U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and the War in the Gaza Strip: Israel’s Defense in the War of the Suez Canal
The US is not the first country to criticizeIsrael’s military operations in Gaza.
The year was 1956. Israel, Britain and France had just invaded Egyptian territory in a bid to take over the Suez Canal, which Egypt had decided to nationalize.
U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower stepped in, ending the brief conflict. But in the months afterward, Israel resisted a United Nations resolution that called for it to pull its troops out of the Gaza Strip, then controlled by Egypt.
“Repeated, but so far unsuccessful, efforts have been made to bring about a voluntary withdrawal by Israel,” Eisenhower said in a nationally televised speech. The government of Israel was disappointed by the United Nations action and felt unwilling to withdraw.
President Biden supports Israel in its war with Hamas. But he’s warning Israelis against a military offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah at a time when more than a million Palestinian civilians are taking refuge there.
“They agreed that they share the objective to see Hamas defeated in Rafah. The U.S. side expressed its concerns with various courses of action in Rafah. Both Israel and the US agreed that the Israeli side would take the concerns into account and have follow up discussions.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, a group in Washington that favors pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy, sees a real risk to Israel’s long-term interests.
During his many years in power, Netanyahu has aligned himself with Republicans in the U.S. His battles with the past three Democratic presidents have included peace negotiations with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran and the war in Gaza.
Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, recently called on Netanyahu to be replaced.
U.S.-Israeli relations have rebounded from past disagreements. Robert Satloff, who heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, believes this will happen again.
He said that there will be renewed commitment to strengthen the relationship after the passage of time.
The White House hasn’t done enough to end the Gaza War: a Palestinian friend’s voice in the White House? Israel’s response to the attack on Gaza
A younger generation sees Israel’s aggressive military campaign in Gaza, with thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths, and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories.
“My parents and their grandparents went through the Holocaust. My father’s family fought for Israel’s independence,” said Ben-Ami. “It’s a completely different life experience than the young person born in the 21st century. There is a completely different conversation happening at college campuses compared to what is happening in senior citizen centers.
So his secretary of state, James Baker, delivered a blunt message in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “It’s gonna take some really good faith, affirmative effort, on the part of our good friends in Israel. There is a telephone number that everybody should be aware of. When you are serious about peace, call us.
Alzayat and others pushed the White House for a meeting with Biden instead of a dinner, though Alzayat still declined the invitation altogether. The president hosted a small group of Muslim officials who worked in his administration for an iftar.
Thaer Ahmad was in attendance at the meeting. The emergency medicine doctor left the meeting before it was over. He told NPR he left out of respect for his fellow Palestinians and as a signal that he believes the White House needs to do more to end the war and to get humanitarian aid into the region.
Ahmad returned to the United States from Gaza where he was working at a hospital that was no longer functional because of fighting.
“We’ve been on the ground, we’ve seen just how overcrowded Rafah is — just how little aid is getting in — and that any sort of military activity there would be catastrophic,” Ahmad said.
I wanted to communicate that message but I also wanted it to be clear that what the White House has done is not enough,” Ahmad said.
The White House declined comment on the discussions during the private meeting. The press secretary said Biden respects the right to peaceful protest. She said that they understood that it was a very painful time.
Dr. Nahreen Ahmed also attended the meeting. The medical director of Med Global, who has been to Gaza twice since the war started, said that she felt Biden was not interested in what she had to say when she showed photos of the suffering she had witnessed.
“Maybe he didn’t mean it that way, but you’re the president of the United States, you cannot sit there and be this dismissive of individual pictures of people suffering that are being put in front of you and then tell us all, ‘Well, I’ve seen these before,’” she told NPR.
“Even if you have — that’s not the right response to a community of people that are hurting from what’s happening in Palestine and are trying to express to you their hurt and their pain and their frustration.”
Ahmed said she felt the meeting was “a way to manage the community, to say that we are trying our best, that we hear you,” and did not feel like the president was empathetic to their concerns.
The White House had planned to invite some Muslim leaders to an iftar to mark Ramadan, but scaled those plans back when some people said they did not feel comfortable with the plans.
“We should not be breaking fast at the White House in the last 10 days of the month since our policies are enabling a famine in Palestine,” said Wa’el Alzayat, who runs Emgage USA.
The president takes some responsibility for the fact that his inability to reign in Benjamin may be the reason. Netanyahu much earlier has contributed to some of the catastrophic loss of life,” Nashashibi said.
We have said there have been too many deaths of civilians. The infrastructure that’s been destroyed is called the civilian infrastructure. We have been very clear about our concerns and objections over some obstacles that have been put in the way of getting additional humanitarian assistance in,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said on Wednesday.