The conflict in the Middle East is very distant for the United States. From New York to Tel Aviv there are about 9 thousand kilometers. If the President decides to travel to this country, it will take him, at least on a direct flight, between 11 and 15 hours. However, geopolitically it is a key issue of its foreign policy. The region has a large amount of energy resources to which access must be ensured. But the North American presence must also be noted to reduce the force of the Russian and Iranian incidents. in the Arab world. And by the way, combat terrorism and promote democracy.
After Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Joe Biden waited ten days to visit Netanyahu’s homeland. Meanwhile, the head of United States diplomacy, Antony Blinken, traveled this Wednesday for the seventh time since the start of the war. However, there is hardly any progress and the main objective of a ceasefire remains unrealized. The question is: Is the US government doing enough to stop the conflict? Its actions can be divided into three: humanitarian aid, military support and diplomatic shielding.
Police evicted the pro-Palestinian camp at Ucla (EFE)
Regarding the first point, The Netanyahu administration does not comply with one of the most significant demands of the international community, which is to end the blockade and let in humanitarian aid. The situation reached the point that the United States decided to act on its own and organized an operation to drop supplies from planes over the Gaza Strip. And in addition, it began to build a floating dock off the coast, to be able to enter products directly. According to the United Nations, there are some 2 million civilians in Gaza on the brink of famine.
Regarding military aid, the North American government has deployed an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. It is a tactic of deterrence so that not even Iran, Hezbollah or other armed groups in the region allied with Hamas would think of escalating the conflict. At the same time, the shipment of weapons to Israel has continued: ammunition, weapons, projectiles, vehicles, bombs, F-15 fighter planes. And with respect to the third point, diplomatic shielding, the Biden government has used its veto right in the United Nations Security Council to protect Israel from adverse resolutions.
The truth is that all this support – humanitarian, military and diplomatic – from the White House helps keep the war afloat. For this reason, they began to be strongly questioned internally. The first thing that arises is the impact that this situation could have in an election year. There are many accusations against Biden of favoring the “genocide of the Palestinians.” Meanwhile, the president affirmed that the pro-Palestinian student demonstrations have not changed his position towards Israel and that his support remains unwavering.
Students demonstrate at Columbia University in New York. (BBC).
His opponent and opponent, Donald Trump, took advantage of the electoral occasion, while he is being tried in the New York courts. He celebrated the police eviction of the universities and expressed about what happened in that city “The Police arrived and in two hours everything was over. “It was beautiful to see.” Furthermore, in accordance with his communication tactics, he described: “Radical extremists and far-left agitators are terrorizing college campuses.”
The truth is that it was the former president who dared in 2018 to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. If Trump is reelected this year, American policy toward Israel could become a little less ambiguous. Although not that much. There is a great consensus among the American political class that is mostly aligned with Israel and its interests. It is this same political class that is putting pressure on universities not to give in to the demands of students.
The demand of the university students, which is really annoying, is not the request for an end to the war in Gaza. Because it is a distant conflict, where there are no national troops and the cost is merely economic, so it is more or less simple to get rid of it. What disturbs, annoys and bothers the North American political class is the request for universities to part with the equity funds they have in companies linked to Israel. because “they are investing in the murder of Gazans and Palestinians.” This is a request that almost completely irritates both Republicans and Democrats.
Protest camp at Columbia University, April 24, 2024. (Reuters)
Most universities in the United States have endowment funds in which they invest their capital. These billions of dollars are put into company stocks. Thus, through multiple investment funds, study houses obtain profitability. In this sense, the conflict in the Middle East is beginning to be transversal and threatens to penetrate other instances of North American society. There appeared, for example, the names Google and Microsoft, which have business relations with Israel and in turn, financial ties with universities. But the list is long.
The students managed to uncover an intricate economic system that helps sustain the conflict, and that runs through the entire North American society. And this is uncomfortable. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Anti-Semitic mobs have taken over major universities.” And he added “We see this exponential rise in anti-Semitism across the United States (…) as Israel tries to defend itself from genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.”
Pro-Palestinian protests at universities in the United States (EFE)
It is this discursive inflexibility that probably annoys students the most because it belittles and invalidates them. Is demonstrating an anti-Semitic act? In a very different and conciliatory tone, the spokesman for the United Nations General Secretariat, Farhan Haq, expressed: “Some protests may have been used by different individuals to reach hate speech or anti-Semitism, and we are against that, but the peaceful demonstration It is one of the fundamental rights.”
There are several worrying things that began to occur frequently in these twenties of the 21st century. For example, hate speech or anti-Semitism began to be used and praised again from different places, also from places of power. Or that any peaceful demonstration is lightly labeled as anti-Semitic or terrorist simply for being contrary to the policies implemented by a government. These are some evidences that ghosts of the last century have returned and intend to stay.
