Opinion Archives - CrossFireArarbia

Flying Kites and The Politics of Fear

marwan
August 27, 2026

There is something profoundly unsettling about a military power becoming alarmed by children flying kites:

In Gaza, where childhood has already been stripped of so many of its ordinary meanings, even a kite has now entered the vocabulary of warfare. In August 2026, several kites drifted from Gaza toward Israeli communities near the border. Israel’s own military reported that the kites it recovered carried no suspicious material and posed no danger. Yet Israeli leaders responded by treating their appearance as a potential act of war. Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that a balloon would be treated like a kite and a kite like a drone, “with or without explosives.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz subsequently warned that those responsible could be targeted and that populations could be evacuated from areas identified as launch sites.

By 25 August, Palestinian committees in Gaza were asking parents to prevent their children from flying kites, not because kites themselves had become dangerous, but because the children holding their strings might become targets. One mother told Reuters that her ten-year-old son had always flown kites during the summer but that she would no longer allow him to do so.

The gravity of that moment

There is, of course, a history that cannot simply be erased. During Gaza’s Great March of Return beginning in 2018, incendiary kites and balloons were used by Palestinians and caused fires in agricultural fields inside Israel. Activists have examined those incendiary devices as an unusual form of anti-colonial resistance, while Israel characterised them as terrorism and a security threat. But recognising that history makes the present distinction more important, rather than less important. The kites now causing alarm were reportedly not incendiary: a children’s kite is equated with an armed drone, the category of “security threat” expands almost without limit.

Every aspect of Palestinian life has become securitised.

Even a woman in labour at a checkpoint, carrying a newborn into the world, is subjected to the same architecture of suspicion and control. A neighbourhood can be transformed overnight into a military zone following an act of resistance. And now even the sky above a displacement camp, entered only by a child’s kite, can be drawn into this expanding geography of securitisation.

Shrinking of the spaces in which Palestinians can safely live ordinary lives

Across the occupied West Bank, settler attacks have intensified. In July 2026, the UN human rights office warned of escalating settler violence, killings, destruction of property and attacks affecting Palestinian communities. OCHA has documented assaults on homes, restrictions on agricultural land, damage to livestock and olive trees, intimidation and displacement, particularly around newly established settlement outposts.

The International Court of Justice concluded in its July 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and found its settlement policies and associated practices in breach of international law. Yet territorial expansion continues while Palestinians possess overwhelmingly unequal military and political means with which to resist it.

Historical continuity that deserves examination.

The connection between Zionists Guerrilla attacks during the British Mandate and the present, is not that history simply repeats itself. The Zionists operations continue to be inhumane, savage and far from civilised, territorial expansion remains remarkably persistent. From the depopulated villages documented by Walid Khalidi, to the history of transfer examined by Nur Masalha, to Edward Said’s insistence on recovering the Palestinian standpoint, and Rashid Khalidi’s account of a century-long colonial confrontation, Palestinian scholarship provides its own intellectual vocabulary for understanding what we are witnessing today: displacement is an unfinished process of contesting Palestinian presence on the land. The problem today is that intimidation, territorial acquisition and displacement continue to interact at a regional level as well.

Israeli military actions have extended repeatedly into Lebanon and Syria, including recent strikes in Syria, creating an increasingly dangerous geography in which borders no longer insulate neighbouring populations from Israeli military power. The language is invariably security. Yet for the people experiencing bombing, displacement, occupation or territorial encroachment, “security” looks remarkably different depending on which side of military power one inhabits.

And perhaps this is why the kite is so revealing. The kite made of plastic bags carries almost nothing. It is fragile. It is made to rise, not conquer. For a child surrounded by destroyed buildings and displacement tents, flying one may represent one of the few remaining possibilities of movement. The child’s body is confined; the kite is not.

Perhaps that is precisely why the reaction to it deserves our attention. Children cannot be asked to surrender childhood because an occupying military power has progressively widened its definition of threat. The most disturbing image coming from Gaza this week may therefore be neither a missile nor a tank: It may be a mother telling her child:

Do not fly your kite. They may see it.

That sentence should disturb the conscience of the world. Because when even a child’s kite becomes too dangerous to fly, what is being taken away is more than a toy. It is the remaining space in which a Palestinian child is permitted simply to be a child.

Dr Oroub El-Abed originally wrote this piece for Middle East Monitor and is reposted here in crossfirearabia.com. She is an Associate Professor at Bir Zeit University and specializes in refugees issues.

Opinion

Beware! Qusra and The Next Nakba

Heba
August 26, 2026

By Ramzi Baroud

If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events unfolding in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus.

The story of the future of the West Bank begins here.

While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians.

Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba.

The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities and expelling their inhabitants.

The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank.

Nor is this merely an intellectual argument. Israeli officials have openly invoked a new Nakba as an intended outcome. In November 2023, Avi Dichter declared: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding, “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

True to form, this new Nakba carries many of the characteristics of the old one: coordinated violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and land confiscation.

The genocide in Gaza represents the zenith of this violence — a more devastating manifestation, but a continuation of the original sin upon which the Israeli state was established.

While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades.

The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps alone.

Now, back to Qusra.

Beginning on August 9, armed Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in the Ras al-Ain area on the outskirts of the town.

They blocked access to the houses, erected tents outside them and cut water and electricity supplies. Families, including young children, were effectively trapped inside.

The Israeli military subsequently declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, restricting access by Palestinians, activists and journalists.

What emerged was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.

And the siege continued. As I write these words, the siege of the Qusra homes has concluded its second week.

Qusra is not incidental to this strategy. Israel has already confiscated its land for the settlement of Migdalim, while nearby outposts including Esh Kodesh have long been associated with attacks and attempts to seize Palestinian agricultural land.

Control of such areas is essential to the larger project of connecting settlement blocs, fragmenting Palestinian territory and transforming Palestinian communities into isolated enclaves.

A few years ago, the Israeli government behaved as though its plan to formally annex large swathes of the West Bank had been placed on hold. Yet, since October 7, annexation has moved from aspiration to obsession — in both words and action.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir oversawthe mass distribution of weapons after October 7, arming thousands of civilian security-squad members with rifles amid an already heavily armed settler population.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has systematically worked to transfer powers over the West Bank from military administration to Israeli civilian authorities — one of the clearest institutional mechanisms of annexation.

And now another piece is falling into place: Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered preparations to transfer law-enforcement responsibility over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police, another critical legal step toward annexation.

The picture is becoming complete: settler militias, government funding, weapons, the army, police, civilian bureaucracies, courts and political decisions originating at the highest levels of the Israeli state.

Seen in this wider context, Qusra becomes a microcosm — and potentially a testing ground — for the mechanisms through which larger-scale annexation can be implemented. These realities echo the past. The Nakba did not simply ‘happen,’ but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.

Some governments are warning of accelerating annexation; others sanction individual settlers, as though targeting a few extremists could reverse a blueprint implemented by an entire state apparatus.

Palestinians in the West Bank are fully aware of the challenge awaiting them. Urging the Palestinian Authority, which maintains security coordination with Israel, to suddenly devise a ‘strategy’ is painfully redundant.

But for the rest of us who understand the horrors of the Nakba — and the reverberations of that catastrophe from Deir Yassin to the genocide in Gaza — recognition is no longer enough.

The price of silence is already being paid by every Gazan living among the ruins of the Strip and every Palestinian in the West Bank confronting the violence of settlers and their military partners.

It needs to end now, before Qusra becomes the blueprint for what comes next: today, Qusra; tomorrow, the whole of the West Bank.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, ‘Before the Flood,’ was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

Opinion

Morocco-Israel: Normalization Stops at The Top

Heba
August 24, 2026

by Mohamed El Metmari

Palestine has always been at the heart of all Moroccan societal and political life. From street art in Chaabi neighborhoods, university student unions, leftist and Islamist political parties, to football chants in Moroccan stadiums, Moroccan solidarity is deeply rooted in a history of shared regional anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles.

Therefore, Moroccan streets fill with demonstrations whenever Palestinian rights are violated. Moroccans never fail to remind Palestinians of a brotherhood stretching back 750 years, when Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi named a quarter in Jerusalem the Moroccan Quarter (Ḥārat al-Maghāriba) to commemorate their assistance in reclaiming the city from the Crusaders.

A prime example is the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD), which earned much of its credibility in Moroccan streets through marches in solidarity with Palestine. Incorporated into the makhzen state, the party faced significant structural constraints that curtailed its ideological positioning. In December 2020, this culminated in the PJD-led government signing the Abraham Accords on behalf of the state, marking a structural realigning of diplomatic priorities that stood in tension with the party’s historical grassroots platform

Ever since then, Moroccans have never missed a chance to call for an end to normalization: signing petitions, engaging in acts of boycott, and taking to the streets, often at the expense of their own freedom, as the country’s crackdown on dissent has only intensified in the aftermath of COVID. More recently, an investigative report by Forbidden Stories implicated Morocco in the use of Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to target journalists and activists.

However, reversing normalization remains far-fetched, as foreign policy in Morocco remains largely concentrated within the monarchy, giving the king a central role in determining the country’s strategic and diplomatic orientation.

Consequently, although signed by the Head of Government, the decision to normalize did not go through the Moroccan Parliament, and the Moroccan people were never consulted. This, however, did not prevent Moroccans from taking to the streets to demand an end to normalization. Moroccan authorities and the media tried their best to promote the benefits of normalization, highlighting Trump’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara while stopping short at mentioning Israel. Instead, Moroccan media focused on showcasing the Moroccan Jewish heritage in preparation for the big reveal.

The American support and recognition of what Morocco considers its first national cause amplified a patriotic narrative which justified normalization, as it asserted that Morocco comes first, even before Palestine. However, to avoid backlash, the royal cabinet issued a statement asserting that Morocco’s obligations towards Palestine remain unchanged, promising that it will keep advocating for a two-state solution.

Nevertheless, many Moroccans remained unconvinced that Trump’s proclamation did not come at the expense of Morocco’s longstanding position on Palestine. Indeed, Israel’s outreach expanded into all critical sectors, including intelligence, trade, agriculture, and even education, with the Ministry of National Education modifying curricula to add more “Jewish elements.” Subsequently, Moroccan official and media rhetoric refrained from commenting on Israeli violations such as the Sheikh Jarrah incidents in East Jerusalem and settler violence in the West Bank, not to mention their failure to condemn Israeli actions in Gaza after October 7, contributing to perceptions of a significant shift in Morocco’s foreign-policy priorities following normalization.

Moroccan people could not remain silent in the face of Israeli crimes, especially in the aftermath of October 7th, when they joined a global outcry denouncing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Throughout the genocide, Morocco could not temporarily sever ties nor even issue condemnation statements, except on one occasion when the Foreign Ministry condemned the violence in the region, stopping short of denouncing Israeli crimes. This response angered many, as it was seen as equating “the victim with the aggressor.”

As Morocco’s official silence increased, the Moroccan Front for Supporting Palestine and Anti-Normalization, a coalition of various leftist, Islamist, and labor entities, emerged as a strong societal player pushing the kingdom to sever ties with Netanyahu’s genocidal state.

In contrast, leading up to October 7th, a number of Moroccan pro-Israel organizations, NGOs, and institutions emerged to support normalization and promote more favorable perceptions of Israel within Moroccan society. Some of these bodies emphasized a ‘Morocco first’ narrative and promoted the view that the Palestinian issue should not take precedence over Morocco’s national interests.

Following the October 7 attacks, some of these actors adopted positions strongly supportive of Israel, while using the events to reinforce arguments in favor of normalization. For instance, Ahmed Charaï, a close figure to the top intelligence and diplomatic tier and the president of the conglomerate Global Media Holding, published a provocative article titled “We Are All Israelis.” In this piece, Charaï denounced Hamas, labeling it a “terrorist” group that needed to be eliminated.

Although this piece sparked fierce backlash within the pro-Palestinian Moroccan community, Ahmed Charaï’s media wings, such as MedRadio, have continued to this day to defend Israel by promoting the “Taza before Gaza” narrative, prioritizing Moroccan interests, where not only is normalization publicly defended by hosts and guests, but the same talking points used by Israeli spokespersons also surface.

After Charaï, other Moroccan pro-Israel civil society entities issued similar statements, indicating the emergence of a more visible pro-Israel current within parts of Moroccan civil society. In a joint statement led by the Moroccan-Israeli Friendship Association (MIFA), October 7 was described as a “black day” for the Jewish people, and Hamas was described as a “Nazi-like” terrorist group. As they failed to address Israel’s war crimes, they asserted its right to attack Gaza and eliminate Hamas as an act of “self-defence.”

The combination of institutional support for pro-normalization voices and increasing restrictions on anti-normalization activists has contributed to a growing perception of a gap between state policy and public opinion.

Crackdowns on pro-Palestine voices started in campuses and universities, which were the first institutions to strike normalization agreements with Israeli counterparts. These developments also raised concerns among critics that Moroccan academia was increasingly becoming a space for normalizing relations with Israel and reducing resistance to Israeli policies within campuses. Indeed, just after the Abraham Accords, there was a rush of conferences to host events praising the diplomatic wins in Western Sahara, asserting that they would not have happened without these monumental agreements, especially as both Israel and the US promised to build consulates in the area.

However, Moroccan universities are also spaces where Moroccan youth first encounter organized pro-Palestinian activism, mainly through leftist and Islamist student unions such as the National Union of Moroccan Students (UNEM). UNEM members have mobilized vigilantly against this Israeli encroachment on their campuses. They have pushed for petitions, attended classes wearing keffiyehs, and even boycotted seminars, such as those of Saad Eddine El Othmani, the PJD leader who signed the Abraham Accords.

Since most academic institutions and universities have formed partnerships with Israeli counterparts, an effective way to circumvent the state’s control over academic spaces is to organize open solidarity conventions and pro-Palestine events on campuses. Against this backdrop, campuses became an important site of contestation over normalization, and authorities increasingly restricted anti-normalization activism there, particularly as students advocated for divestment from Israeli universities.

In July 2024, Morocco’s top university, UM6P, cancelled a graduation ceremony after students planned to wear keffiyehs to the event in solidarity with Gaza. The same year, Abdelmalek Essaadi University closed its doors for four days to prevent students from holding the sixth edition of the Al-Quds Convention. This was not an isolated incident; earlier, in 2022, Ibn Tofail University also shut its doors for three days to block the fifth edition of the same convention, following a violent police crackdown in which three UNEM students were arrested and detained.

As pro-Palestine activism moved from campuses to the streets following the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the state intensified its restrictions on activists. These developments coincided with growing criticism of Morocco’s continued relations with Israel, particularly as reports emerged that ships carrying military supplies to Israel had been permitted to dock at Tanger Med

These developments contributed to growing public perceptions of Moroccan complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza. This indignation only increased with the state’s decision to detain anti-normalization activists, especially those active within the Front. A prominent incident involved 13 activists from BDS Morocco who, according to a recent statement, were sentenced to six months in prison and fined 2,000 MAD each for their involvement in boycotting Carrefour, a company seen as complicit in the Gaza genocide for supplying aid to IOF soldiers.

This reality of detention has already befallen many other activists, especially members of the banned but tolerated Al-Adl Wal-Ihsan group. A prominent example is that of the activist Redouane Al-Kastit, who was sentenced to two years in prison over a Facebook post, an outcome that would have been unthinkable before normalization.

Recently, a 23-year-old young rapper from Taza, of all cities, named Souhaib Qabli (aka L7assal), was detained and sentenced last March to 8 months in prison and fined $106 for the content of his songs, especially a song titled “No to Normalization,” where he clearly criticizes the rulers for their role in normalization.

Despite a brutal genocide and ongoing starvation and siege in Gaza, continuous attacks on Iran and Lebanon, Israel is still deepening its ties with Morocco, branching into deep structures of the Moroccan state.

For the first time, the royals, who hold a sacred position in Moroccan consciousness, were scrutinized for their closeness to Israel, as an investigative report by Le Desk showed that Princesses Lalla Hasnaa and Lalla Asmae have partnered with the Israeli hotel chain Selina amid the ongoing war in Gaza. This comes after André Azoulay, the French-Jewish advisor to the king, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Distinction by Israeli President Isaac Herzog for his peace-building efforts and mediation in the Abaraham accords.

Moreover, the rise of arbitrary arrests against activist and protestors had led to the state to be alienated from its people especially after Morocco welcomed members of the Golani Brigades to train on tunnel fighting after they have just come from a brutal massacre they committed in Gaza just two months prior, which involved 15 Palestinian medics, United Nations workers, and ambulance drivers.

Outside the framework of the United Nations, Trump established the Board of Peace to oversee the proposed reconstruction and governance of Gaza in the post-war period. With Trump as its permanent chair, the first countries to join included signatories to the Abraham Accords. As part of its Gaza deradicalization pledges to the Board, Morocco was the first Arab country to send senior military officers to join the Gaza International Stabilization Force, thereby contributing to what critics describe as an indirect Western-led occupation of Gaza.

These developments have also raised concerns among critics that Morocco’s expanding cooperation with Israel may be increasingly at odds with public opinion, particularly as authorities continue to detain activists who oppose normalization. For some Moroccans, this tension is particularly significant because of the kingdom’s religious and political responsibilities toward Jerusalem and its role as chair of the Al-Quds Committee.

Mohamed El Metmari is an independent Moroccan writer, activist, and PhD researcher specializing in Orientalist discourse. His master’s thesis focuses on the Khan Younis and Rafah massacres of 1956. His articles have appeared across various prominent platforms, including Al Jazeera, Raseef22, and The New Arab. He wrote this article for Countercurrents.org

Opinion

A Middle East Whirlpool! View From Amman

Saleem Ayoub Quna
August 17, 2026

By Saleem Ayoub Quna

Unlike the grey terrain of the Middle East, known for its harsh aridity and barren landscapes, the region’s still-unsettled, multi-front conflicts that erupted after the 7 October, 2023 surprise Palestinian assault on Israeli settlements around Gaza Strip, almost literally, become associated in the public imagination with the colour blue: The sea, its waves, its vessels and its strategic waterways.

The Palestinians called that watershed event Al-Aqsa Flood. Israel described 7 October as a second Holocaust. If the Palestinians deliberately chose the word flood for its religious and symbolic connotations, the Israeli way of describing it, indicated how serious and tough their losses and injuries were.

What followed was a succession of milestones and unprecedented developments across the Middle East. They continue to unfold dramatically, resembling the abrupt and unpredictable movements of hurricanes and tempests on the high seas.

Yet the side-conflicts and mini-wars that followed 7 October have neither followed a single pattern nor obeyed the same rules. Instead, events have moved in different, sometimes opposing directions — unlike the orderly circular motion of an actual whirlpool. It is almost as though every confrontation has chosen a course of its own: The predictable alongside the unpredictable, the rational alongside the seemingly illogical.

It therefore takes more than intelligent guesswork or clever political analysis to determine which direction these events will ultimately take, and which may prove more dangerous — not only to the region and its inhabitants, but also to the many international powers with interests at stake.

If we were to capture the current Middle Eastern scene in a single frame, we might portray it as an extraordinary, almost unbelievable collision of man-made tides, currents and sub-currents, all moving simultaneously through one increasingly turbulent sea.

Because the first shots fired on 7^th October around Gaza strip, from a Palestinian point of view, came as a last desperate call and reminder of the injustice they are suffering, they soon found their echoes in the four corners surrounding it: In south Lebanon, Yemen to the south and Iraq and Iran to the east. Even to the west, there were international sailors who belonged to the Peace Flotilla, trying to bring medicine and food to the starving children of Gaza!

One of the most significant currents emerged on Israel’s northern front.

What initially appeared to be a relatively “controlled” confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah steadily intensified until September 2024, when Israel killed the party’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. Only a few months later came another geopolitical earthquake: The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus in December 2024.

Each development sent another powerful current through the already boiling waters of the wider Middle Eastern whirlpool.

Then came an even larger artificial wave.

In June 2025, the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer, striking Iran’s three principal nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan while diplomatic efforts surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme were still underway.

Washington described the operation as an attempt to inflict decisive damage on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Tehran responded with retaliatory action against American military interests in the Gulf.

But that was not the end of the storm.

On 28 February, 2026, the world witnessed another major escalation when the United States and Israel launched coordinated, large-scale attacks against Iran. The two allies acted jointly but gave their military campaigns different names: Washington called its operation Epic Fury, while Israel called its campaign Roaring Lion.

The strikes hit Iranian military infrastructure and senior leadership and inflicted substantial damage. Yet they failed to produce one of the most far-reaching political outcomes sought by US-Israeli advocates of the military campaign: The toppling of the Iranian regime.

And so the whirlpool continued.

Iran responded not simply through missiles and military retaliation, but by shifting the struggle towards one of the most strategically sensitive waterways on earth: The Strait of Hormuz.

Through restrictions on shipping, attacks on vessels and increasingly assertive claims over the waterway, Tehran transformed Hormuz into another major front in the confrontation. The strait — through which a substantial share of the world’s energy supplies traditionally passes — became yet another current dragging regional powers and the wider international community deeper into the turbulence.

Here, the metaphor of the whirlpool becomes more than literary.

Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are no longer easily separable theatres. Each produces currents that flow into the others. A military strike in one location generates political pressure somewhere else; an assassination changes the balance of power hundreds of kilometres away; a blocked shipping lane reverberates through global markets thousands of kilometres beyond the Middle East.

And all the while, new currents are being created faster than old ones can disappear.

What begins on the shores of Gaza does not remain in Gaza. What happens in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran or the Strait of Hormuz does not remain there either.

The Middle Eastern whirlpool has become too wide, too violent and too interconnected to contain its turbulence within the region itself.

And as it keeps spinning, its waves will continue to splash far beyond the shores of the Middle East — reaching, sooner or later, virtually every corner of the globe.

Conclusion: As long as the waters surrounding the Middle East remain crowded with warships, missiles, blockades, retaliatory strikes and the debris of foreign intervention, the region’s old whirlpool will continue to spin.

News Opinion

‘No Need For Your Crocodile Tears’

Heba
August 13, 2026

By Ismail Al Sharif

“I’ll say it frankly: We should have exerted more pressure on Israel to adopt a different approach in Gaza” – Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to ex-President Joe Biden.

A striking phenomenon is recurring in American politics: Some presidents, cabinet members, and senior officials become more outspoken in their stances toward the Israeli occupation entity after leaving office, expressing regret for decisions that contributed to the injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people.

This may be due to their liberation from diplomatic and partisan constraints, the pressures of Zionist lobbies, and the influence of tainted money, or perhaps their consciences awaken belatedly as they feel closer to death, realizing the enormity of the injustice they participated in or condoned.

Examples of this are numerous. Among the most prominent is former US President Jimmy Carter, who, after leaving office, shifted from a traditional pro-Zionist rhetoric to criticizing the Israeli occupation and its policies. Then there is Chuck Hagel, former US Secretary of Defense, who held the United States responsible for the Zionists’ continued aggression and described their practices as terrorism— but only after his retirement, of course.

Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, also criticized war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him ungrateful.

More recently, Jake Sullivan, former National Security Advisor, and Antony Blinken, Biden’s lackluster Secretary of State, joined the ranks of those who have expressed regret. Both men have blood on their hands from the blood of Palestinian children and played a shameful role in supporting the Israeli entity during one of the greatest acts of genocide in modern history.

This was revealed in a lengthy investigation published in The New Yorker magazine last 20th July, titled “How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Against Gaza – and Iran,” with the subtitle: “Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.”

However, this regret will not absolve them for they knew full well that the Zionists were committing genocide in Gaza. On 5 March, 2024, five months after the start of the genocide, Mirjana Spoljarić, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), sent a confidential letter to President Biden. The ICRC, in addition to its humanitarian mission, is obligated under the Geneva Conventions to provide states with information and advice to help them avoid committing war crimes.

In her letter, Spoljarić reminded President Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” massacre perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October 2023 and that it had continued to press the movement “tirelessly” for the release of the “hostages” it was holding.

However, this time she appealed to Biden with “grave concern,” warning that Israel, which had continued to bombard Gaza with heavy munitions since that October, was ignoring the ICRC in an unprecedented manner.

In her letter, she wrote: “The way Israel conducts hostilities is inconsistent with the laws of armed conflict, particularly the obligations to protect civilians, to distinguish between military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian infrastructure on the other, to ensure the humane treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical facilities and personnel, and to provide and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.”

Despite these clear warnings, the United States remained a key partner in the genocide, providing weapons, money, and political and international cover to Israel. And now some of its officials come to shed crocodile tears for the children of Gaza!

I say to them: You have no right to repent now, after all these martyrs, after all these tragedies, to say: “We are sorry, we made a mistake.” You knew, and you had the power to pressure and prevent, but you chose to support, arm, and cover up. You bear the burden of what happened, and the blood of the children of Gaza will haunt you and pursue your names to the dustbin of history.

This piece by Ismail Al Sharif was originally published in the Arabic Addustour daily and reprinted in English in Crossfirearabia.com.