U.S.-Israel Ties Mask Gaza Genocide, Critics Say

UN staff and medical workers evacuating patients from a hospital in northern Gaza in late May 2025.

Whatever the outcomes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday or the latest efforts for a Gaza ceasefire, a shared policy of destruction appears to have united the Israeli and U.S. governments in what many describe as a cruel and calculated campaign.

That alliance and its devastating consequences for the Palestinian people continue to either shock Americans or normalize indifference toward atrocities on a massive scale.

Recent news of former President Donald Trump pushing for a Gaza ceasefire echoes previous claims of peace-seeking by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Yet, their rhetoric remains out of step with the ongoing killing — carried out not only with American-supplied arms but also through Israel’s tight restrictions on humanitarian aid, including food and medicine.

At the start of 2024, a United Nations report stated that Gazans made up 80% of all people globally facing famine or catastrophic hunger, calling it an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Experts quoted in the report said, “Currently, every single person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population is starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent.”

In February 2024, President Joe Biden, while holding an ice cream cone during a photo op in Manhattan, told reporters, “We’re close, we’re not done yet,” in reference to a possible ceasefire — even as the UN warned that almost no aid had entered besieged Gaza that month.

Over the following months, official rhetoric from U.S. leaders has increasingly resembled Orwellian doublespeak. Words like “peace,” “security,” and “restraint” are used while genocide unfolds in real time.

The refusal to acknowledge U.S. complicity — and Israel’s impunity — is maintained through strategic avoidance and silence. This makes a terrible truth invisible rather than acknowledged.

According to the International Genocide Convention, genocide includes “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including actions like “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” Experts argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza clearly meet this definition — a view supported by detailed reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Yet under the banners of the Israeli and American flags, official narratives insist the unconscionable should remain unseen.

Even liberal Zionist organizations in the U.S. play a role in this narrative. In an earlier article for The Nation, Norman Solomon analysed statements from J Street, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group.

“While routinely calling for the release of Israeli hostages, J Street also expressed concern for Palestinian civilian casualties. However, none of its 132 news releases between October 7 and the temporary ceasefire in January 2025 called for halting U.S. weapons shipments — even as those weapons were actively enabling starvation and bombing campaigns,” he wrote.

Instead, J Street consistently rejected the genocide allegation. Following oral arguments at the International Court of Justice in January 2024 — in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention — J Street issued a release: “J Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.”

Even when the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah on May 24, J Street maintained: “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case.”

Similarly, U.S. mainstream media and members of Congress have largely evaded using the term genocide to describe the situation in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the events in Gaza — and the evasion of responsibility in Washington — have proven deeply eye-opening, especially for young Americans. Many now understand more about their government and its global role than they did just two years ago.

What has come to light is the use of mass killing as de facto policy and ideology — a stark reality hidden in plain sight.