Israel’s Attacks on Gaza Are Not “Mistakes.” They’re Crimes.

There could hardly be a clearer war crime than Israel’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers earlier this month. The strike was deliberate, in line with Israel’s demonstrated pattern of targeting aid workers, journalists, and doctors. The victims’ cars were marked with the World Central Kitchen logo, and the charity was communicating their position directly with the Israeli military. The IDF bombed three vehicles in succession, the second carrying survivors from the first, and the third carrying survivors from the second.

Yet, in the wake of the attack, the US media and political class scrambled to frame Israel’s patently deliberate strike as a horrible mishap. The New York Times described a “botched operation” replete with “lethal mistakes and misjudgments.” Another Times headline referred to a “cascade of errors” by Israel. According to CNN, President Biden was “furious” about the “tragedy,” which he described as a “failure” of the Israeli military.

This pattern—first, an Israeli war crime, then a flood of stories describing American “outrage” at the “tragic” Israeli “error,” hammered home by a sternly worded message from Biden—is part of a time-honored rhetorical device that transforms every bloody action by America or its allies into a heartbreaking blunder made by well-meaning people.

In this surrealist version of events, Israel’s war is just and necessary, but, hijacked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his mistake-prone gang of hard-liners, it has gone awry. Case in point: In a widely discussed speech, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer blamed “extremists” in Israel’s government for the country’s failure to live up to its “values,” lamenting, “Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear. We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.”

Schumer’s comments were echoed by Senator Bernie Sanders, who castigated Netanyahu for turning Israel into a “religious fundamentalist country.”

Last weekend, the Times’ editorial board laid out this argument quite nakedly. The board portrayed Netanyahu and his “ultranationalist allies” as rogue extremists—while casting Biden as a weary, benevolent peacemaker, whose calls for “restraint and humanitarian help” have gone unheeded.

What this narrative obscures is that Netanyahu is not an aberration. Nor are Israel’s crimes errors. Nor do they contradict its supposed values. On the contrary, they embody the values of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza—just as past US interventions have embodied this country’s imperial aims.

The US has found it increasingly difficult to claim leadership of the “rules-based international order” as Israel flouts international law and openly undermines the United Nations. Even high-ranking State Department officials acknowledge that the war is creating a “major credibility problem.”

With each image of a Palestinian corpse mangled by tanks, each mass execution in the courtyard of a hospital, each emaciated child who starves to death, and each American ambassador who smugly vetoes a UN cease-fire resolution, the hypocrisy deepens.

But the contradictions of the US-led world order do not guarantee its collapse. As the ever-prescient cultural theorist Stuart Hall taught us, “every crisis is also a moment of reconstruction.” And the US has certainly proved capable of reconstructing and fortifying its legitimacy in the past. Situated historically, it becomes clear that the tepid position being served up by Biden, Schumer, and the Times is yet another attempt at this kind of ideological reconstruction.

In the opening to Ken Burns’s widely acclaimed docuseries The Vietnam War, a disembodied voice narrates over a wistful folk song and dusty images of American soldiers: “[The war] was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and cold war miscalculation.”

This version of the war as a regrettable “good-faith” error is not limited to historical retrospectives. It was being created in real time, by some of the most influential journalists and political operatives of the day.

Walter Cronkite peddled the tale of a valiant cause that lost its way in his famous 1968 broadcast that is thought to have turned the tide of public opinion against the war. The war was now a stalemate, he told his audience, but the Americans were “an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Former defense secretary Robert McNamara, one of the war’s chief architects, shared parallel reflections in his 1995 memoir: “[We] acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.”

The apotheosis of this narrative might come from George Ball, a former under-secretary of state for both Kennedy and Johnson, famous for his internal opposition to escalating the conflict. In 1973, he wrote a reflection called “The Lessons of Vietnam”:

[The war was] a defeat not because our initial purposes were unworthy but because—in frustration and false pride and our innocence of the art of extrication—we were forced to the employment of excessively brutal means to achieve an equivocal objective against a poor, small, backward country.

Ball also called the war a “mistake,” a “misjudgment,” a “misadventure,” a “misappraisal,” and a “misassessment.”

Does any of this sound familiar?

Rather than a bastardization of American principles, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as a logical outgrowth of American principles—primarily, the violent pursuit of Cold War hegemony.

Similarly, the Iraq War is proof positive that the US will lie, kill, and torture to achieve its self-interested goals. But it, too, has been historicized as a tragic blunder rather than a damning indictment of US empire. The fact that six successive presidents have bombed Iraq does nothing to puncture this facade. (To this point, Times columnist David French recently wrote a column titled “Israel is making the same mistake America made in Iraq.”)

As in Vietnam and Gaza today, the “mistakes” discourse kicked off while the war was still raging. In early 2004, as it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, columnist and Iraq war supporter Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic:

Had I known then what I know now, I would have opposed it. Next question: Does that mean the war itself was a mistake? Yes. But it was a special kind of mistake: a justified mistake.

A policeman shoots a robber who has killed in the past and who brandishes what seems to be a gun. The gun turns out to be a cellphone. The policeman expects a thorough investigation (and ought to cooperate). In the end, if he is exonerated, it is not because he made no mistake but because his mistake was justified. Reasonable people, facing uncertainty, would have thought they saw a gun.