For months President Joe Biden’s administration has used leaks to the media to communicate the president’s apparent unhappiness with Israel’s treatment of Gazans as Israel has responded to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. In recent days, Biden himself has finally begun to more openly criticize Israel’s military operation. But the language he’s using subtly lets Israel off the hook for its ongoing atrocities.
Speaking at a White House news conference alongside Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Monday, Biden spoke sympathetically about the suffering Israel has inflicted upon Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ war crimes. “Too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children. And hundreds of thousands have no access to food, water or other basic services,” Biden said in his opening statement. “Many families have lost not just one but many relatives and cannot mourn for them or even bury them because it’s not safe to do so. It’s heart-breaking. Every innocent life in Gaza is a tragedy, just as every innocent life lost in Israel is a tragedy, as well. We pray for those lives taken — both Israeli and Palestinian — and for the grieving families left behind.”
Biden’s statement downplays and omits Israel’s role — and the U.S.’ complicity — in causing horrific civilian suffering in Gaza.
Biden’s statement downplays and omits Israel’s role — and the U.S.’ complicity — in causing horrific civilian suffering in Gaza. He noticeably uses the passive voice to describe Palestinian hardship and death. For example, he refers to “Palestinians killed,” instead of saying Israel killed them. Biden also laments that Gazans don’t have access to food, but he doesn’t call out Israel’s policy of starving the entire enclave’s population. In Biden’s telling, Gazans have just “lost” family. But human rights observers have said Israel’s airstrikes on civilian infrastructure have instantly wiped out families of multiple generations. Of course, any reasonable viewer could deduce from Biden’s words why Gazans are dying. Israel has been killing them with its weapons and with its manufactured humanitarian crisis. But language matters. And by eliding the actors behind the killing — and the brutal methods that those actors are using — Biden obscures the misconduct underpinning the mass death unfolding before us.
Consider also Biden’s use of the word “tragedy” to characterize the deaths of innocent civilians. (“Tragedy” is a word that’s also been used by other administration officials to describe the unconscionable death toll in Gaza.) The loss of innocent life in Gaza is indeed a tragedy, but the word connotes a natural calamity and suggests some fate of cosmic origins has befallen Palestinians. With every repetition of that word, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration and the Israel Defense Forces’ culpability recede further from view. The invocation of tragedy also implies that the death rate in Gaza is a natural byproduct of a painful but necessary war, and that Biden’s ability to alter the course of events is limited. But wars can be waged in different ways, and, with American money and weapons, Israel is knowingly using ruthless tactics that are wiping out Palestinian life and civilization en masse.
Biden also soft-pedaled the nature of what’s transpiring in Gaza in his other recent instance of criticism of Israel last week. At a news conference, Biden said “the conduct of the response in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip, has been over the top” and expressed concern that “there are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying. And it’s got to stop.” Again, Biden managed to avoid naming whose behavior is over the top and what specifically makes it over the top.
The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 is approaching 30,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which has consistently reported that most of the people who have died are civilians. (NBC hasn’t independently confirmed those numbers; human rights observers say that historically the ministry’s estimates are credible.) Biden should describe this not just as a tragedy but as an intolerable and ongoing violation of international law. Of course, using that kind of language might then compel him to do something about it, such as declining to continue to arm Israel or shield it at the United Nations, or admitting that defunding the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency is the wrong choice. Biden’s soft language, however, allows the administration to sound morally upstanding without having to be morally upstanding.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.