[I’m a historian of US foreign policy. The Biden
administration’s effort to muddy the waters about the staggering
human toll of Israel’s assault on Gaza is in keeping with
Washington’s long history of atrocity denialism on behalf of
allies.]
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JOE BIDEN IS ENGAGING IN ATROCITY DENIALISM FOR ISRAEL. IT HAS A LONG
HISTORY.  
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Bradley Simpson
October 28, 2023
Jacobin
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_ I’m a historian of US foreign policy. The Biden
administration’s effort to muddy the waters about the staggering
human toll of Israel’s assault on Gaza is in keeping with
Washington’s long history of atrocity denialism on behalf of allies.
_

US president Joe Biden (L) and Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu (R) in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2023, amid Israel's assault
on Gaza., Miriam Alster / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)

 

I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how
many people are killed. . . . I’m sure innocents have been killed,
and it’s the price of waging a war . . . but I have no confidence in
the number that the Palestinians are using.” This was President Joe
Biden’s response on October 26 to a reporter’s question about the
death toll from Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Gaza.

As I write, Israel has seemingly cut communication networks in Gaza
and unleashed its fiercest bombardment of the strip yet, following
twenty days of bombing and shelling that have already killed
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more than 7,700 Palestinians, including at least 3,000 children,
wounded some 20,000, and damaged or destroyed over a third of the
buildings in Gaza. The Biden administration has sought to portray
itself as both staunchly supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu’s military
assault on Gaza, the ostensible aim of which is to eliminate Hamas,
and concerned with the humanitarian impact on Palestinian civilians.
At the same time, the United States has repeatedly vetoed United
Nations (UN) resolutions calling for a humanitarian pause in the war
and flatly rejected the growing global demands for a cease-fire.

The Biden administration’s repeated questioning of Palestinian
casualty figures prompted the Gaza Health Ministry to release a
comprehensive list of those killed by Israeli bombing and shelling. It
makes for grim reading. But Biden’s attempt to sow doubt
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about the human toll of Israel’s assault is in keeping with a broad
US pattern, stretching back decades, of rejecting allegations of mass
murder by client states and allies, and of disputing casualty numbers
cited by journalists, activists, and international organizations.

I wrote my first book [[link removed]] on US
relations with Indonesia in the 1960s, and in particular the Lyndon
Johnson administration’s support for the campaign of mass murder
carried out by the Indonesian armed forces in late 1965 and early
1966, when it overthrew Indonesian president Sukarno. Scholars
estimate that the army and its allies slaughtered half a million
Indonesian civilians between October 1965 and March 1966. Even as they
provided crucial military and economic backing to Indonesia’s armed
forces, Johnson administration officials privately recommended
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“the desirability of downplaying the extent of the carnage . . .
especially when questioned by the press.”  The Johnson
administration likewise rejected casualty figures of hundreds of
thousands in Nigeria’s US-backed war against the Biafran
secessionist movement between 1967 and 1970, while emphasizing its
support for humanitarian access to the besieged state of Eastern
Nigeria.

Washington’s commitment to dismissing allegations of mass murder and
atrocities carried out by its diplomatic friends was bipartisan and
enduring. When Pakistan launched a war in 1971 to prevent the
secession of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, killing hundreds of
thousands, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger stood by the Pakistani military and sought to suppress or
discredit reporting on the horrific civilian toll, leading to a
low-level revolt by US embassy officials in Pakistan. Following the
US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and again
following a US-backed military coup in Argentina in 1976, Nixon and
later Gerald Ford administration officials publicly denied
contemporary press, church, and human rights accounts of tens of
thousands arrested, murdered, and tortured, accusing regime opponents
of being pro-communist.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations likewise scoffed at
press and human rights reports of mass murder when Indonesia invaded
the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in December 1975, with the
blessing of the United States, killing between fifty and one hundred
thousand people over the next twelve months. Former Australian consul
James Dunn, testifying before Congress in early 1977, said the
Indonesian killings “might well constitute . . . the most serious
case of contravention of human rights facing the world at this
time.” US officials in Jimmy Carter’s administration, which was
preparing to double military aid to Indonesia, publicly denounced
Dunn’s estimates
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“greatly exaggerated” and claimed only a few thousand people had
perished in Timor, “most of whom would have been fighting men on
both sides.”

One of the most infamous instances of US atrocity denial took place in
December 1981 during El Salvador’s civil war, when the US-trained
Atlacatl special forces battalion massacred more than nine hundred
people in the village of El Mozote. The Ronald Reagan administration,
which was providing millions of dollars to arm and train Salvadoran
military units, initially rejected allegations of the massacre
altogether, before shifting to blaming any killings on left-wing
guerrillas. When journalists visited El Mozote
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confirmed that the Atlacatl battalion had indeed carried out a
massacre, US officials, led by then Assistant Secretary of State for
Human Rights Elliott Abrams, publicly denied mass casualty figures as
FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) propaganda, a
position he maintains to this day. (Abrams was recently nominated by
Biden to serve on the United States Advisory Commission on Public
Diplomacy.) When US-backed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein launched a
genocidal assault on Iraqi Kurds in 1988, deploying poison gas and
killing thousands, Reagan administration officials again denied
reports, blamed the use of poison gas on Iran, or downplayed their
significance.

We can find many similar examples over the last thirty years. Most
recently, the Donald Trump (and now Biden) administration muddied the
water about the scope and scale of US-assisted Saudi atrocities and
killings in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has slaughtered more than one
hundred thousand civilians, and suppressed internal warnings
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that US officials might be guilty of war crimes for continuing to sell
weapons to Saudi Arabia.

In the US’s long campaign of carrying water for brutal allies and
repressive client states, Israel has been a particular beneficiary.
Bill Clinton’s administration obliged in 1996 when Israel bombed a
UN compound in Qana in southern Lebanon and killed 106 people. It
rubber-stamped Israeli denials of responsibility and attempts to blame
Hezbollah guerrillas, though later evidence confirmed
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Israeli Defense Force (IDF) culpability. Ten years later, in 2006,
Israel shelled Qana again, killing fifty-four in a single strike.
Again, the IDF blamed Hezbollah, with support from Barack Obama’s
administration, and again it emerged Israel had deliberately targeted
civilians in what Human Rights Watch
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later called a war crime.

The Biden administration’s determination to downplay the extent of
Israeli killings of civilians in Gaza, to amplify Israeli military
propaganda, and to deny the credibility of Palestinian casualty
figures should be seen in this light. As Israel’s relentless war
continues — despite growing protests and significant public support
in the United States for a cease-fire — we should not expect White
House spokespeople
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or Biden himself to acknowledge the chilling number of Palestinian
deaths as confirmed by journalists, human rights organizations, and
others. We should instead expect the US government — as it has been
doing for years, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike
— to minimize the massacres carried out by a close ally like Israel
and use its diplomatic and media influence to this end.

As the atrocities pile up, the atrocity denialism will almost
certainly deepen.

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Bradley Simpson is a historian at the University of Connecticut.

* US Foreign Policy
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