Biden is Deceiving You on Rafah
The relation between illusion and deception is always complicated. At the deepest level, we all live by illusion. We believe in something and do so instinctively: at that level, we cannot deceive anyone but ourselves. But then in order to preserve the vital illusion or illusions that define us, many deceptions and even many lies become necessary. The more limited that illusion, the greater and more numerous become the lies.
These two levels explain Biden’s position on the war in Gaza. His views on Israel are the vital illusion helping him make sense of the world. His views on Rafah are a deception he has skilfully created for public consumption. Between the two levels, there are shades where illusion and deception may well be combined.
In an interview with Erin Burnett on May 9 he suddenly admitted Israel has been using massive 2000-pound bombs to “go after population centres.” These are bombs with a lethal blast radius of 1000 metres. Even protected troops are not safe within 250 meters of a 2,000-pound bomb. What conclusions did he draw? Was it not an unjustifiable war crime to go after population centres and to do so using such crude killing machines?
Biden retreated to the myth, a myth of Israel which, being so central to our Western identity, has a natural tendency to replace reality. The extraordinary acrobatics Biden and his advisors now engage in are for the sake of preserving the myth in its daily clash with real events. When Biden says Israel must not go into Rafah, he speaks with the fear that Rafah will become the moment of truth, the moment when it becomes impossible to believe Israel is fighting a war against ancient hatreds rather than a war whose goal is Gaza’s complete destruction.
When Burnett asked him if Israel had crossed his red line, if it had gone into Rafah, Biden responded that it had not, that it had not entered the town center, as if the small town now hosting more than a million people were something like metropolitan Tokyo.
It’s becoming clearer that all that the Biden administration asks of Israel is some help in preserving the myth, some care not to smash it too hard against the horror of daily reality in Gaza. Israel has in fact entered Rafah. It has bombed it as indiscriminately as the rest of the Strip. About one million people have now left the area, heading north to Khan Younis, a mound of rubble, or west to Mawasi, a desolate plot with no electricity, sewage or food supplies. Since the beginning of the Rafah operation on May 7, no aid has crossed from Egypt, threatening to extend the famine to the south of Gaza, where the majority of the population now is. For a week now, there have been daily or hourly reports of explosions, artillery shelling, warplanes and helicopter gunfire in several areas of Rafah.
Is there a way out? The first step is to recognise we are in the grip of a mania. By “we” I mean Western democracies, even if the group includes a few outliers. We must relearn to see what is in from of our eyes. After Rafah, the whole of Gaza will be a tent city, with no buildings left. Did we not see it at the beginning? “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings,” an Israeli defence official told Channel 13 on October 11 last year.
Very well, we did not see it at the beginning. Do we see it now? Biden seems determined to stick to his line: Israel has not entered Rafah. Perhaps he means that Israel has not stormed Rafah, but then the Israeli forces followed the exact same protocol in Rafah they have followed elsewhere in Gaza and whose goal is evidently to avoid casualties among its troops: an initial bombing campaign and then a slow ground invasion combined with comprehensive demolitions of buildings and infrastructure.
To the extend that there is some distance between the Biden administration and the Israeli war cabinet, it seems to consist of a disagreement about how to communicate the policy, rather than the policy itself. He would want a different language to be used and perhaps different bombs to be used, although his administration was quick to explain that only a shipment of those 2000-pound bombs has been delayed and even that shipment may still be resumed. Since the beginning of the Rafah assault, Biden has moved ahead with a new $1 billion arms sale to Israel.
For America’s image and prestige in the Middle East and the world, Gaza is turning into a historical watershed. As an official in Jordan told me in April, the United States has evolved from a provider of order into an agent of chaos. It is often said that American politics has turned inwards. That is supposed to mean away from the world and towards domestic concerns. I fear the condition may be much worse. If the United States has turned inwards it is away from the world and towards its own fantasies and myths, recesses of a feverish mind.