Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday said he appreciated the US vetoing a UN Security Council resolution that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and vowed to continue his war in the besieged enclave, which has killed at least 18,000 Palestinians.
“Other countries must also understand that it’s impossible to support the elimination of Hamas on one side and on the other to call for the end of the war, which will prevent the elimination of Hamas,” Netanyahu said.
“Therefore, Israel will continue our just war to eliminate Hamas and achieve the war’s other objectives that we set,” he added.
That brings us back to the original question. What would happen if the United States stopped supporting Ukraine? We already know. Ukraine and Russia would work toward a deal. It won’t go as well for Ukraine as it did almost two years ago when they were stronger. But it’s not a path to fear. Because the alternative is that the White House gets its way and this brutal, unnecessary war carries on. And that’s so much worse.
Over the weekend, border-policy negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans fell apart. The talks were meant to firm up Republican support for the president’s massive $105 billion military support proposal ahead of Wednesday’s vote by including additional funds for border security in the spending package. Now, with no imminent approval of further aid to Ukraine, hawks in government and the media are trying to stoke panic about what will happen if Kyiv is cut off from US support.
In a letter to Congress Monday, White House budget director Shalanda Young told Congress the funds will dry up by the end of the year:
I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks. There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money—and nearly out of time.
Young goes on to forecast disaster for Ukraine if more money isn’t allocated. But is that really accurate? Are the Ukrainian people doomed if Washington stops funding the war?
If we’re going to understand what might happen in the absence of US involvement in Ukraine, we must first understand Washington’s actual effect on the war, the true nature of which has been laid out brilliantly in a series of recent columns by Ted Snider.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began with a bombardment of cruise missiles on February 24, 2022. Later that day, infantry and armored divisions rolled in from Russia, Belarus, and Crimea while paratroopers dropped in around the capital city of Kyiv.
Days later, as the shock and confusion of the initial offensive began to dissipate, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky attempted to set up indirect talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Zelensky called then–Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett and asked him to contact Putin and to serve as a mediator. Bennett agreed.
Over the next week, Bennett had a series of phone calls with Putin before traveling to Moscow and Berlin to help organize diplomatic communication channels. His effort culminated in a March 10 meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers in Turkey.
In the series of talks that followed, Bennett described both sides as making “huge concessions” in pursuit of a ceasefire.
But Kyiv’s Western backers were resistant to the truce. At a special summit on March 24, NATO decided not to support or approve the peace negotiations. Still, Zelensky and Putin kept at it. And on March 29, the two sides reached an agreement.
According to a draft unsealed this past June, Russia had agreed to pull its forces back to prewar boundaries. In exchange, Ukraine had agreed it would not seek NATO membership.
So why didn’t it happen? Well, it may have started to. In early April, Russia withdrew its forces from northern Ukraine, around Kyiv—an action Putin later said was related to the Istanbul agreement.
But then, according to Bennett, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the talks, David Arakhamia, the West pressured Zelensky to abandon negotiations and fight.
The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children. Thomas-Greenfield’s policy statements suggest Israelis are deserving of human rights, while Palestinians are not.
In 2015, Thomas-Greenfield received the Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award, and yet her current presence at the UN has not exhibited any humanitarian urgency for Gaza, which her own colleagues at the UN are calling a humanitarian disaster, and genocide.
She forgets that her own ancestry mirrors the Palestinians, not the Israelis. She is representing the interests of the masters, while denying the oppressed people’s rights.
Thomas-Greenfield is the great granddaughter of Mary Francoise, who was born in 1865 in Louisiana. Mary was born after the civil war ended, but she was not born into freedom; her mother had been a slave, and even though the war ended, it would be decades before any African Americans were given their rights.
Mary Francoise might as well have been born in the Occupied West Bank, or Gaza. Her life and the lives of Palestinians today have a great deal in common. She lived in a land where the colonial government in Washington, DC. had two separate codes of justice and human rights. The White European settlers came to Virginia in 1607 and shortly were bringing thousands of enslaved Africans. The Native Americans were deprived of all human rights, and many were kept as slaves.
Mary’s son, Oliver Thomas, and his son, Oliver Thomas, Jr. were born ‘free’ in America, but had no right to vote, to live where they chose, to sit anywhere on the bus, except in the back, to eat in a restaurant with White people, to use a public bathroom used by White people, and no right to a decent education alongside White classmates. Thomas-Greenfield’s parents were illiterate, and she was the first in her family to graduate from high school.
Palestinians are not allowed to own land in Israel, and much of the land they live on in the West Bank has been bulldozed to make way of illegal Jewish settlements for decades. Building permits in East Jerusalem are denied to Palestinians. The people who live in Gaza today are the original inhabitants of other areas, and were forced to be segregated into a ghetto called Gaza.
Thomas-Greenfield attended an all-Black high school in Baker, East Baton Rouge County, Louisiana. In 1960, the total population of Baker was 4,823 persons, and by 2020 the population is 82% African American, the descendants of slaves, with 12% living at or below the poverty line.
She grew up in segregated Louisiana, where by law and tradition White students and Black students never sat together. When desegregation finally came to Louisiana in 1960, only four Black girls attempted to go to a White school and violence ensued by White parents.
In 2021, Tammy C. Barnett wrote that Louisiana’s history of racism is historical, and present. Barnett cites the definition: “Racism is the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another.” By this definition, we can see that the Israeli policy toward all Palestinians is racist.
Blinken also claimed Hamas is preventing American citizens from fleeing the Gaza Strip
“UNICEF says 1,524 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip during these bombings. Why isn’t the US calling for at least a temporary ceasefire?” Margaret Brennan, the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” asked Blinken.
During the interview with Brennan, Blinken also claimed it was Hamas’s fault that American citizens in Gaza could not leave despite the fact that the enclave is under Israeli blockade and Egypt has not been letting people enter its territory from its one border crossing with Gaza.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday rejected the idea of the US calling for a ceasefire in Gaza when confronted with the massive number of child casualties in Israel’s onslaught.
“UNICEF says 1,524 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip during these bombings. Why isn’t the US calling for at least a temporary ceasefire?” Margaret Brennan, the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” asked Blinken.
Blinken claimed that the death of children on both sides hits him “right in the heart” but did not criticize Israel’s vicious bombing campaign. He pointed to US efforts to get Israel to allow aid trucks to enter Gaza through Egypt, and Brennan then asked why the US isn’t pushing for at least a temporary ceasefire.
“Israel has to do everything it can to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Blinken said, referring to the October 7 Hamas attack. “Freezing things in place where they are now would allow Hamas to remain where it is and to repeat what it’s done some time in the future. No country could accept that,” Blinken said.
Blinken made a similar argument earlier this year when rejecting the idea of a ceasefire in Ukraine ahead of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, saying a pause in fighting would only benefit Russia. Now, it’s clear Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed after months of brutal fighting and heavy Ukrainian casualties.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Russia would capitalize on any ceasefire to give its troops rest and to re-equip its military. He claimed that a break in fighting would prolong the war.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Zelensky said, “Freezing the conflict with the Russian Federation means a pause that gives the Russian Federation a break for rest. They will not use this pause to change their geopolitics or to renounce their claims on the former Soviet republics.”
Zelensky predicted a ceasefire would only last a few short years, then Moscow would resume its offensive. Russia “will rest and in two or three years, it will seize two more regions and say again: Freeze the conflict. And it will keep going further and further. One hundred percent,” he said.
The statements by Zelensky come as Russia has slowly captured a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. The US and its allies have sent billions in increasingly advanced weapons to Kiev. However, even long-range rocket systems have proven inadequate in aiding Ukrainian forces to retake territory.
Zelensky believes his forces will turn the tide and drive Russian troops out of Ukraine. He said, “The society believes that all the territories must be liberated first, and then we can negotiate about what to do and how we could live in the centuries ahead. Our people are convinced we can do it. And the faster we do it, the fewer will die.”
Russia President Vladimir Putin said last week that Ukraine proposed a workable offer in March, but Kiev broke off talks in April. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with Zelensky in Ukraine shortly before negotiations ended. Ukrainska Pravda reported Johnson discouraged Zelensky from making an agreement with Moscow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced last week the Kremlin plans to seize more of Ukraine’s territory because of the Western arms transfers. “Now the geography is different, it’s far from being just the DPR [Donetsk] and LPR [Luhansk], it’s also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” the Russian foreign minister said.
MCViewPoint 