The International Criminal Court’s (ICJ) January finding of a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, and subsequent ruling that Israel is responsible for an apartheid system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would not have surprised former Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, or indeed Reagan, who famously denounced Israel’s 1982 levelling of West Beirut to Prime Minister Menachem Begin as a “holocaust”.
Israel is the only US ally that has been exercising such oppression and terror for a lifetime. For many years, consecutive American administrations, both Democratic and Republican, condemned Israel’s recurring practice of terror. Today, however, the Biden-Harris administration has been supporting these practices to the extreme.
Harry S Truman recognised Israel in May 1948, yet once re-elected in November, wrote of his “disgust” over how “the Jews are approaching the refugee problem”. Then his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, joined Winston Churchill, who’d returned as the UK’s prime minister, to censure Israel in the UN Security Council in November 1953.
Paratroopers under Colonel Ariel Sharon, a future Israeli prime minister, had “shot every man, woman and child they could find,” in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank village of Qibya, according to Time magazine, leaving 69 dead. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion cried “anti-Semitism.”
Eisenhower had Israel censured twice more: In March 1955, after a self-described Israeli “terror unit” bombed US consulate libraries in Cairo and Alexandria, seeking to blame Egypt, followed by an attack on Egyptian-controlled Gaza that killed 38; and in March 1956 over a so-called “retaliation” against Syria that killed 56 soldiers and civilians.
“Upward of 2,700 Arab infiltrators, and perhaps as many as 5,000, were killed by the [Israeli military], police, and civilians along Israel’s borders between 1949 and 1956,” writes Israeli historian Benny Morris, “the vast majority of those killed were unarmed.” They were shepherds, farmers, Bedouins, and refugees.
Eisenhower was unpersuaded by Israeli ambassador Abba Eban’s claims of self-defence, and Israel would keep inflicting vastly asymmetric episodes of terror for decades.
In October 1956, after killing some 49 civilians in the village of Kafir Qasim near Tel Aviv, Israel invaded Egypt and immediately began massacring refugees in Khan Younis and Rafah. Eisenhower responded by declaring that the US would “apply sanctions” on Israel. When Israel still refused to withdraw from Gaza and Sharm El Sheikh, the US president threatened to block its access to US financial markets. The Israeli retreat followed.
In November 1966, Lyndon Johnson once again put “the Palestine Question” on the UN agenda to condemn Israel, this time after a massive attack on Jordan involving more than 3,000 soldiers. “The Israelis have done a great deal of damage to our interests and to their own,” concluded his National Security Adviser W W Rostow, adding that “they’ve wrecked a good system of tacit cooperation.”
All-out war followed in 1967, after which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The martial law imposed on the Arab population in Israel since the founding of the state was lifted in 1966, but Jimmy Carter described the conditions imposed on Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory after the beginning of illegal Israeli settlement there as “apartheid”.
With nothing resolved by 1982, Prime Minister Begin, a former Irgun terrorist against British authorities, vowed to “destroy” the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He oversaw then-Defence Minister Ariel Sharon’s killing of some 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians, in Beirut. Belatedly, Reagan stopped the slaughter with a phone call, given Israel’s dependence. It was then that he described the Israeli onslaught as a “holocaust”.
Despite using a word with such weight, however, the White House did not demand the UN censure Israel. The US had not attempted to sanction Israel even over its illegal settlements which spawned from the 1967 war. Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren explained why in his 2007 book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present. In the mid-1970s, he wrote, Israel’s supporters began to achieve “the financial and political clout necessary to sway congressional opinion” – meaning that they had acquired enough power to impede US official opposition to Israel at the UN or elsewhere. Ever since, Israel has taken US backing for granted, no matter the record of wildly disproportionate atrocities.
In 1991, Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir, who had approved the murder of UN negotiator Folke Bernadotte, tried to explain why terrorism was “acceptable” for Jews, but not Arabs: Palestinians are “fighting for land that is not theirs. This is the land of the people of Israel.”
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel was distinct. It was the only time that Palestinian resistance groups were able to react to decades of Israeli terror on a similar scale. In response to the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu simply doubled down on Israel’s recurring massacre-making, now backed by starvation and disease. The US administration took no meaningful action to stop “plausible genocide.”
At this time, Israel has also become the only entity in the world that Washington allows to kill US citizens with impunity. The ever-growing list from the West Bank includes Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, Mohammad Khdour, and Shireen Abu Akleh – each killed with a shot to the head. No sanctions or renditions followed their deaths. The White House simply suggested the sniper-killings were “not acceptable” and asked Israel to “investigate” itself. The issue was swiftly dismissed.
As Gaza’s torment enters its second year, Israel’s killing has reached unprecedented levels in the West Bank, and Lebanon once again becomes a target of Israel’s self-described retaliation. More is needed from Israel’s patron than mutterings to perhaps halt some arms shipments. Washington should not only stop upholding Israeli brutality, which includes apartheid but, like the UK, it can support the pending International Criminal Court indictments which are to, finally, include an Israeli prime minister.
Past US presidents had tried to reign in Israeli behaviour of the sort that statesman Abba Eban came to describe, during Israel’s previous bombing of Beirut, as “wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations.” Time is overdue for Washington’s decisionmakers to follow those presidents’ examples, and to rescind diplomatic protection as well as weapons exports for Israel.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.