Gaza Through the Looking Glass

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry got caught in one of those hot mic moments that reveal the speaker’s true feelings. Between interviews, Kerry had been speaking to an aide about Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip—which the Obama administration has publicly backed—and Fox host Chris Wallace confronted him with the disjuncture between his public remarks and his private comments, in which the secretary seemed to mock Israel’s insistence that the incursion has been a careful one. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Kerry said. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.”

Elsewhere that morning, CNN's Candy Crowley asked Kerry point-blank if “Israel has gone too far”—and the secretary of state pivoted immediately to describing his phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and complaining about Hamas’ rocket attacks. Asked again, he allowed that “no human being is comfortable with children being killed, with people being killed,” but quickly retreated to the line, “So you know, in war, it’s very difficult.” The difference between his on- and off-air remarks was stark.

What is one to make of this? We already know that U.S. officials are highly skeptical of Netanyahu’s true intentions toward the Palestinians, having made clear that they consider the Israeli prime minister’s inability to control settlement growth to have been the main reason for the collapse of Kerry’s nine-month peace talks effort. Some skepticism regarding Netanyahu’s claims about Gaza is therefore warranted—but Obama administration officials seem loath to express that skepticism publicly.

Just as notable as Kerry’s off-message chat about Israel’s “pinpoint operation,” though I think more problematic, was Kerry’s on-message claim on CNN that Israel is “under siege” by Hamas.

One really couldn’t ask for a better example of the through-the-looking-glass quality of the discussion about Israel-Palestine here in Washington than the claim that Israel, not Gaza, is “under siege.” Since 2007, the territory has been under a blockade, whose severity has risen and fallen, but even in its lightest moments has almost entirely prevented the ability of Gazans to leave. Travel to visit family, or to attend school, or anything else in the West Bank is almost completely prohibited, exacerbating the political division between the territories. A ban on exports prevents any economic growth, with Gaza’s unemployment sitting at around 40 percent. Gaza is, as a top official with the NGO Doctors Without Borders recently noted in a searing letter, the world’s largest “open-air prison.”

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While no one should dismiss the threat of rocket fire on Israelis, there’s simply no comparison to the pressures of Palestinian life under occupation and blockade—especially now that Israel’s anti-rocket system Iron Dome is fully operational. “For us living here, the current military operation and the ongoing drizzle of rockets are neither unbearable nor threatening in an existential way,” wrote Israeli analyst Hillel Ben-Sasson of the Jerusalem-based think tank Molad. “Iron Dome has enabled Israelis to continue with their normal lives neither terrified nor terrorized.” Comparing, for example, the polo shirts of Tel Aviv-based correspondents with the helmets and Kevlar vest of reporters covering Gaza tells you just about all you need to know about the relative danger.

Yet the discussion in Washington focuses almost entirely on the threat to Israel. Indeed, after days of bombardment that killed hundreds of Palestinians, the Washington Post’s Sunday front page featured the headline: “2 Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza clash.” (The sub-headline, “Death toll tops 330 as Hamas militants step up attacks,” is arguably more out of whack—it doesn’t even mention who is being killed in those numbers.) Within hours of Israel’s ground invasion, the Senate passed a unanimous resolution expressing its full support, with nary a word of concern for Palestinian civilian casualties. (As of Monday, 548 Palestinians had died in the fighting, over 70 percent of them civilians, according to the United Nations.)

Matthew Duss is a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress and the incoming president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.