasefire,” they mean a temporary pause for the purposes of hostage exchanges, with the explicit understanding that they will continue the so-called war until quote-unquote “total victory.”
And so there’s this double game going on where the word “ceasefire” loses all meaning. it’s not related to any underlying reality. But Biden’s always pursuing these ceasefires. And again, there’s never any details. It’s unclear. They, like, meet in Qatar. They meet with some Egyptian officials. And Egyptian officials, by the way, are mitigating this, have repeatedly said that these ceasefires are not real, that they are for public media consumption in the US, within Israel, Israel, because Netanyahu wants to get the hostage families office back, and in the US because, again, they need liberals to look like they’re doing something. There’s some thingamajig they can point to.
Nima: Which is why Biden’s working ‘round the clock, Adam.
Adam: Tirelessly. ‘Round the clock, yeah, just 2 am, just burning the midnight oil. Blinken coming up with the terms of surrender. But again, these are just an assertion of surrender. This is not a ceasefire negotiation in good faith, because Hamas’s position has been they will support a ceasefire and release all the hostages if Israel withdraws from Gaza. Not Israel surrenders, right? Not Israel gives up. And, you know, says we no longer exist, right? They just want them to leave Gaza and stop bombing residential buildings and killing entire families. And you see this all the time, this constant firefighter and fire starter dynamic just goes on without question. So let’s listen to this clip from CBS News from January of 2024. This is even before they even faked like they cared about the cease fire. And let’s listen to this intro of the so-called Israel-Hamas war.
[Begin clip]
Robert Costa: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is en route to the Middle East again, his fourth trip there since fighting between Israel and Hamas broke out on October 7. The State Department says Blinken is aiming to prevent the conflict from spreading, while expanding humanitarian aid and reducing civilian casualties. Meanwhile, the Israeli military says it has completely dismantled Hamas’s military framework in northern Gaza. CBS’s Ian Lee has the latest from Tel Aviv.
Ian Lee: Good evening, Robert. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Turkey to a Middle East in trouble. He’ll be playing the role of firefighter as he tries to extinguish the conflicts popping up in the region.
[End clip]
Adam: So here we have, he’s a firefighter putting out fires. Again, 99% of the people dying are being killed by American-made bombs, and he’s presented not as an active participant in the conflict, which they are, right? The White House is, the US is. They are presented as the exact opposite of reality, which is an agent of peace, who’s there to stop the hotheaded Orientals from killing each other. But that’s not what’s happening at all. It’s a total inversion of reality. And we see this over and over and over again. Biden pushing for a ceasefire, trying to calm tensions, you know, make sure it doesn’t escalate, and that’s the absolute opposite of reality.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’ll now be joined by Dalia Hatuqa, a multimedia journalist specializing in Israeli Palestinian affairs and regional Middle East issues. She also writes about religion, minorities, and immigration in the United States. Since 2000, she has divided her time between the US and the West Bank, covering a range of political and economic and cultural issues for print, TV and radio. Her work has been featured in Al Jazeera, BBC, Washington Post, Time, NPR, The Economist, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. Dalia will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Dalia Hatuqa. Dalia, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Dalia Hatuqa: Thank you for having me.
Adam: So at the top of the show, we were breaking down the so-called Gaza ceasefire negotiations and how they, in many ways, steal from the kind of peace process, quote-unquote “peace process,” or quote-unquote “two-state solution” playbook of an endless, open-ended bad-faith process that exists largely so US and Western liberals and media, I think in particular, can kind of point to something showing that the status quo is bad or unacceptable, but there is some process that’s kind of ongoing. That way they can sort of look like they’re doing something. This is something that Egyptian negotiators have said, explicitly, they said it was for media consumption in the West and domestically within Israel, for the kind of hostage families. I want to begin by discussing this idea of a peace process that’s been carried out ad infinitum as apartheid and genocide become a matter of reality. Begin, if you could, by discussing this kind of blueprint, specifically in the context of the so-called peace process. What you feel like common misunderstandings are of this so-called process, and how does the US media kind of maintain this pretense seemingly forever?
Dalia Hatuqa: I mean, I would start off by using a nut graf, so to speak. I would say that for decades, since before the Oslo Accords were signed in ’93, Palestinian leaders have engaged in a peace process that I would say is rigged. This peace process was the international community’s way, and that includes the US, to impose a blueprint for a Palestinian state onto the population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And I would say that the United States has been a leader in this process, and it’s sought to maintain a fiction that it’s an honest broker and a neutral mediator.
I would say that since at least 1967, Palestinians have tried everything to kind of end the Israeli occupation. So they’ve tried armed resistance, they’ve tried unarmed resistance, they’ve tried neoliberal economics, they tried diplomacy. And everything pretty much either got them trouble or threats from Israel and the United States. Washington has long brokered these peace negotiations under the flawed premise of two equal sides vying for the same piece of land, and that’s the crux of it, really. So under various US administrations, we’ve seen that the amount of land that Palestinians had control over has shrunk. Settlements have mushroomed across the West Bank. Violence not just against combatants, but also primarily against civilians.
And the thing is, there have been so many monumental changes that the Palestinians had no say in. Like, for example, if we looked at, under Trump, we had the US embassy in Israel was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to support what Israel claims as its undivided capital. We then had the closure of the PLO representative office in DC, on the grounds that Palestinian leaders had failed to advance the final status negotiations, again, which is to engage in the peace process with Israel, because they had sought the prosecution of Israeli officials at the ICC at The Hague. The thing is that working on the final status issues, the final status issues are, for those who don’t know, you know the borders, determining the borders between Israel and the Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem and the refugees. But Israel was constantly changing that. So, for example, if you’re in Jerusalem, you see that there is this constant attempt on the ground to erase the Muslim and the Christian and the Arab identity of Jerusalem. It’s slow, but it’s there. A constant demolition of homes in places like Silwan, a lot of places in close proximity to Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is revered not just by Palestinians, but by Muslims worldwide.
With the refugees, we’ve had successive US administrations trying to deny UNRWA, or the UN agency that provides relief to Palestinian refugees with funding. So they attacked it as antisemitic. They’ve called it every name under the sun, like irredeemably flawed and unsustainable. And so considering all the years that I’ve been working on this, I’ve just seen that under so many administrations, the final status issues were sought to be finalized in Israel’s favor, and the only hurdle they faced was finding a way to bully the Palestinians into acceptance.
Nima: How do you see the media really play a role in this? I know that we hear those kind of buzzwords, ‘irredeemable’ or ‘intractable’ in political speech. How have you seen over the years, the media doing not only the same, but even sometimes going further?
Dalia Hatuqa: I would want to focus a little bit on Gaza, and I want to start out by saying, in general, mainstream American news coverage of what’s happening in Gaza since October 7 has been marred by a deep-seeded bias, and that’s an understatement. News outlets are consistently prioritizing Israeli lives over Palestinian ones. They’re adopting Israeli framing and narratives even when they fail to stand up to scrutiny.
I mean, you’ve also done, along with Othman Ali, for The Intercept and The Nation and others, some of the research on the pro-Israel bias. And to me, it’s very strange that something like in The New York Times or The Washington Post, the LA Times, Israelis generally got far more mentions in news stories than Palestinians, even as the deaths of Palestinians far outpaced Israeli deaths. There were adjectives that were almost exclusively applied to the murder of Israeli civilians, like slaughter, massacre, and horrific, but you would never see that on the Palestinian side.
But specifically to the point you mentioned, I think the US press reported reality during the Gaza war, or is reporting, largely as the Biden administration had scripted it, even when the script seemed bizarrely out of line with observable events. So the coverage parrots the talking points of both US and Israeli officials. I’ve noticed it downplays dissent even within Washington, over US military support to Israel, and it suppresses or spins countervailing evidence about human and civilian suffering in Gaza. The US press, in a way, is legitimizing a disastrous policy choice, and in some ways, it also reminds me of how the US press initially covered the Iraq War under George W.
But to go back to the previous point, I would say that despite the US government’s claims that it’s working to secure a ceasefire, for example, the genocide that’s unfolded in Gaza over the past year has been a joint US-Israeli endeavor. Israel would never be able to inflict anything approaching the degree of violence it has on the Palestinian people without American weapons, without American intelligence, without American political cover, and unfortunately, the media has played a role in this.
Adam: So let’s talk about this third-partying. Because you wrote about this, what, four or five years ago, I’m sure you’ve written about it many years before, which is this idea of the US presenting itself as a third party to the so-called conflict, when it is, in fact an active participant, the primary patron, 75% of weapons, to say nothing of the billions of dollars, and it’s kind of an impressive PR gambit, because it’s, you are actively engaging in hostilities while framing yourself or presenting yourself as an agent of peace or kind of bumbling human rights organization.
And what’s made this particular version of it interesting in the last 14 months is that, so for the first three, four months, the State Department banned the word ceasefire because everybody knew what it meant in the context of Gaza. It had an historical precedent from 2021, 2014, 2018, 2009, everybody knew what it meant. And then on the eve of the Michigan primary, as we argue at the top of the show, the Biden White House realized they had to do something. There was so much pressure, so much bad PR. It was going to completely wreck Democrats’ prospects in 2024 so then they said, Okay, we’re going to actually say we support a ceasefire, but just redefine the term to mean this nebulous process, which is really just a reiteration of surrender demands, a demand of capitulation from anyone in Gaza with the gun. So some kind of vichy governments or whatever, backed by Saudi Arabia, can supposedly come in and, quote-unquote “rebuild.” And that’s, of course, a dubious suggestion, given the amount of planning going on for settling Gaza by Israeli settlers.
So I want to talk about this kind of very bizarre thing, where Biden would come out and say, This is an Israeli peace proposal, or Israeli ceasefire proposal, and then Netanyahu, literally, an hour later, would be like, I have no idea what he’s talking about. I do not support this. And then the media would still call it an Israeli proposal in English. In a very bizarre way, the most honest person in this whole equation has been Netanyahu. And other Israeli officials who are like, I have no idea what they’re talking about, because they have their own base to please, right? And it’s this really strange fiction where the only 10 people on Earth are the editors at the New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN and the White House who believe that this is an Israeli peace, quote-unquote “ceasefire proposal.” And so we saw this at least a half a dozen times. It sort of kind of meandered on throughout the winter of this year.
So talk, if you could, about this elaborate theater, like, who do you think it kind of serves, what function it serves? Again, we argue it mostly serves to kind of get human rights groups and progressives and liberals off their backs. Talk, if you could, about the sort of function of this theater, and also the extent to which this word ‘ceasefire’ has meant two different things simultaneously. It’s meant a temporary exchange of hostages, with the assertion that they’ll go back to bombing everyone. And it’s also kind of meant what it’s broadly understood to meant, which is actually a quote-unquote “end to the war.”
Dalia Hatuqa: I would start off by saying that basically the US government, when all of this was unfolding, it needed a critical mass of the American population to support or go along with its policy of working with Israel to basically exterminate, I would say, at least some of the Palestinians. To sustain it, Biden’s administration adopted a pro-Israeli narrative, but it also sought to justify Israeli actions and its own by citing Israel’s right to self-defense. The right to self-defense became very much linked with the issue of the ceasefire. Simultaneously, you had influential voices in American media contributing to creating the necessary ideological conditions for public acceptance of US-enabled Israeli atrocities.
So as far as I’m concerned, some in the American media are partially responsible for the genocide in Gaza, because for a genocide to occur, a climate must be created to enable such crimes to be committed. So like you said, The New York Times, The Washington Post, I would add, the Wall Street Journal, it definitely needs to be in there, can be thought of in these terms, because pundits in these papers have engaged in a form of incitement to genocide, in a way. I mean, I focus on Israel-Palestine, but it’s unprecedented, especially given what’s going on in Gaza and the large numbers of killings and the lack of food and everything that’s happening.
But the thing is, there’s a piece that stayed in my mind. It was published in The Washington Post a few months ago, and it straight out rejected ceasefire calls and said that the idea that Israel should limit its response to precision airstrikes and commando raids to take out high-level Hamas operatives and to free the hostages. So it argued that if Israel agreed to ceasefire at that point, it would be tantamount to rewarding aggression and inviting more of it in the future. This is between quotes. The subtext is that Israel’s actions are ethically defensible, no matter what the US and Israel had done, no matter how much Israel had killed, despite the fact that this piece, you know, that was published in The Washington Post, came out when nearly 3,800 Palestinians were killed in the first 13 days of the assault on Gaza.
And similarly, I recall at the end of February, I believe a Wall Street Journal editorial criticized Palestinian American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and others on the grounds that the ceasefire that they want will leave Hamas fighters alive and free to rebuild their terror state. ‘And of course, the suffering of Gaza is terrible, but we all know why it’s terrible, because the main cause is that Hamas uses civilians as human shields.’ On the one side, we’ve seen US officials including Vice President Harris Biden, others speaking in lofty terms about pursuing peace and seeking ceasefires. But on the other side, like you mentioned earlier, Israeli leaders, especially Netanyahu, he often, if not always, undercut these claims in blunt public statements. I mean, to put it in, let’s say, in other terms, he didn’t give two shits, you know.
And for instance, like while the US touts and it’s still doing this, a potential ceasefire deal, Netanyahu categorically rejects any notion of halting military operations until specific objectives are being achieved, and these objectives are constantly being changed. So first it was the return of the captives, then it was the killing of the upper echelon of Hamas, which happened, and yet still here we are, you know, and now it’s like the total dismantling of Hamas. So what does that mean? When will it end? Because this disconnect is illustrating, if anything, this disconnect between the US and Israel, it’s showing us a diplomatic charade where both parties are playing to their respective audiences with the US leaders to the domestic and international constituencies advocating for peace, and the Israeli leaders to the more hawkish domestic base.
Nima: Yeah, and we see this also with regards to Israel never being able to do anything wrong. They’re effectively not even criticized, even in the very, very low-level critiques that do appear. I mean, if we’re talking about a ceasefire, even the definition of what a ceasefire means is infinitely flexible when it comes to Israel. I mean, we’ve seen quote-unquote “ceasefires” in the bombing of Lebanon, which is ongoing, you know, Oh, there’s a ceasefire now, yet Israel violates that ceasefire 60 times in the first three days, right? But never do we hear that Israel is then at fault. It is always only responding. It is always only the victim. And you know, as you’ve said, Dalia, this just allows a genocide, allows the slaughter to continue while consistently having one side, the Israeli side, be perpetual victims, whereas whether Palestinians or Lebanese, always the aggressor. In your work on the ground, what do you see as the public response, or even just reaction, I shouldn’t even say response, reaction to this kind of constant allowing of the aggressor to be the victim? What do you see when you talk to Palestinians? Are they so inured to this at this point? Because they’ve seen this for so many decades, you know, on and on.
Dalia Hatuqa: So there are a few things that people would say. I think, at the beginning, when the Gaza war happened, I think people were shocked. And, I mean, so were we. We knew as soon as we heard about the October 7 attacks, we knew that, quote-unquote, “Something bad is going to happen.” We knew there was going to be a war. But I don’t think in anybody’s mind that the extent of this war, or, you know, the genocide or onslaught, we had no idea about it, myself included, despite the fact that, you know, I’ve lived through and covered the Second Intifada. But this is nothing like it. This is more reminiscent of 1948. This is more like, We want to kill people, and we’re getting away with it, and unfortunately, it’s happening under the Biden administration’s status.
The thing that I’m seeing from people is that their feelings have been fluctuating. So when students started coming out in the United States and doing protests, I think Palestinians felt like they weren’t alone. That, you know, maybe there’s been a global shift in the views about Palestinians. Because for a long time, Palestinians have, and even more so now, they’ve been very much dehumanized. I could get into why, but that’s a topic for another day. But it really boils down to the dehumanization of a Palestinian, because, like, when an average American thinks of a Palestinian, they come up with the most ridiculous things. And I, I’ve been privy to this on a personal level and in my work as well, but now we’re kind of back to a point where Palestinians feel like they’re completely isolated, that the Arab countries, not the people, the governments, have pretty much played the same role that they’ve played since 1948 and 1967, which is to kind of say one thing and then do a backstabbing after that.
I think there’s mixed feelings, but honestly, like at the end of the day, what’s really troubling right now is that everybody in the West Bank is kind of keeping an eye on things there, because there is a general feeling, and it’s not just a feeling, it’s something that’s happening on the ground as well. It’s coming from what’s happening on the ground, that the West Bank is next. And with calls by Netanyahu government for annexing the West Bank, and they’re waiting for Trump to take over in January. You get a sense that people are like, okay, you know, we’re next.
Adam: On the topic of Trump, I want to ask about the elaborate diplomacy theater. Doesn’t really, is not really going to, I think, be a preferred tool of the Trump administration, if his template with his last administration, with respect to, say, Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, because he kind of abandoned that. So I think we’ll get some of this. Because I think there’s kind of a general, steady state that kind of needs it. So I think we’ll still get some of the ceasefire negotiation rigmarole, especially with Rubio as the Secretary of State. But I want to ask about that. So do you think there’s any kind of benefit to removing that pretense? I know some people have said, you know, liberal Zionism in general, or the kind of pretense of some peace solution, actually, in many ways, is a barrier, because it gives a lot of the so-called progressive or liberal or kind of human-rights-minded people in the West the veneer of not being genocidal, whereas, if you have Trump, and the kind of raw brutality and racism and fascism of Trump, it kind of exposes the underlying reality more. Ultimately, again, probably won’t make much of a difference on the ground, but I’m sort of curious what your thoughts are of having an administration come in that does abandon all this PR rigmarole.
Dalia Hatuqa: I think the return of Trump, or, you know, anybody else who’s similarly unrestrained, it does offer a shift, at least in the rhetorical landscape of US-Israeli relations and the implications for public discourse. I know that a lot of even Palestinians, they are seeing some silver lining in the bluntness of his more openly aggressive policy. I think the reality, however, is much more complex, and there’s a lot of contradictions. So a Trump administration, I think, would likely dispense with, as you mentioned, much of the liberal humanitarian facade that kind of underpins the current US policy on Israel and Palestine. And if we were to look at Trump’s track record from relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem to recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, it reveals a willingness to embrace an explicitly pro-Israel position. This approach is, choose the traditional rhetorical nods to human rights or peace processes that we mentioned earlier.
But this shift might simplify the target for criticism, so you have a government who’s not ashamed to be aligned with Israeli expansionist aims. It’s not burdened by the hypocrisies of diplomatic doublespeak. Maybe, as far as activists and journalists are concerned, the absence of pretense could clarify the stakes. It could expose the raw dynamics of power without the smokescreen of shared democratic values or mutual security concerns. But the danger lies in how such an overt stance could normalize open support for policies which have previously been couched in euphemism. So while liberal administrations at least feel pressured to justify their actions within a framework of international law, I mean, to certain extent, a Trumpist approach abandons even the appearance of constraint. So it risks cementing this kind of worldview where brute force is openly celebrated as legitimate policy, and it makes it harder to mobilize opposition.
You know, I fear for these kids that are going out at universities and speaking out and NGOs and human rights organizations, because I feel like when Trump does take office in January, he’s going to go after these people. He’s going to go after Palestinians, and I know he’s going to go nuts and go after Venezuelans and other people, but there’s going to be this dropping of the mask.
But however, I do want to say that there is a potential benefit, in the sense that the contradictions of such a policy become harder to ignore. So when Trump praises Netanyahu or dismisses Palestinian rights, it kind of, as I mentioned, it illuminates the cognitive dissonance that accompanies the liberal humanitarian pretense. So maybe, perhaps activists, global movements, can more effectively galvanize opposition when the injustice is laid bare. So there could be that, but honestly, I don’t have much hope for anything at the moment. I know that sounds really bleak, but I don’t see how Trump is going to change things except for the worse.
Nima: Right, yeah. Well, look, bleak is what we do on this show. So you’re definitely in line with our editorial voice here. But I think that’s such an important thing to note, that even the silver lining, you know, as they say, has a touch of gray there, especially as bills like HR9495 that effectively could attack any nonprofit that even mentions, say, human rights or Palestinian humanity. These are all really, really dark threats that are being faced, but as you said, might potentially galvanize the kind of usual suspects who speak a big game, but then sort of continue supporting genocide when their own work is threatened. So I guess we will see.
But, Dalia, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been such a great talk. We’ve been speaking, of course, with Dalia Hatuqa, multimedia journalist specializing in Israeli-Palestinian affairs and regional Middle East issues. She also writes about religion, minorities, and immigration in the United States. Since 2000, she has divided her time between the US and the West Bank in Palestine, covering a range of political, economic, and cultural issues for print, TV, and radio. Her work has been featured all over, in Al Jazeera, BBC, Washington Post, NPR Time, PRX, New York Review of Books, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. Dalia, thank you so much again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Dalia Hatuqa: Thank you for having me.
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Adam: Yeah. I mean, a lot of it really is the ideological assumptions. It is something the White House pushed aggressively and successfully, but it’s also just the kind of chauvinist water everybody swims in, which is that the US can’t really do fundamentally bad things or evil things, and so therefore there must be this other dynamic going on. And then again, from there, you have a seller’s market of people who are willing to offer you that kind of pseudo-sophisticated foreign policy analysis. Bear hug. It’s actually secretly working on it. There’s this sort of mysterious process that no one has any details about. Never changes. But trust us, all the dying kids you’re seeing on your timeline are for some cause or some end, and to the extent to which they’re not, it’s not our fault. We have nothing to do with it. Nobody’s in charge, right? Everyone’s looking for the manager. And no one’s responsible for anything. And that’s kind of the ideal place liberals want to be. They want to be they want to have absolutely zero responsibilities, but they want to have the power.
Nima: And as Dalia pointed out, and as we have brought up numerous times on Citations Needed this past year, and also before, Adam, is the idea that this only works, this defensive coverage, this handwringing, without any kind of leverage, any kind of real power, this only works when you’ve completely dehumanized an entire people. This only works when Palestinian children are not fully human, when Palestinian parents, when Palestinian doctors, when Palestinian reporters, when Palestinian lawyers, when Palestinian workers of every kind, bakers and plumbers, when they are all just not human enough to be cared about the same way that our so-called allies are always seen as the victims.
So you have an ongoing 15-plus-month genocide, which is being livestreamed, which is being reported on, which has deep on-the-ground analysis and research in real time. We know this is happening. Everyone knows this is happening. Everyone knows what the fucking reality is here. And the only way that you get to the handwringing reports, the ‘Biden is so upset,’ ‘a break is about to come,’ a ‘maybe some weapons won’t be sent to Israel to keep slaughtering men, women and children.’ The only way you get to this is by already having dehumanized completely an entire people.
Adam: Yeah, and you need a post facto rationalization for why you’re doing it. It can’t be Biden supports a genocide. That doesn’t process, that doesn’t register, it would completely destroy our political media.
Nima: That gets you, like, a 404 error in your editorial department.
Adam: It just won’t compute, right? It’s like with the robot from Star Trek, you give it a paradox, and it explodes. That’s really what you have. I mean, the whole thing is such bullshit. I mean, everybody knows it’s bullshit. Again, we published this piece. We had several people who work in that space who were like, Yeah, pretty much it’s bullshit. Of course it’s bullshit. The idea that Biden was helpless, or really secretly was wanting to change it, but couldn’t. Nobody believes that. Now that his term’s coming to an end. I think more and more people will probably say that. And then the question is, will they do a similar theater with Trump? And I think they will do it, I think they’ll do kind of a lesser extent, because I don’t think Trump really will focus as much on pushing it out, but the media will do it for him. Even if he doesn’t push it, they’ll still do it. They’ll still make up these elaborate excuse-making regimes. They did this when he was hiring all these Cold War veterans to go overthrow Venezuela. People still did the, ‘Oh, humanitarian aid.’ I mean, again, even someone who’s transparently cynical and vulgar and horrible and fascist as Trump, they’ll still do it.
Nima: Because he’s going to be overtly genocidal, but the media will still do this kind of cover.
Adam: That’s my prediction.
Nima: I guess we will see what happens come the new year, a preview of many more horrible things to come. But hey, that’s what we do here on Citations Needed. So thank you all for listening to the show, for continuing to support the show, for spreading the word, for writing reviews, and of course, for supporting us through Patreon. We cannot do this without your ongoing support. We are so grateful to you. Thank you from the entire team here at Citations Needed from me, Nima, Adam, Florence, Julianne, Trendel, Marco, Mahnoor. We hope you get some rest and relaxation. At this time, we are going to be taking a short break for the end of the year, for the holiday season. We will be back with new episodes of Citations Needed in January 2025, so stay tuned for that. And as always, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed. Please, if you’re not already a supporter of the show, consider becoming one through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations needed. Senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, December 11, 2024.
