Biden Must End the War in Gaza Before He Leaves Office | Opinion

Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, the UN secretary general attended the BRICS summit in Russia and “seemed happy to be filmed on arrival.” The BRICS alliance, whose gathered leaders represented almost half of humanity, has undoubtedly discovered a new confidence and momentum. Putin in particular senses the historic opportunity for the global South and East to counterbalance what he termed “the West’s perverse methods and approaches.”
Our adversaries are finding their stride at a time when the West is losing the moral argument and haemorrhaging credibility with each passing day. Before he leaves office, President Joe Biden can act swiftly to stem the bleeding by leveraging U.S. military aid to end the war in Gaza.
Global faith in the U.S.-led order was already shaken by Western foreign policy after 9/11, bookended by the unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, during which the U.S. signaled that it was no longer willing to defend its values overseas and abandoned those millions of Afghans who had dared to live by them.
But it is in Gaza that the U.S.-led liberal order is coming undone. Of course, since 1947, the injustice festering in Palestine, perpetrated by a major U.S. ally, has fostered resentment at a flagrant double standard and suspicions about the integrity of the rules-based system.
But the way Israel has prosecuted its latest military campaign after the heinous attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, has placed the U.S. global order, and its central moral ideas, under unprecedented stress.
In the first place, the notion of self-defense as the only legal or legitimate cause for war is under threat. Leaving to one side the horrifying siege and bombardment of Gaza, many of Israel’s other excesses, from shooting at UN peacekeepers to openly inciting civil strife in Iran and Lebanon, have been so wrapped up in a one-sided theory of self-defense that the concept risks losing all meaning.
If Israel can claim an inherent right to self-defense, then a fortiriori, Lebanon can too, given that its territories were invaded by Israeli forces on September 30 and its civilians have been indiscriminately attacked by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) warplanes. Not to mention the Palestinians, who have labored under the yoke of Israeli military occupation, with its endless persecution and bouts of fierce killing over three quarters of a century.
Israel has also driven its tanks over the laws of armed conflict, under which acts of war are supposed to be necessary, proportionate, and directed at military targets—as opposed to sustained and vengeful killing sprees. The suffering inflicted upon women and children in particular—who constitute the majority of the IDF’s victims—is too terrible to countenance. The multitude of tiny bodies encased in white shrouds for burial, or the dazed parents walking around with the remains of their toddlers in plastic bags, will likely be how history remembers this war.
As the IDF now refocuses on the northern part of the Gaza strip, “subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation,” the UN human rights chief pointed out that states have a duty under the Geneva Conventions to ensure that international humanitarian law is respected.
The Western-led global system has repeatedly shown itself incapable of meeting this moral emergency. The UN found more than six months ago that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israel was committing the crime of genocide in Gaza, driven by genocidal intent. But the West’s response has been defined by gesture politics and virtue signaling, whether focusing on rolling out a polio vaccination campaign for a child population at equally grave risk from death or starvation at the hands of an allied state, or undertaking to gather evidence of war crimes after they have occurred, rather than acting to prevent imminent new ones from being perpetrated.
All the while, Western media has been tarnished in the eyes of the global public—and at a moment when our adversaries are ramping up the spread of disinformation and undermining trust in mainstream media. The Israeli government and armed forces have undeniably benefitted from the subtle passivity with which media sources attribute atrocities. Headlines such as “Four fragile lives found ended in evacuated Gaza hospital,” referring to premature babies who died at a hospital besieged by the IDF, work to soften Israeli agency.
However much the fact is skirted, the Israeli state has, for more than a year, brutalized and traumatized roughly two million Palestinians, and now millions of Lebanese citizens, making peace in the region an unlikely outcome. As Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi observed, “the amount of damage the Israeli government has done—30 years of efforts to convince people that peace is possible, this Israeli government killed it.” We should not expect that the tens of thousands of bereaved parents and orphaned children, subsisting amidst the ruins of their homes, schools, and infrastructure, will look to build bridges with their occupiers. The IDF’s vicious military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon may also spur nearby states to super-charge deterrence, incentivizing outlaw regimes like the one in Iran to build a nuclear bomb.
President Biden must urgently recognize that global objections to the slaughter in Gaza, as well as to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory more broadly, has never been about picking a side in a conflict. Dissent from present U.S. policy aims, ironically, to uphold the most fundamental tenets of the U.S.-led world order. It seeks to preserve international law, crafted from the wreckage of the Second World War, in the face of the astonishing crimes of an increasingly rogue state, and at safeguarding the possibility of a meaningful peace. As Russia and the BRICS alliance accelerate their challenge to the liberal rules-based order, Biden can reinforce it before he leaves office—by finally applying those rules in Gaza.
Dr Alia Brahimi is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and the author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror (OUP).
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.