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Blinken's Willful Blindness on the Gaza Genocide

Blinken can deny a genocide that he is abetting and move on because he assumes that there is no accountability for what he says and does.

Daniel Larison || January 7th, 2025

Peter Beinart comments on Antony Blinken’s willful blindness about the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. role in it:

And then to me, the most astonishingly pathetic and arrogant moment in the conversation is when the New York Times reporter says, ‘do you worry you’ve been presiding over what the world sees as a genocide?’ And Antony Blinken simply says, ‘no, it’s not.’ No, it’s not. That’s it. No suggestion that he might have read the Amnesty or United Nations reports. No suggestion that he needs to rebut these claims. No suggestion that the fact that Israel has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the universities, most of the agriculture, that 90% of the people are dislocated from their homes, right, that there’s been report after report of mass starvation that even some of Israel’s former security officials like Moshe Bogie Ya’alon are calling this an ethnic cleansing, right.

None of this makes Antony Blinken feel like he has to give any justification for why he doesn’t think it is a genocide. He doesn’t feel the need to make the argument. He simply says, ex cathedra categorically no it’s not, and then moves on. This is what William Fulbright famously called during Vietnam the arrogance of power.

Blinken can deny a genocide that he is abetting and move on because he assumes that there is no accountability for what he says and does. He ignores the mountain of evidence contained in the reports because he must have already decided before the reports were published that it can’t be a genocide. Perhaps he believes that genocide is something that only our enemies and other pariahs do. Unfortunately, Blinken has a lot of company on that score. Most people in Washington cling most fiercely to the myth that the U.S. and its partners are simply a force for good in the world, and they won’t acknowledge or accept anything that complicates or contradicts that belief. The mental prison that Beinart describes is that of exceptionalism. 

An exceptionalist can rationalize away even the most heinous crimes by insisting that the perpetrators meant well or that they were forced to make terrible choices by others. If the U.S. or a client government commits war crimes and crimes against humanity, the exceptionalist will deny that the crimes happened as long as possible and then say that it was still ultimately someone else’s fault. An exceptionalist can’t admit that a U.S.-backed client government has been committing genocide. According to this warped view of the world, any government aligned with ours can never be guilty of such a crime even when the evidence is there for all the world to see. In other words, the laws that apply to others don’t apply to governments on “our” side.

Blinken has been one of the chief enablers of the genocide in Gaza. In his position as Secretary of State, he has made sure that the weapons keep flowing in flagrant violation of U.S. laws governing arms transfers. He has every incentive to deny the reality of what he has been supporting. As one of the top officials of Israel’s main arms supplier, Blinken bears greater responsibility than almost any other person in our government for making the ongoing horrors in Gaza possible. 

The lack of response in the U.S. to the extensive documentation of the genocide is even more disturbing that Blinken’s self-serving answer. Blinken feels no need to engage with the reports’ findings because he knows that almost no one in Washington is going to put any pressure on him on this issue. Relatively few members of Congress have called attention to the same reports that Blinken is ignoring, and the coverage of these reports has been remarkably limited. Howard French recently pointed out the lack of U.S. media interest in the reports that document Israel’s genocidal campaign in great detail:

This was evident in the coverage that was muted or missing altogether in early December, after Amnesty International, a human rights organization that is treated with the highest respect when it reports on non-Western countries, accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Its report concluded that Israel had “deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction.”

Front-page news, right? Not really. And in some instances, coverage of Amnesty’s findings placed Israel’s vehement rejection of the charges ahead of the substance of the alleged violations of international law itself.

One might think that it would be sensational news that a major human rights organization has concluded that a government armed by the United States is waging an ongoing genocidal campaign, but instead it was barely acknowledged and has since all but vanished from the conversation. The general silence on the opinion pages has been even more noticeable. Since the Amnesty report was released last month, there have been no editorials in The Washington Post or The New York Times on this subject. The Wall Street Journal predictably chimed in right away, but only to denounce the report as “anti-Israel” propaganda. The WSJ editorial prompted Amnesty to respond with a letter that summed things up well:

Our extensive research and findings at Amnesty International may be unpleasant or inconvenient for some, but the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s pattern of conduct against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip is clear: It is genocide.

These findings certainly are inconvenient for both defenders of the Biden administration and hardline supporters of Israel, and that is why those people have been so desperate to ignore or attack the reports that show what the Israeli government has done to the people of Gaza for the last fifteen months.