Washington is purposefully dragging out negotiations to enable Israel’s pursuit of its genocidal goals.

• Belén Fernández Al Jazeera columnist

Published On 28 Aug 2024

On July 21, 2006, nine days into the 34-day Israeli war on Lebanon that killed 1,200 people, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opined that “an immediate ceasefire without political conditions does not make sense”.

In response to a journalist’s question at a press briefing, the secretary declared that she had “no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante”.

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In addition to manoeuvring to delay a ceasefire, the US also expedited shipments of precision-guided bombs to Israel to assist in the mass slaughter.

Just two and a half years later, Rice was back agitating against a too-quick ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where over the course of 22 days in December 2008 and January 2009 Israel massacred some 1,400 Palestinians.

In this case, Rice claimed that the US was “working toward a ceasefire that would not allow a re-establishment of the status quo ante where Hamas can continue to launch rockets out of Gaza”, Hamas’s largely ineffectual rockets clearly being a graver problem than the slaughter of 1,400 people.

Fast forward 15 years to Israel’s straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip, which is undoubtedly a more effective means of eradicating the “status quo ante” – at least if we take “status quo ante” to mean Gaza and its inhabitants. With official fatalities now exceeding 40,000 Palestinians and predictions that the real death toll may in fact be many times higher, an immediate ceasefire is the only non-genocidal option on the table.

And while US President Joe Biden has repeatedly stressed the urgency of just such a ceasefire, it is a bit tricky to stop a war when you have just approved an additional $20bn in weapons transfers to the party that has officially killed nearly 17,000 Palestinian children since October.

Indeed, current US qualifications to ostensibly mediate a ceasefire in Gaza are rather dubious given that the country could easily be taken for a de facto belligerent to the conflict. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that, like Israel, the US has “poured vast resources into trying to find” Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and has not only “provided ground-penetrating radar” to Israel but also tasked US spy agencies “with intercepting Mr Sinwar’s communications”.

The Times quotes White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on additional US contributions to the obsessive search for Sinwar: “We’ve had people in Israel sitting in the room with the Israelis working this problem set. And obviously we have a lot of experience hunting high-value targets”.

But again, simultaneously “hunting” the leader of the very organisation one professes to be negotiating a ceasefire with does not exactly speak to one’s credibility as a mediator.

source https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/28/the-us-is-israels-accomplice-not-a-ceasefire-mediator