The Quiet Part

 Truthout tells us what we already knew: Former Top Biden Spox Admits Israel Sabotaged Ceasefire Deals as US Blamed Hamas.  This comes two months after a related non-revelatory revelation from the same "spox"--  Matthew Miller--that "without a doubt" Israel committed war crimes throughout the period that at the State Department podium, Miller repeatedly asserted that it had not.  Lying is part of the job according to Miller: “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government.”   And yet, as the articles and interviews make clear, the Biden Administration was behind the scenes fully aware of the truth.  So how were these lies the conclusions of the United States government?  The reality is that Matthew Miller, John Kirby, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other officials and representatives of the government were tasked to lie in keeping with the US's longstanding role as enabler and abettor of Israel's genocide against the Palestinians.  And Miller, Kirby, Blinken et al rose to the task.

From the article:

Miller’s latest statements make it clear that the statements blaming Hamas were a lie. In April of 2024, for instance, Netanyahu announced that Israel would cross Biden’s supposed “red line” and invade Rafah, even as Biden was publicly calling for a ceasefire at the time.

“But in the middle of that proposal being submitted to Hamas, the prime minister publicly said that Israel was going to invade Rafah, whether there was a ceasefire or not,” Miller said. “You can imagine how much harder that made it to get a deal over the line.”

Then, he said that U.S. officials would even try to outmaneuver Israel when announcing Biden’s ceasefire outline in May — only for Netanyahu’s office to “leak” to the press that the plan was not what Israel had agreed to.

“We told the government of Israel only an hour or two before the speech because, frankly, we spent the last few months seeing the government of Israel, at times, try and sabotage an approach to get to a ceasefire, and we were determined not to let that happen here,” he said. “It is consistent with the pattern we saw for many months.”

Later in the program, Miller recalled statements from Netanyahu at a war cabinet meeting toward the beginning of the genocide, saying that he wanted to continue fighting in Gaza for decades.

Blinken told Netanyahu that Israel was “‘making it impossible to realize the dream that the state of Israel has had since its founding. You’re going to be bogged down here fighting this war for years and decades to come,’” Miller recounted. “And the prime minister said, ‘You’re right. We are going to be fighting this war for decades to come. That’s the way it’s been. That’s the way it’s going to be.’”

If it were serious about the ceasefire, the Biden Administration could have exposed Netanyahu's duplicity in order to shine a light on the intransigence of America's partner in the Middle East and shame Israel into doing the right thing.  Instead it chose to signal its commitment to not hindering Israel's goals.  Learning to what extent this is due to ideological commitments to the Zionist project and to what extent due to more venal motivations of the ruling class may perhaps need to wait for a future casual truth bomb that Miller, ex-spox, feels free to drop.