SE Hoya Containment Thread (aka Politics)

While I thought this over I was following the coverage of Israel's murder of the seven World Central Kitchen relief workers in Gaza. Now and then, it feels as if some atrocity from Gaza has to be so atrocious as to break through the complacency and resignation, and this one really seemed to be a contender: The relief convoy was fully labeled and had cleared its route with the Israeli authorities, and the Israel Defense Forces didn't just blow them up anyway, but viciously hunted them down—blowing up one car, then blowing up the car that rescued the survivors from the first car, then blowing up the car that rescued the survivors from the second, stretching out their victims' ordeal over the course of a mile until there were no survivors left for anyone else to try to rescue.

In the eyes of Joe Biden and the U.S. government, Palestinian lives count for less. If a former State Department official can casually state it as fact in an interview, it’s not really that provocative of a thesis. The past six months in Gaza have provided heaps of evidence, but last week’s bombing of the World Central Kitchen workers re-emphasized that there is an exchange rate on Palestinian life, and it is favorable to those doing a brisk trade in genocide.

On April 1, Israeli air strikes destroyed three different vehicles, all clearly marked by the WCK logo, and killed seven aid workers who had finished unloading supplies in Gaza. WCK founder José Andrés said that the bombings were conducted “systematically, car by car.” An army doesn’t accidentally air-strike a fleeing group of people three times.

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The reason that Israel, in this case as opposed to so many cases before, had to treat these killings as a serious matter was because Biden finally chose to exert the barest amount of diplomatic pressure. (At the same time, his administration was sending more planes, bombs, and money to Israel.) This time, the reaction was different. It was the final straw. These seven humanitarian aid workers from all over the world—three of them British, one Australian, one Polish, one dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, and one Palestinian from Rafah—were seen as complete innocents. And they were. “Innocent people, doing good work to feed a starving population, have died for no reason at all,” read an article in The Atlantic. Did anyone stop to wonder how many of the 33,000 dead in Gaza were also innocent people doing good work?

[...] his assorted flacks and lackeys all insist that the policy toward Israel will remain unchanged. They will continue to say that every civilian death is a tragedy—an endlessly repeated talking point that fits in line with the Democratic Party’s broader philosophy of acknowledging needless death without doing anything about it. The red line is a mirage. Leverage exists and could be exercised, but is intentionally left untouched.

While the Biden administration might have its own unspoken exchange rate, the Israeli military has a literal one. An investigation published by +972 Magazine revealed the existence of an artificial-intelligence program called “Lavender,” used to identify targets for bombing and treated to be as accurate as a human. Essentially it functioned as a generator of collateral damage; a separate program called “Where’s Daddy?” would reportedly track targets and bomb them when they returned to their families. The number of acceptable civilian deaths fluctuated with no justification or discrimination between adult and child. Israel’s military was allowed to kill 20 innocents to get one person identified as part of Hamas—never mind whether that one person had been accurately identified as part of Hamas. From the investigation:

According to A., who was an officer in a target operation room in the current war, the army’s international law department has never before given such “sweeping approval” for such a high collateral damage degree. “It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” A. said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’

“Every person who wore a Hamas uniform in the past year or two could be bombed with 20 [civilians killed as] collateral damage, even without special permission,” A. continued. “In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist.”

According to A., this was the policy for most of the time that he served. Only later did the military lower the collateral damage degree. “In this calculation, it could also be 20 children for a junior operative … It really wasn’t like that in the past,” A. explained. Asked about the security rationale behind this policy, A. replied: “Lethality.”

This strategy was unchallenged for years, but then José Andrés’s workers fell victim to it. [...] "The latest incident has also affected Joe Biden in a way earlier ones did not," Edward Luce wrote at the Financial Times. "Put simply, Andrés is a Washington celebrity." The queasy-making part of Luce's speculation is that he might be right: Because this horror is connected to José Andrés, a chef and humanitarian revered in D.C., it sprang a specific subset of American politician into action. “He was one of the pioneers of high-quality restaurants in an early 1990s Washington that had a well-deserved reputation for dowdy food," Luce went on. "Andrés’s Jaleo introduced Spanish-style tapas food to America’s capital. In 2016, his restaurant, Minibar, was one of Washington’s first batch to merit a two-star Michelin award. Among others, Nancy Pelosi, the former US Speaker, has nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize.”

How are Andrés and his workers any more innocent than a Palestinian family that hasn’t eaten in weeks, a child in Rafah whose parents have been erased by bombs, or the rest of the nearly 200 aid workers killed by Israel’s attacks? Where was this kind of honest and direct language for them? Well, of course, they’re from over there. The distance, combined with a relentless campaign of dehumanization, reduces them to numbers in a death toll rather than individual portraits, like the humanitarians who came to Deir al Balah from other parts of the world. And anyway, a U.S. congressman isn't looking for a restaurant reservation in Gaza.

There is no relief to be found in Biden’s sharp criticism, a sharpness comparable to a butter knife. It’s not just the callousness of White House policy that reveals who and what is being valued; it’s also the moments where the administration chooses to care. As it stands, the exchange rate is six to 33,000, and counting.