{"id":281490,"date":"2024-12-02T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=281490"},"modified":"2024-11-28T09:28:27","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T09:28:27","slug":"touting-ceasefire-in-lebanon-biden-shares-vision-for-permanent-us-israeli-aggression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/12\/touting-ceasefire-in-lebanon-biden-shares-vision-for-permanent-us-israeli-aggression\/","title":{"rendered":"Touting Ceasefire in Lebanon, Biden Shares \u201cVision\u201d for Permanent US-Israeli Aggression"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Israel and Hezbollah reach a 60-day truce, Biden’s commitment to Israeli occupation ensures long-term carnage. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

27 Nov 2024 <\/em>– Yesterday, President Biden announced a 60-day ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah that stands to end more than a year of cross-border fighting. The violence has reached catastrophic levels since October, when Israel intensified its strikes on Lebanese civilian areas and launched a ground invasion that has displaced more than one million people.<\/p>\n

In unveiling the truce, which took effect after a last-minute flurry of Israeli carpet bombing in Lebanon, Biden boastfully argued that Hezbollah suffered a crippling blow.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is left of Hezbollah,\u201d Biden declared, \u201c…will not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.\u201d Hezbollah undoubtedly suffered significant losses. The group\u2019s longtime senior leadership was wiped out, and it failed to stop the genocide in Gaza \u2013 the aim that prompted the late Hassan Nasrallah to intervene against Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Despite Biden\u2019s suggestion to the contrary, it was not battlefield defeat that forced Hezbollah to stand down. Even with the military backing of its US sponsor, Israel was unable to stop Hezbollah\u2019s strikes into Israeli territory and suffered considerable casualties when it invaded Lebanon\u2019s. Hezbollah\u2019s ability to remain intact after yet another punishing war \u2013 not just the 2006 conflict, but also years of fighting the US and Israel\u2019s insurgent proxies in the Syria dirty war — defeated Washington and Tel Aviv\u2019s maximalist aim of the group\u2019s destruction.<\/p>\n

Along with killing Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, Israel\u2019s main strategic achievement in Lebanon amounts to sufficiently terrorizing the country\u2019s civilian population, which ultimately forced Hezbollah to broker an end to the destruction. Meanwhile, the long-awaited indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court may have helped force Israel\u2019s hand. France says that it will not arrest Netanyahu on its soil, fueling speculation<\/a> that the Israeli leader traded France\u2019s mediation in Lebanon for a pledge to not enforce the ICC warrant.<\/p>\n

Because the US is committed to defending Israel\u2019s \u201caura of power<\/a>\u201d, a deterrent to Israel\u2019s monopoly on aggression cannot, as Biden put it Tuesday, be \u201callowed.\u201d Therefore, Israel will reserve the right to carry out continued violence at the next opportunity \u2013 a threat that will only strengthen Hezbollah\u2019s resolve, and its ability to recruit members.<\/p>\n

Emboldened by his blind devotion to Israeli aggression, Biden also claimed that the Lebanon ceasefire \u201cbrings us closer\u201d to what he described as his signature \u201cvision for the future of the Middle East… at peace and prosperous.\u201d At the center of that effort, Biden said, is \u201ca set of historic deals with Saudi Arabia\u201d in which the Gulf kingdom would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for incentives that include a security pact and \u201ca credible pathway for establishing a Palestinian state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s team is so enthused about his \u201cvision\u201d that it believes, as one senior US official put it<\/a>, that \u201cthe political and geopolitical stars both are aligned\u201d for an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal, albeit one that would likely be finalized under the next administration. Toward that end, US envoy Amos Hochstein has briefed the Trump camp and \u201ccame away feeling that the incoming team was supportive,\u201d the New York Times reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet outside of the mutually supportive Biden and Trump circles, the rest of the world only sees one credible pathway to a Palestinian state \u2013 and the US and Israel as the sole obstacle. That globally recognized pathway was newly expressed this month at the United Nations General Assembly, when member states carried out the now decades-old custom of voting on \u201cThe right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.\u201d The measure called on Israel to end its now 57-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, followed by the establishment of a Palestinian state there \u2013 a major compromise for Palestinians, who would be living in just 22% of their stolen ancestral homeland. It passed by a margin of 170 to 6<\/a>, with the US and Israel casting their traditional votes of opposition.<\/p>\n

In rejecting the Palestinian people\u2019s right to self-determination, Biden is also in lockstep with his incoming successor Trump, who has appointed a cabinet of hardline Israel Firsters who do not even bother to pretend that they believe in Palestinian nationhood.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s professed belief in a \u201cpathway\u201d for a Palestinian state is therefore a carbon copy of his approach to a Gaza ceasefire. He has spent more than a year pretending to broker a truce in Gaza all while facilitating Israel\u2019s destruction of the defenseless territory and the slaughter of tens of thousands of besieged Palestinian residents.<\/p>\n

That same commitment to duplicity recently led Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to threaten Israel with punitive action unless it allowed more aid into Gaza, only to do nothing when their deadline passed and Israel\u2019s starvation siege continued apace. The same goes for other facets of Israel\u2019s occupation regime. Biden sat idle amid Israel\u2019s largest theft of West Bank land in decades<\/a>, all while fanatic Israeli settlers and their Israeli military enforcers carried out escalating violence against their encircled Palestinian subjects. Both the Biden and Trump camps have also said nothing about open calls from Netanyahu\u2019s allies to return illegal settlers to the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n

In his remarks Tuesday, Biden vowed to use his remaining weeks to \u201cwork tirelessly to advance this vision for an integrated, secure, and prosperous region… all of which strengthens America\u2019s national security.\u201d Biden, so devoted to US-Israeli hegemony that he was willing prioritize a genocide over winning an election, has in fact harmed the cause of regional peace more than any of his predecessors, including the Iraq-invading George W. Bush. Whatever else Biden manages to accomplish in his remaining days, any further steps toward his \u201cvision\u201d for the Middle East will only undermine peace and security for all.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Aaron Mat\u00e9 is a journalist with<\/em> The Grayzone, where he hosts<\/em> \u201cPushback.\u201d He is also a contributor to<\/em> Real Clear Investigations and the temporary co-host of<\/em> \u201cUseful Idiots.\u201d In 2019, Mat\u00e9 won the\u00a0Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media for Russiagate coverage in<\/em> The Nation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aaronmate.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Nov 2024 – As Israel and Hezbollah reach a 60-day truce, Biden’s commitment to Israeli occupation ensures long-term carnage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":269935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,1161,2197,1854,87,865,1029,3339,88,2416,2097,427,2159,70,965,1594,1025],"class_list":["post-281490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-arms-industry","tag-biden","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hamas","tag-hezbollah","tag-israel","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-lebanon","tag-palestine","tag-rogue-states","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes","tag-war-economy","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281490"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281491,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281490\/revisions\/281491"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}