On October 27, the nations of the world voted in the United Nations General Assembly, by a margin of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was drafted by twenty-two Arab countries, and sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Patrick Gruban CC BY-SA 2.0
United Nations General Assembly hall in New York City.
Israel’s U.N. ambassador responded with utter disdain, accusing those who voted in favor of the resolution as supporting “the defense of Nazi terrorists” over Israel. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel’s response to the global call for a truce was to escalate its bombing and expand its ground invasion.
The U.S. corporate media have not helped Americans understand how isolated our government is in continuing to unconditionally support Israel’s genocidal military campaign, which has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians—30 percent of whom are women and 40 percent of whom are children—while destroying hospitals, apartment buildings, streets, and schools, and turning Gaza into nothing short of a Hell on Earth for the bereaved survivors. According to Save the Children, Israel has killed more children in Gaza in three weeks than have been killed in all other global conflicts since 2019.
The United Nations vote makes it clear how diplomatically isolated Israel and the United States have become. The mere twelve countries that sided with Israel and the United States in the General Assembly were made up of four from eastern and central Europe (Austria, Croatia, Czechia, and Hungary); two from Latin America (Guatemala and Paraguay); and six small island nations in the Pacific.
Israel and the United States are not only diplomatically isolated, but their governments are out of touch with their own people.
Not a single country from western Europe, Africa, the mainland of Asia, the Caribbean, or the Middle East voted with the United States and Israel. The countries that voted for a truce included many traditional U.S. allies (France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, and New Zealand), while other U.S. allies like the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Japan were among the forty-five countries that abstained.
Israel and the United States are not only diplomatically isolated, but their governments are out of touch with their own people. As Israel prepared to launch its ground invasion of Gaza, a Maariv poll of Israelis found that public support for an immediate large-scale ground offensive of Gaza had fallen from 65 percent on October 19 to only 29 percent a week later.
Palestinian News & Information Agency CC BY-SA 3.0
Palestinians inspect the ruins of Watan Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza city, on October 8, 2023.
Israelis, alongside the rest of the world, are watching the horror of the massacre in Gaza, and have realized that their government has no real plan beyond massive, indiscriminate violence for its stated goal of destroying Hamas, which may well be unachievable no matter how many Israelis—including the soldiers and civilians captured on October 7—and Palestinians it is ready to sacrifice.
In the United States, a Data for Progress poll, published on October 20, found that 66 percent of voters wanted their government to “call for a ceasefire and a deescalation of violence in Gaza,” and to “leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.”
Support was present across party lines, but, for the Biden Administration and Democratic members of Congress, the 80 percent of Democrats who agreed with the poll’s statement should have been a wake-up call. Evidently they slept through the alarm. On October 25, Congress passed a bill promising unconditional military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza by 412 votes to 10—giving a green light to the escalation that followed.
By October 30, only eighteen members of Congress had signed the resolution introduced by Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, calling for an “immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” The newly chosen House Speaker Mike Johnson has pledged to spend $14.5 billion to resupply Israel with weapons, as part of a bill that is generating more Democratic opposition because it is paid for by cuts to the Internal Revenue Service than for its impact on the massacre in Gaza.
The impotence of the U.S. government to contain the chaos its policies have unleashed can hardly be exaggerated. The U.S. embassy in Beirut has posted a message to all U.S. citizens to leave Lebanon immediately. It says, “You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on U.S. government assistance,” and it tells them they will have to sign a promissory note to reimburse the U.S. government if it needs to help evacuate them.
The impotence of the U.S. government to contain the chaos its policies have unleashed can hardly be exaggerated.
The results of the U.S. government’s massive investments in the power to kill and destroy have left it unable to protect or help its own citizens around the world, instead directing them to a State Department web page titled: “What the Department of State Can and Can’t Do in a Crisis.”
The current international isolation of the United States stands in sharp contrast to the way that Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 was welcomed around the globe. Biden promised a new era of U.S. diplomacy, an end to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and renewed international cooperation on the most serious problems facing the world.
Instead, his policies are the worst of all worlds, continuing Trump’s ratcheting up of military spending and his illegal sanctions against Iran, Cuba and other countries, while shifting Trump’s Cold War with Russia and China into overdrive, and now fueling and escalating catastrophic proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine.
But alternatives to “American leadership” are finally emerging. The U.N. Security Council is immobilized by self-serving U.S. and Russian vetoes, and exclusive rich boys’ clubs like the G7 and the World Economic Forum have only further entrenched neocolonialism and inequality. As a result, the world is turning to more representative forums like the U.N. General Assembly, the G20, the G77, BRICS, and regional groupings like the African Union, ASEAN, and CELAC, to more honestly debate our common problems and find new ways to solve them.
In turn, U.S. propaganda is losing its power to shape the way people look at each new crisis. Israeli and U.S. officials, including Biden, have done their best to cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza, but these numbers have been meticulously documented by Palestinian health authorities and are accepted by the World Health Organization, U.N. agencies, and the NGOs that work in the region.
U.S. propaganda is losing its power to shape the way people look at each new crisis.
U.S. officials and media are more inclined to listen to Israeli officials than Palestinian ones, but this only increases U.S. isolation by making it complicit in Israeli propaganda, both in fact and in the eyes of people and governments around the world.
King Abdullah II of Jordan, President Abdel Fattah Sisi of Egypt, and Palestinian leader Abu Mazen canceled a meeting with Biden after Israel allegedly killed hundreds of people with what appeared to be an air-burst bomb, as they sheltered at the Anglican Church’s Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. Biden validated Abdullah II, Sisi, and Abu Mazen’s decision by doing exactly as they feared and publicly claiming that “the other team” was responsible for the hospital bombing.
While Palestinian officials have identified more than 8,000 people killed in Gaza, Israeli officials have so far only identified 1,087 of the 1,300 or 1,400 people they say were killed in the Palestinian attack on October 7.
The independent daily newspaper Ha’aretz has a web page with photos, names, ages and some personal details of the people killed in Israel who have been identified. At the prompting of the Israeli military, many Western politicians, and other media have painted the Palestinian attack as a massacre of civilians, so it may come as a surprise to see that at least 381 of the 1,087 dead so far identified were, in fact, soldiers, police, and security officers.
But Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian fighters also killed hundreds of civilians on October 7, as surely as Israel’s air strikes have killed thousands of civilians in Gaza. The prisoners they took back to Gaza also included both soldiers and civilians.
Since the United States has utterly failed in its role as a mediator and honest broker, it must now step aside to allow real mediators to take on that role.
Ha’aretz’s records raise questions about another story that has been widely repeated by Western media and politicians, including Biden, which is that Israeli soldiers found forty dead babies who had been decapitated by Hamas. There are seven children below the age of ten among the 706 civilian dead identified in Ha’aretz, but the youngest was four years old, not a baby. As with all these questions, we don’t know the answers, but we should be skeptical of unverified atrocity claims, especially since Israel has lied about previous war crimes and resisted independent, international investigations of them.
Since the United States has utterly failed in its role as a mediator and honest broker between Israel and Palestine, acting instead as a party to the conflict on Israel’s side, it must now step aside to allow real mediators to take on that role.