The White House routinely makes mutually exclusive statements about its desire to “end the war,” while saying Hamas could “have no role in postwar Gaza.” Yet no mainstream reporter, editor, or opinion writer bothers to reconcile this contradiction. This calculated vagueness is central to why Israel is permitted to continue bombing and killing at will for an indefinite amount of time. How can US officials simultaneously push for an “immediate, lasting ceasefire” while, at the same time, saying the other warring party must be completely defeated before they can support a lasting ceasefire?

This isn’t a call for a ceasefire—it’s a call for, in Netanyahu’s phrasing, “total victory.” The pairing of these two mutually exclusive phrases can only mean one thing: In common usage from the White House and its friendly media, “pushing for a ceasefire” means “continuing to bomb and besiege Gaza while reiterating terms of surrender.”

One linguistic trick that permitted this contradiction to go unchallenged is the sleight-of-hand in what the White House means by “ceasefire.” In some contexts, it means the term as it has been used by the Israelis, namely by Netanyahu: a temporary pause in fighting to facilitate hostage exchanges, followed by a continuation of the military campaign whose goal, ostensibly, is to “eliminate Hamas.” But this is explicitly not an effort to “end the war” as Netanyahu made clear repeatedly throughout the conflict.

The White House’s demand to “end the war,” increasingly popular since the summer of 2024, is just a reiteration of surrender terms. The State Department banned its staff from even using the word “ceasefire” for the first few months of the conflict. But in late February 2024, on the eve of a Michigan primary that was embarrassing then-candidate Biden, the White House, as we noted in The Nation at the time, pivoted to embracing the term. But the Biden administration changed its definition to mean (1) hostage negotiations, but with a firm commitment to continue the “war” once Israeli hostages were freed, and (2) a reiteration of surrender demands, sometimes using both definitions simultaneously.

The concepts of “ceasefire” and “push to the end the war” became, like the “peace process,” a ill-defined, open-ended process for process’s sake that US officials could point to in order to frame themselves not as participants in an brutal, largely one-sided siege and bombing campaign but a third party desperately trying—but perpetually failing—to achieve “peace.”

How the US Media Helped the Biden Administration Distance Itself From the Horrors of Gaza | White House–curated stories of performative outrage and feigned helplessness provided cover for an administration arming death on an industrial scale.

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza

Absolutely wild the apologia for Democrats doing genocide you guys will do to avoid holding Democratic politicians and campaigners to account for their own decisions on policy and how they campaign.