White House–curated stories of performative outrage and feigned helplessness provided cover for an administration arming death on an industrial scale.
by Adam Johnson and Othman Ali
Part 1
An analysis of press coverage of the first year of the siege, bombing, and invasion of Gaza reveals a US media eager to produce narratives that allow the White House to distance itself from the moral, social, political, and professional consequences of their support for Israel. White House and State Department reporters at major US outlets, we will show, consistently took self-serving claims by anonymous aides at face value, did not interrogate clear conflicts of interest, and focused too much on alleged personality disputes, unverifiable states of mind, and assumed benevolent motives over material policy.
This distancing of the White House from the carnage in Gaza is achieved through three reporting genres: Helpless Biden, Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden, and Third-Partying.
Helpless Biden is any report, analysis, or opinion that describes Biden as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the war overall. This is typically framed as a “limit” to US power, often accompanied with a picture of Biden looking overwhelmed, sad, or doddering. These are sourced almost entirely by anonymous Biden aides and Biden allies in the think-tank world.
Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden is any report, analysis, or opinion that paints Biden as secretly upset, outraged, or privately sad or anguished about civilian casualties. These articles are also sourced almost entirely by anonymous Biden aides and Biden allies in the think-tank world.
Third-Partying is a variation of an anti-labor propaganda concept whereby corporations treat unions as somehow separate from workers and worker democracy in order to portray unions as an outside “third party.” Just the same, media reports consistently paint the United States as separate from the conflict, despite its being the major patron of one side, deploying troops and military hardware, assisting in military operations, providing intel, and protecting Israel at the United Nations. The US media consistently frames the United States as a neutral party—even a humanitarian force—always looking (but, mysteriously, always failing) to end the conflict. This is typically done through coverage of largely fictitious ceasefire talks, whereby US media conflates efforts for a short-term pause for the purpose of hostage exchanges with “ending the war.”
Before detailing the three media genres helping the White House distance itself from the horrors of Gaza, we must establish two premises:
1. The Biden White House could—and indeed still can—end Israel’s bombing, siege, and occupation of Gaza whenever it wishes and simply isn’t, because it broadly agrees with it.
The evidence that Biden has sufficient leverage to compel Israel to end its military campaign in Gaza is well-documented and widely understood. Seven US-based unions, representing 6 million workers (AFA, APWU, IUPAT, SEIU, UAW, UE, and NEA), and over 250 humanitarian organizations (among them OxFam, Amnesty International, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders) have called for an arms embargo against Israel pursuant to this end. And Israeli officials themselves routinely acknowledge that such leverage gives the US dispositive say over what the Israelis do and don’t do.
The evidence that Biden has sufficient leverage to compel Israel to end its military campaign in Gaza is well-documented and widely understood. Seven US-based unions, representing 6 million workers (AFA, APWU, IUPAT, SEIU, UAW, UE, and NEA), and over 250 humanitarian organizations (among them OxFam, Amnesty International, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders) have called for an arms embargo against Israel pursuant to this end. And Israeli officials themselves routinely acknowledge that such leverage gives the US dispositive say over what the Israelis do and don’t do.
In the early days of the war, critics pressed Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant about why Israel agreed to allow in limited humanitarian aid to Gaza. He responded, “The Americans insisted, and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?” Retired Israeli Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick said in a November 2023 interview, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
In a recent book on Biden, The Last Politician, Franklin Foer reports how Biden put an end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2021 with a single phone call. After Netanyahu “struggled to justify his request for more bombing of Gaza because he “couldn’t point to fresh targets that needed striking,” Biden said, according to Foer, “Hey, man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.” And then, Foer wrote, “like that, it was over. By the time the call ended, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a cease-fire that the Egyptians would broker.”
The Financial Times wrote in its October 25 editorial, “US President Joe Biden must end the year-long cycle of death and destruction.… Biden has the tools to rein in Netanyahu. He must halt the offensive arms sales to Israel that enable its relentless bombing of Gaza and Lebanon.”
But most persuasive of all is the fact that a good portion of the articles we will be discussing that suggest Biden is helpless to end Israel’s military campaign concede themselves that Biden can do this, but simply doesn’t want to. Yet these articles breeze past this reality, burying it in a “to be sure” paragraph further down on the page or treating it as polemical guesswork from “critics” of the administration.
But most persuasive of all is the fact that a good portion of the articles we will be discussing that suggest Biden is helpless to end Israel’s military campaign concede themselves that Biden can do this, but simply doesn’t want to. Yet these articles breeze past this reality, burying it in a “to be sure” paragraph further down on the page or treating it as polemical guesswork from “critics” of the administration.
2. The second premise is that those in the Biden White House have obvious professional, social, political, and moral reasons for wanting to promote the idea that the daily atrocities occurring in Gaza are not something they are responsible for.
On this premise, Israel has been credibly accused of war crimes by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, widely condemned by almost every country on earth, and credibly accused of plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice and of outright genocide by Aryeh Neier, a cofounder of Human Rights Watch. Domestically, despite support for Israel in the abstract, the “war” has been incredibly unpopular with US voters. The incentive, therefore, for White House officials is to distance themselves from the inevitable, horrific outcomes of Israel’s siege, bombing, and occupation of Gaza.
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