So, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken did a big interview with the New York Times this weekend about his legacy, the Biden administration’s legacy. And a big part of that interview was about Gaza. And I think it’s worth noting a number of things he said because I think they show the way in which people like Blinken live inside kind of intellectual and moral prison, in which basic truths are things that they cannot bring themselves to see or will not bring themselves to see. And they end up saying these things which are completely, utterly incoherent, and I think just morally inexcusable.
And so, the first thing that’s striking if you listen to Blinken’s comments on Gaza is that for him, the problem of Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza is a problem that begins on October 7th. He says, ‘since October 7th,’ this is Blinken, ‘we’ve had some core goals in mind. And what are those goals,’ he says, ‘make sure October 7th can’t happen again, prevent a wider war, and protect Palestinian civilians.’ Now, what he means by make sure October 7th can’t happen again, and he says it explicitly, is destroying Hamas’s military capacity, right. There’s no recognition that October 7th doesn’t just happen because Hamas has a bunch of weapons. October 7th happens because Palestinians are living in what Human Rights Watch calls an open-air prison, what the UN has said is a place that’s unlivable. This is before October 7th. That Palestinians are living in what all the world’s major human rights organizations call an apartheid state, right. All of that is completely absent.
So, Blinken thinks that the problem that he’s trying to solve begins on October 7th. And then he says astonishingly, he says, ‘when it comes to making sure that October 7th can’t happen again, I think we’re in a good place.’ No, you’re not in a good place. Not only because Gaza has been utterly destroyed, but you’re not in a good place in terms of making sure that things like October 7th can’t happen again because the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. But that’s basically completely absent from Blinken’s framework.
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