U.S. Response to Israel-Hamas War Draws Fury in Middle East The staunch support for Israel has stoked accusations of American hypocrisy, with Arab critics fearing a wholesale massacre of Palestinians in response to the deadly Hamas attacks. Israeli soldiers around a mortar launcher firing toward Gaza from Be’eri, Israel, on Tuesday.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times By Vivian Nereim, Alissa J. Rubin and Euan Ward Reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Baghdad; and Beirut, Lebanon Oct. 17, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/world/middleeast/biden-israel-gaza-anger.html President Biden’s trip to Israel on Wednesday will put him in a region where grief and fury are mounting, not only toward Israel, but also toward the United States, the world power that has declared unyielding support for its chief Middle East ally. On Tuesday, widespread condemnation of Israel rippled across the region after a huge explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip killed hundreds of Palestinians who had been seeking treatment and refuge. Israel has denied being behind the blast, blaming a Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad, for a failed rocket launch. But even before that, many people across the region had come to view Israel’s war with Hamas — the Palestinian armed group that carried out a shocking attack on southern Israel more than a week ago, slaughtering 1,400 people — as an American-backed massacre of Palestinian civilians in the blockaded territory of Gaza. Israel has cut off water, medicine and electricity in the enclave and continued to target Gaza with deadly airstrikes, bringing the death toll to at least 2,800 before the hospital explosion. Many Arabs view the American government as not only being indifferent to the agony of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, but also complicit in it. American pledges of “ironclad” support for the country — and no-strings-attached security assistance — have stoked those feelings as Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Gaza. “There is tremendous anger in the Arab world, even by those who do not support Hamas,” said Nabil Fahmy, a former foreign minister of Egypt. “They are giving Israel a green light,” he said of Western powers, “and as this gets increasingly bloody, the West will have blood on its hands.” So intense is the anger that a refrain, “Death to America,” has found renewed resonance in the region, including during a protest on Friday in Bahrain, a close American ally. Many Palestinians and other Arabs said in interviews that the rhetoric coming from senior Israeli and American officials had been dehumanizing and warmongering. Palestinians pulling the wounded and dead from the rubble of a building that was hit by Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Tuesday.Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times When the war began, Mr. Biden called the attacks by Hamas — in which gunmen killed Israeli soldiers and civilians and took nearly 200 people hostage — “pure, unadulterated evil.” The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said: “We are fighting human animals. There will be no Hamas; we will eliminate everything.” As he traveled around the region over the past week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken signaled that the Biden administration would have a high tolerance for whatever resulted from Israel’s military response to the Hamas attacks. Diana Buttu, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who has worked as a lawyer on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, said she had never harbored “any illusions” about the U.S. role in the conflict, knowing that America firmly backed Israel. Even so, she said, she was stunned by the Biden administration’s response. “It’s like somebody has ripped out my guts,” she said. “This level of siding with Israel is genocidal.” In the broader Middle East, many people do not view Israel as the victim of an unprovoked terrorist attack — as some American officials have described it — but as a colonial-style occupier that has been buttressed by the United States and that has oppressed the Palestinians for decades. Khalid Al-Dakhil, a prominent Saudi public intellectual, said that what frustrated him the most was Western powers’ “blind adoption of the Israeli narrative of events.” “You are against occupation in Ukraine — can you deny that the Palestinians are under occupation?” he said. “Nobody is asking you to go and declare war on the Israelis because they are occupying the Palestinians; people are asking you to be rational, wise and convince your allies — push them to their senses.” Israel soldiers at a tank repair base in Be’eri, Israel, on Tuesday.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times American officials appear to have softened their statements in recent days, stressing that Palestinian civilians should not suffer because of Hamas. On Sunday, the State Department appointed David Satterfield — a veteran diplomat with experience in Arab countries — as a special envoy for humanitarian issues to help address the crisis in Gaza. In an interview with “60 Minutes” on CBS, Mr. Biden discouraged Israel from fully reoccupying Gaza. And shortly after taking off on Air Force One headed for Israel, Mr. Biden issued a statement on the explosion at the hospital in Gaza: “I am outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion at the Al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza, and the terrible loss of life that resulted.” He said he had spoken with leaders in the region and directed his national security team to look into what had happened. Even so, the damage to America’s battered image in the Middle East is done, said Hafsa Halawa, a nonresident scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. “The Americans have zero moral standing in this region,” she said. As Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Gaza, a densely populated urban area, American military officers with memories of the battle for the Iraqi city of Falluja in 2004 — a struggle against Iraqi insurgents that became some of the bloodiest urban combat in recent decades — have been conveying the lessons of that experience to their Israeli counterparts. Ms. Halawa said that the past week reminded her of the atmosphere in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the lead-up to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. “What we’re really in, if you watch the news for five minutes, is genuine, pure 9/11 Islamophobia,” she said. “Twenty-three years later, we’re in exactly the same language. The Americans have learned nothing.” In Iraq, which is still struggling in the aftermath of that war, the dominant sentiment was weariness as people watched events unfold in Israel and Gaza. There was also a mix of anger and disappointment. “America does not care if a thousand or a million or a billion Arabs and Muslims die, as long as its interests are not harmed,” said Moayad Jubeir, a professor of law and political science at Anbar University. A demonstration in support of Palestinians in Baghdad on Friday.Credit...Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Still, there is one thing that the United States can do, Iraqis said: Keep the war with Hamas contained. Mohammed Akram Ali, 43, a primary schoolteacher in Baghdad, said he had hoped that America would restrain Israel and help restore calm to the region. “Hamas committed massacres of Israelis, but also the Israelis committed massacres and nobody can say, ‘Stop, it’s enough’ to them,” said Mr. Ali. “We demand that America take a position where it says, ‘Enough’ to everyone so that they can restore what they lost of their reputation in Iraq.” Frustration with the United States has grown across the region as Mr. Blinken’s diplomatic tour presented the unusual spectacle of authoritarian Arab rulers lecturing American officials about human rights. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, told Mr. Blinken that Israel must lift its siege on Gaza and that the kingdom “rejects the destruction of infrastructure and vital services that affect their daily lives.” In Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi falsely claimed that Jews in his country had never experienced persecution and suggested that the United States was more shocked by the killing of Israelis than decades of Palestinian oppression. “Yes, it is true what happened over the past nine days was very difficult and too much, and we unequivocally condemn it,” Mr. el-Sisi told Mr. Blinken about the Hamas attacks. “But we need to understand that this is the result of accumulated fury and hatred over four decades, where the Palestinians had no hope to find a solution.” After the explosion on Tuesday at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, denunciations flowed in from Arab countries. Turkey, Qatar and Iran were among those blaming Israel. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry swiftly released a statement blaming the attack on the Israeli military, demanding that the international community “let go of its double standards” to hold Israel accountable. In Gaza, Wisam Abu Jamae, 27, compared the Western response after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year with the relative lack of condemnation of Israel’s siege of Gaza, saying that the discrepancy was “not logical.” “If the world cared enough about us, we would not be where we are today,” she said, as the sound of Israeli warplanes droned overhead. “Every minute, one family is removed from the record of existence.” The bodies of those killed in an explosion on Tuesday at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.Credit...Abed Khaled/Associated Press Vivian Nereim reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Alissa J. Rubin from Baghdad; and Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by Ameera Harouda from Gaza, Ben Hubbard from Cairo, David E. Sanger and Michael D. Shear from Washington, Edward Wong from Tel Aviv and Ahmed Al Omran from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Vivian Nereim is the Gulf bureau chief. She has more than a decade of experience in the Arabian Peninsula and was previously a reporter for Bloomberg News covering Saudi Arabia. More about Vivian Nereim Alissa J. Rubin covers climate change and conflict in the Middle East. She previously reported for more than a decade from Baghdad and Kabul, Afghanistan, and was the Paris bureau chief. More about Alissa J. Rubin Euan Ward is a reporter on the International desk and a 2022-2023 New York Times Fellow. He is based in London, and previously worked as a Middle East correspondent and investigative reporter in Beirut. More about Euan Ward
The more support Israel gets the more arrogant and bullying they become. When someone retaliates against them, they cry the victim. They still bleating loudly as the victim 80 years after the holocaust.
The rush to support Israel reveals the West’s hypocrisy Backing for the Israeli assault on Gaza angers the Global South, after US and EU sought to build consensus against Russia. Henry Foy Oct 18, 2023 https://www.afr.com/world/middle-ea...-reveals-the-west-s-hypocrisy-20231018-p5edbu Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned. The reaction to the October 7 attack on Israel by Islamist militant group Hamas and to Israel’s vow to hit back against Gaza has undone months of work to paint Moscow as a global pariah for breaching international law, they said, exposing the United States, the EU and their allies to charges of hypocrisy. Death, misery and deprivation in Gaza have galvanised feeling against Israel across the Global South. AP In the flurry of emergency diplomatic visits, video conferences and calls, Western officials have been accused of failing to defend the interests of 2.3 million Palestinians in their rush to condemn the Hamas attack and support Israel. In the first days after Hamas’ assault, some Western diplomats worried that the US was giving carte blanche to Israel to attack Gaza with full force. That had eroded efforts since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to build consensus with leading states in the so-called Global South – such as India, Brazil and South Africa – on the need to uphold a global rules-based order, more than a dozen Western officials said. The backlash had solidified entrenched positions in the developing world on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They warned that this could derail future diplomatic efforts on Ukraine. “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” Many developing countries have traditionally supported the Palestinian cause, seeing it through the prism of self-determination and a push against the global dominance of the US – Israel’s most important backer. Protesters demonstrate in front of the Israeli consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, after an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. Getty Some American diplomats are privately concerned that the Biden administration’s response has failed to acknowledge how its broad support of Israel can alienate much of the Global South. In the Middle East, many Arabs feel that the US and other Western powers have never held Israel to account over its treatment of Palestinians, or paid enough attention to brutal conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Libya. Russia and its ally China have cultivated warm ties with the Palestinians. Russian President Vladimir Putin this week met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. “What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza, otherwise we lose all our credibility,” the senior G7 diplomat added. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?” Just four weeks before the Hamas assault on Israel, leaders from the US, EU and Western allies attended the G20 summit in New Delhi and asked developing nations to condemn Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian civilians to uphold respect for the UN charter and international law. Since last Sunday, many of those officials told the Financial Times they had had the same argument read back at them in demands for condemnation of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, and of its decision to restrict water, electricity and gas supplies there. In recent days, Russia has sought to pass a UN Security Council resolution condemning violence against civilians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without specifically mentioning Hamas. The council rejected its resolution on Monday. “I mean, let’s be frank – this is a gift from heaven for Russia,” said a senior EU official. “I think it’s damaging what’s happening … because Russia is exploiting the crisis and saying, ‘look, the global order that has been built after the Second World War is not working for you’, and addressing 1 billion inhabitants in the Middle East or in the Arab world.” Arab states, particularly Jordan and Egypt, have pressed Western officials to harden their tone on protecting Gaza’s civilians. “If you describe cutting off water, food and electricity in Ukraine as a war crime, then you should say the same thing about Gaza,” said one Arab official. They noted a shift in tone from some Western governments. Since Sunday, the EU and UK have announced an increase in aid shipments to Gaza. US President Joe Biden was due to visit Israel on Wednesday before meeting the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority in Amman. The second leg of that trip has been cancelled after a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday evening (Wednesday AEDT). The White House said he would “reiterate that Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination, and discuss the humanitarian needs of civilians in Gaza”. In a sign of concerted efforts to maintain contact with developing countries, UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said on Tuesday he had spoken with the foreign ministers of Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. At an emergency video summit of EU leaders on Tuesday, several leaders warned that failing to uphold the rights of Palestinians in Gaza risked exposing Western states to the charge of hypocrisy. That discussion was prompted by irritation across EU capitals over European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to travel to Israel last week without a mandate from the bloc’s 27 member states or an agreed common position. Dublin, Madrid and Luxembourg were upset at her lack of reference to international humanitarian law when she spoke in Tel Aviv. “What New Delhi, Jakarta and Brasília want to see is a common position on these issues, and consistency. And if they don’t see that … then on the major global issues, there’s a certain danger EU, G7, NATO will not be taken seriously,” said Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, former NATO secretary-general and now chairman of the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank. “We, the West, do not call the shots any more, and the Global South says: ‘please, we have a voice as well which you have neglected for some time’.” Russia’s proposed UN Security Council resolution garnered support from only four countries – China, the United Arab Emirates, Mozambique and Gabon – but many Western diplomats worry that an amended Russian resolution could gain the nine votes required to pass. The US, UK or France might then veto it, handing Moscow a propaganda victory. “We have to prevent Russia … supported by the Chinese … taking the initiative to use this against us,” said a senior Western diplomat. “There’s a risk that at the next vote in the [UN] General Assembly on supporting Ukraine, we’ll see a big explosion in the number of abstentions.” France, in particular, is concerned about the risk of escalation in the Hamas-Israel conflict. It believes Russia is no longer playing the traditional “great power” role of restraining its allies in the region, but instead sees an opportunity to consume US resources and distract from Ukraine. “Russia has a huge stake in prolonging this conflict, given the distraction value … and the use in shifting the global narrative,” said one Western foreign minister. EU and US diplomats will also use Friday’s summit at the White House between Biden, von der Leyen and EU council president Charles Michel, who represents the EU’s 27 national leaders, to forge a common position. “Europe has to hold the line here,” the minister said. “We were a bit of a mess to begin with, but I think we’re better co-ordinated now in terms of defending fundamental rights and making sure we see both sides.”
Yeah. If they care so much.... why aren't they opening their doors and taking some of these people in?
Because they're not fools. Israel want them to take refugees so that Palestine becomes drained of Palestinians but countries like Egypt see the ruse. Many Egyptians fear opening up the border to all Palestinians instead of sending aid into Gaza would allow Israel to permanently reoccupy an ethnically cleansed Gaza Strip and push the burden of a refugee crisis onto Cairo.
Its temporary. They have to go somewhere, you can't let Hamas continue using them as human shields. And I don't think Israel has the time to vet 3MM people atm. They kinda have their hands full chasing down murderers.