Thread by @MouinRabbani

Some appear to believe there is a level of death, destruction, and suffering beyond which Western governments will cease or significantly reduce their participation in Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip and their support of its actions.

This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how such governments formulate policy. Thus far Israel has imposed a comprehensive siege on the Gaza Strip, deprived an entire society of all essential supplies except oxygen, razed entire neighborhoods to the ground,

and in less than one month killed approximately 10,000 people, more than a third of them children. This campaign demonstrably has no legitimate military purpose or objective, nor has it degraded the military capabilities of the Palestinian organizations in the Gaza Strip

in any meaningful way. Israel has killed more UN employees, journalists, and medical personnel than Palestinian military commanders.

if the volume of Palestinian death, destruction, and suffering indeed play a role in the calculations of Western governments it would have already done so. It hasn’t, and it won’t. Most Western governments and continue to proudly stand in full solidarity with Israel’s government.

Pope Francis is virtually the only Western leader who hasn’t made the pilgrimage to Netanyahu.

Rather, and as during the 1982 Siege of Beirut and previous Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip, to give but two examples, Western governments are framing their entire policy around Israel’s “right to defend itself”,

a right these governments have never, on literally not a single occasion since 1917, accorded to the Palestinian people. What they are in fact supporting is Israel’s right to dispossess an entire people and seize its lands.

They know it, and we know it. The handwringing about humanitarian aid to the killing fields of Gaza while perhaps the most intensive bombing campaign in the history of the region continues is meaningless drivel.

What will cause a change in Western policy is Israeli military failure. That is why the Biden administration has devoted more energy to compelling Israeli to formulate attainable objectives than restoring fuel and water to Gaza hospitals.

In 2006 Condoleezza Rice ecstatically welcomed Israel’s war against Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”, but as soon as Israeli ground forces faced slaughter in southern Lebanon the US beseeched the UN Security Council to adopt a ceasefire resolution.

In 1982 the US gave Israel a free hand in Lebanon to eradicate the PLO; once it became clear Israel lacked the capacity to occupy West Beirut they sent Philip Habib to negotiate an agreement that preserved the PLO.

So long as the US and other Western governments reject a Gaza truce it means they believe Israel will or can succeed. If they reverse their position you can take all the homilies about civilian suffering with a grain of salt. Window dressing.

It means they have concluded Israel has failed. Or that their and Israel’s policies are producing a significant threat to their own interests.