The core issue underlying the crisis in the Middle East, Seymour Hersh wrote in a new column yesterday, “has been [President Joe] Biden’s inability to understand the recklessness and depravity of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hatred of Palestinians has now brought the Middle East and America to the brink of a war that is neither desired nor necessary.” The fault is not only Biden’s, Hersh points out, but also the majority of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress who “routinely vote to send billions of dollars to support a corrupt and failing government in Ukraine and similarly approve the bombs and tank shells supplied to Israel for use in Gaza. Hamas … is far from defeated and it is now clear that Netanyahu has been the one resisting a ceasefire there….”
Hersh reports that senior U.S. officials had cautioned Netanyahu against a massive bombing attack in response to Oct. 7 and even proposed alternative courses of action. However: “The enraged Israeli leadership instead chose collective punishment, a decision that has led to tens of thousands of deaths—the numbers are impossible to measure amid the societal collapse—and growing worldwide condemnation of Israel. In America that has meant a political backlash among college students and the young against the Democratic Party, whose candidates are at peril in the November elections.”
Hersh goes on: “The Israeli assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran … was a clear message that there will be no ceasefire in Gaza, as long as Netanyahu is in power. It also could turn out to be what no one, except perhaps Netanyahu and his political colleagues in Israel, wants: a very deadly international game changer.”
