By Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard
Joe Biden said he would do it. For weeks Yemen’s Houthi-led government has been hitting commercial shipping to and from Israel in the Red Sea, in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Israel’s Eilat Port has seen an 85 percent drop-in activity since the attacks began.
This entirely bloodless inconvenience was all it took for Washington to militarily attack Yemen, a war-ravaged nation. For the past eight years, the U.S. has supported Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis with armaments and its embargo against Yemen, resulting in a humanitarian crisis.
The US and its loyal imperialist ally, the United Kingdom, began bombing targets January 11 in of the poorest nations in the world. They claimed to be protecting the Red Sea shipping routes from militants supported by Iran there, but the Houthis are not attacking most shipping, but only ships to and from Israel. The Houthis (an Islamic Shia sect named after its founder and political leader Hussein Al-Houthi), which the U.S. and Israel call “terrorists,” has popular support.
Mass demonstrations of Houthis and other Yemeni Arabs have backed the government’s statements that they will retaliate.
Why Now
History’s most destructive world power murdered many millions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan (defeats for Washington). Israel’s military says it is following that U.S. military policy in its war in Gaza, and welcomes a wider war. It has threatened to turn Beirut, Lebanon, “back into the stone age” if Hezbollah militants there don’t stop their own strikes against Israel in solidarity with Gaza.
Israel regularly attacks Iran-aligned militias in Iraq and Syria. A wider war by Israel and the United States could even potentially mean with Iran itself.
A vast majority of the world’s countries and people oppose Israel’s war. Washington’s and Jerusalem’s arrogant answer is to widen the war in defiance of the world’s peoples.
Even as the U.S. escalates the war into Yemen, the International Court of Justice began meeting January 8 in The Hague, the Netherlands. South Africa, a country familiar with racist supremacist domination and apartheid for decades, brought the charges, and outlined why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In response, Israel’s lawyers said the charge was a lie, and that Hamas caused the slaughter of civilians, including hospital patients, women and 10,000 children because they are “human shields” against Israel’s 2,000 pound bombs, tank and other artillery, machine guns, etc. — a cynical and absurd argument.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “No one will stop us—not the Hague, Not the Axis of Evil, and no one else.”
South Africa’s prosecutors explained how even “self-defense” as claimed by the Israelis, after the Hamas attack on October 7, does not justify collective punishment and genocide.
Joe Biden and his government dismissed the charge by South Africa. Biden agreed with Israel that South Africa was acting for Hamas. By implication, they also mean Iran, which supports Hamas.
Iran is largely Shia, and Hamas is Sunni. Palestinians also includes Christians and others. Zionist Israel has always been based on eventually driving out of historic Palestine all Arabs, of whatever religion or none.
Biden and subordinate imperialist powers—Britain, Canada, Australia—are isolated. They are war mongers ready to kill for Israel. That’s why the Zionist state is so confident it can continue massacres of Palestinians.
But Hamas is still intact. The Palestinian people not only in Gaza but the occupied West Bank are continuing their resistance. They say they will return home to rebuild in Gaza.
Israel for a decade and a half has had an air, land, and sea blockade of Gaza, which is not a sovereign country. It is a “Bantustan” of Israel. Now Israel has even shut off water, food and fuel. The Palestinians have opposed that domination for 55 years, including 16 years of Hamas political rule.
Peace, a permanent ceasefire, in Gaza would take these completely unnecessary gambles off the table, but Biden presses ahead even as most Americans oppose a full-scale Middle East War that could lead to World War Three. Both nuclear-armed Russia and China oppose Biden’s war mongering in Europe, the Middle East and in Asia.
Why Biden is so dangerous.
Biden is delusional, more so than previous U.S. presidents regarding Israel. Some Republican and Democratic presidents in the past have pushed back, unlike Biden, when Israeli rulers went too far.
Today no Israeli leader says they support a two-state solution even as Biden cynically claims he supports it knowing it will not happen.
He flew to Israel on October 19 after the October 7 attack and met with the “war cabinet.” He told Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he affectionately calls “Bibi”, after a public bear hug, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”
Biden repeatedly tells all his audiences that he, of Irish Catholic descent, has used similar words in the past to profess his affinity for Israel. But the moment illustrates how Biden’s decades as one of the leading “Friends of Israel” in American politics seem to be guiding him during a defining crisis of his presidency.
It is absolutely within Washington’s power to force a ceasefire in Gaza. Biden could end all this with one phone call, as US presidents have done in the past.
During his 36 years in the Senate, Biden was the chamber’s biggest recipient in history of donations from pro-Israeli groups, taking in $4.2 million, according to the Open Secrets database.
Biden, facing low approval ratings, and a few Democrats are wary of running afoul of the main U.S. pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful force in U.S. elections.
The dissent of liberal Zionists is over. The J Street liberal Zionist congressional lobby has joined the rightwing pro-Israel groups in backing Israel’s “right to defend itself” and in opposing a ceasefire in Gaza.
Zionists are flexing their political muscle in plain sight. AIPAC is planning a multi-million-dollar offensive to pick off members in Congress who have been critical of Israel.
For example, a liberal senatorial candidate in Michigan has been offered $20 million in campaign contributions from a former AIPAC donor to drop his bid and take on Detroit’s Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only elected Palestinian American in Congress.
Pro Zionist media
The mainstream media, as the Intercept reports, are under similar top-down pressure from Israel supporters. “We are horrified and deeply saddened by the brutal attack on Israel,” the chair of Comcast/MSNBC Brian Roberts said, even as Israel was already pounding the Gaza Strip, and murdering about 100 journalists.
The CEO of Warner/CNN, David Zaslav, also issued a statement of support for Israel after it experienced “one of the deadliest [days] in Jewish history since the Holocaust.” Later Zaslav was reported to be considering taking part in a $50 million publicity campaign to “define Hamas to the American people as a terrorist organization.”
The CNN reporters based in Jerusalem have their reports vetted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) before going on air.
You can no longer tell the difference between liberal MSNBC and conservative Fox New. While both networks have aired some reports that portray the Palestinian nightmare of the last nine weeks, the coverage has been from the Israeli point of view. Israeli government spokespeople are frequent guests, and Zionist ideology is ensconced throughout big business-owned media.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer once worked for AIPAC; the Atlantic’s editor, Jeffry Goldberg, once was an Israeli prison guard; and the NYT columnist Tom Friedman told a Jewish audience in 2021 that “Israel had me at hello,” and “Don’t worry. In times of crisis, I know where I will be. When the Jewish state is under threat.” Joe Scarborough at MSNBC regularly equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
The official capitalist party political culture is Zionist. Last summer House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries took 22 first-year Democratic congresspeople on a tour of Israel and stood at Netanyahu’s side, alongside the head of AIPAC.
Biden and Jeffries are surely concerned about Democratic fundraising. Israel supporters use campaign contributions to make sure that the policy debate in the U.S. “remains extremely narrow.”
U.S. policy during the Cold War had to take into account the pro-Arab policy of Moscow. No president then could do what Biden is brazenly doing by bombing a country like Yemen to protect the Zionist state without worrying about a blowback from the Soviets.
Since the Soviet Union was overthrown by the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy in 1989 and Russia’s new ruling class became its weaker capitalist replacement, Washington has felt more freedom to strike against its enemies. It may directly attack Iran (which has the capability to build nuclear weapons) unless stopped.
Supporters of an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid need to not only back Palestine but call for a complete military withdrawal by the U.S. from the Middle East. It means all military bases must be closed, and its special armed forces removed from the region.
The Washington war machine must end its all-out military and financial support to Israel.
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