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 6 - Unquestioned Premises
To understand the nuances of how this Third-Partying PR effort has been so successful, it’s important to explain how much of the heavy lifting is done through the shifting, extremely malleable definition of “ceasefire” and the US media’s unwillingness to question what the term means or how the White House’s usage differs so significantly from its usage with humanitarian and aid groups.
The White House routinely makes mutually exclusive statements about its desire to “end the war,” while saying Hamas could “have no role in postwar Gaza.” Yet no mainstream reporter, editor, or opinion writer bothers to reconcile this contradiction. This calculated vagueness is central to why Israel is permitted to continue bombing and killing at will for an indefinite amount of time. How can US officials simultaneously push for an “immediate, lasting ceasefire” while, at the same time, saying the other warring party must be completely defeated before they can support a lasting ceasefire?
The White House routinely makes mutually exclusive statements about its desire to “end the war,” while saying Hamas could “have no role in postwar Gaza.” Yet no mainstream reporter, editor, or opinion writer bothers to reconcile this contradiction. This calculated vagueness is central to why Israel is permitted to continue bombing and killing at will for an indefinite amount of time. How can US officials simultaneously push for an “immediate, lasting ceasefire” while, at the same time, saying the other warring party must be completely defeated before they can support a lasting ceasefire?
This isn’t a call for a ceasefire—it’s a call for, in Netanyahu’s phrasing, “total victory.” The pairing of these two mutually exclusive phrases can only mean one thing: In common usage from the White House and its friendly media, “pushing for a ceasefire” means “continuing to bomb and besiege Gaza while reiterating terms of surrender.”
One linguistic trick that permitted this contradiction to go unchallenged is the sleight-of-hand in what the White House means by “ceasefire.” In some contexts, it means the term as it has been used by the Israelis, namely by Netanyahu: a temporary pause in fighting to facilitate hostage exchanges, followed by a continuation of the military campaign whose goal, ostensibly, is to “eliminate Hamas.” But this is explicitly not an effort to “end the war” as Netanyahu made clear repeatedly throughout the conflict.
One linguistic trick that permitted this contradiction to go unchallenged is the sleight-of-hand in what the White House means by “ceasefire.” In some contexts, it means the term as it has been used by the Israelis, namely by Netanyahu: a temporary pause in fighting to facilitate hostage exchanges, followed by a continuation of the military campaign whose goal, ostensibly, is to “eliminate Hamas.” But this is explicitly not an effort to “end the war” as Netanyahu made clear repeatedly throughout the conflict.
The White House’s demand to “end the war,” increasingly popular since the summer of 2024, is just a reiteration of surrender terms. The State Department banned its staff from even using the word “ceasefire” for the first few months of the conflict. But in late February 2024, on the eve of a Michigan primary that was embarrassing then-candidate Biden, the White House, as we noted in The Nation at the time, pivoted to embracing the term. But the Biden administration changed its definition to mean (1) hostage negotiations, but with a firm commitment to continue the “war” once Israeli hostages were freed, and (2) a reiteration of surrender demands, sometimes using both definitions simultaneously.
The concepts of “ceasefire” and “push to the end the war” became, like the “peace process,” a ill-defined, open-ended process for process’s sake that US officials could point to in order to frame themselves not as participants in an brutal, largely one-sided siege and bombing campaign but a third party desperately trying—but perpetually failing—to achieve “peace.”
But this only makes sense if one overlooks the contradiction at the heart of the White House’s talking points. Take one recent example: In a press conference on October 12, 2024, Vice Presidential Kamala Harris told reporters these two phrases just seconds apart:
But this only makes sense if one overlooks the contradiction at the heart of the White House’s talking points. Take one recent example: In a press conference on October 12, 2024, Vice Presidential Kamala Harris told reporters these two phrases just seconds apart:
“[The killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar] gives us an opportunity to finally end the war.”
“It is time for the day after to begin without Hamas in power.”
How can the Israelis “end the war” and “begin without Hamas in power”? What the White House is calling for here is not a ceasefire but a surrender. Historically, “ceasefire” means that both parties stop firing, not that one party is crushed militarily.
Did The New York Times, which reported on the press conference in detail, reconcile this contradiction? Did reporters Katie Rogers and Reid J. Epstein ask how Harris can seek to “end the war” while requiring total defeat of Hamas as a condition of ending the war? Or what these statements mean when, according to Israeli analysts, Hamas is years away from being defeated? Did any of them ask why Harris isn’t pushing President Biden to use leverage to compel Israel to agree to an actual ceasefire?
Without exception, US media, for the better part of nine months, has permitted this discussion of nonsensical “ceasefire talks” back and forth to continue, even as we never saw any meaningful progress. (The rare time the glaring contradiction was noted, it was framed as a good thing—“constructive ambiguity,” as Axios’s Ravid put it—a way to create space for peace.) Important people show up “in the Middle East” in suits, talk about “making progress” and “seeking an end to the war,” and reporters take their efforts at face value as a good-faith “peace effort.” To the extent that there are real negotiations between Israel and Hamas, they have been entirely confined to discussions about hostage exchanges, which, both the US and Israel make clear, would explicitly not end the war but provide a few weeks’ pause like the one in December 2023.
Thus, American media consumers are fed a constant stream of Third-Partying, which consistently positions the Biden administration as a disinterested humanitarian force perpetually seeking peace but thwarted by stubborn Israelis and Palestinian—when, in reality, the US is aiding the siege and bombing of Gaza, and US officials are, over and over again, just reiterating Israel’s demand for Hamas’s total surrender.
Take one typical example: a Financial Times headline from October 29, 2024, that reads, “Gaza aid falls to lowest level since start of war despite US warning to Israel.” But aid isn’t falling “despite” the US; it’s falling because the US is backing the Israeli military’s strategy of starvation as a tool of war. The “warning” is for public consumption; it is not a real mode of pressure, and we know this, because Israel ignores these “warnings” over and over again for months without consequence. The Biden administration is not a powerless humanitarian NGO standing on the sidelines with a clipboard. It is a participant in the conflict—providing arms, military support, troops and diplomatic support for the starvation campaign in question. The Third-Partying trope, it’s worth noting, predates the State Department’s embracing and redefining the term “ceasefire.” Even prior to this, it was typical for US media to treat the US as a frustrated agent of peace. Take this example from CBS News in January 2024:
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to the Middle East for the fourth time since the start of the Israel-Hamas war with goals of preventing the conflict from spreading further, expanding humanitarian aid, and reducing civilian casualties.
Here, the US is presented as a passive observer, a firefighter only
concerned with “reducing civilian casualties.” One would hardly know
that Blinken represents a country providing military aid, weapons,
intel, and troop deployments in support of the military causing 99
percent of the deaths of the “war.”
The destruction of Gaza is in its 14th month. Israel continues to escalate in Lebanon, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens by the day. Understanding how US media outlets continue to paint a participant in the siege and bombing of Gaza as a separate, reluctant, humanitarian force is essential to shifting the focus of coverage away from self-serving leaks, personality disputes, court intrigue, and presumed humanitarian motives into the more concrete, skeptical, policy-driven coverage typically reserved for states hostile to US interests. For too long, the Biden White House and its Israeli and think-tank allies have curated an image of an administration in over its head, largely powerless, motivated by humanitarian concerns, separate from the images and reports of human suffering in Gaza. This report seeks to rectify this media convention, ask editors to question why Biden allies are so eager to reinforce this image and implore editors and reporters to refocus coverage on what the Biden White House is supporting as a matter of policy, rather than transcribe the president’s supposed mood, reports of pending “breaks” in the US-Israel relationship that never come, “tense phone calls,” and other journalistic frivolities.
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