US foreign policy ghoul happy with Trump’s new Israel team (Yes, I’m talking about Elliot Abrams)

The Menachem Begin Heritage Center has just published this podcast featuring an interview with Elliot Abrams, a member in good standing of the foreign policy establishment and one of the most ghoulish figures in the history of American foreign policy. (1)

Why does he enjoy that distinction? Charlie Pierce explains in his signature style how Abrams earned that title during the Reagan Administration:

Abrams fronted for murderous regimes up and down Central America. At the time, our old friend, Roberto D'Aubuisson, the [El Salvador] death squad jefe, was being feted as a celebrity by the American conservative movement. (Later, he would be invited to a private dinner with the D.C. conservative power elite not long after he reportedly tried to kill a U.S. ambassador with a car bomb. One of the sponsors of the dinner was...wait for it...the National Pro-Life PAC.) Abrams and D'Aubuisson were a match made several degrees south of heaven.

From there, Abrams kept popping up every time there was a Republican administration in need of a proven public liar willing to support the death squads du jour. He fronted for Efrain Rios Montt, the genocidal leader of Guatemala. ...

At roughly the same time, Abrams got in up to his eyeballs in the Central American half of the Iran Contra scandal. This required his special skills. In 1986, he appeared before a congressional inquiry and, of course, he dealt in his own special kind of non-fact. He did it so well that Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating this fiasco, was prepared to indict him for several felonies. Abrams copped a plea and the charges were reduced to misdemeanors. Then, in December of 1992, in an obvious attempt to cover his own...er..involvement, President George H. W. Bush pardoned everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out of town. This included Elliot Abrams, who, ever since, has been gum on the shoe of American foreign policy. [my emphasis] (2)

Under President Joe Biden, Abrams served as the State Department Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela.

This guy, the death squad enabler in some of the most infamous US meddling in Latin America – and that’s saying a lot – thinks Donald Trump’s announced Israel policy team is awesome. In this interview, he refers at least twice to the occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the term the Zionist settler movement uses to refer to the area. That is part of the Eretz Israel, Greater Israel aka, from the river to the sea - which Netanyahu’s governing coalition has endorsed as its goal.

As a Haaretz editorial described it in 2023:

Israel has been carrying out de facto annexation in the West Bank for many years, with Israeli civilian authorities dictating the policy of the Civil Administration. All previous Israeli governments, however, have been cautious about interfering with the formal governing structure in the occupied West Bank and have been careful to keep the occupation as a military government.

The concentration of powers in an occupying military force, temporarily until an agreed solution is reached on the status of the occupied territory, is a principle of international law – an expression of the important prohibition against obtaining sovereignty that was introduced in the wake of World War II. The prohibition against annexing occupied territory is one of the foundations of the new world order that was built on the ruins of the world wars, and its goal is to eliminate one of the incentives for going to war. [my emphasis] (3)

In an article earlier this year, Abrams sneered at the idea of a “two-state solution.” This is now clearly an unrealistic option. But it still is the official negotiating position of the US and other Western countries, as Abrams knows very well. In fact, the practical choice is between an apartheid state “from the river to the sea” with Jewish citizens and disenfranchised Palestinians., or a one-state solution in which the current Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza become a secular and democratic state. This is a version of what has really always been the Israeli position: no Palestinian state and no place for the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Ever. (4)

How helpful Abrams has been as a Biden official is illustrated by this fact:

Just weeks before the [October 7, 2023] attack [on Israel by Hamas from Gaza], Elliott Abrams, a longtime U.S. operative who is now a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, exemplified this kind of intelligence failure when he advised a congressional committee that Hamas was focusing its operations in the West Bank, not Gaza.

Hamas “wants to restrain attacks from Gaza,” Abrams told Congress. This is because “it wants to avoid Israeli strikes on Gaza, where it is governing. It wants a level of calm there. It wants the border crossings open.”

Despite these analytical errors, U.S. officials have maintained accurate intelligence on Gaza. Since the May 2021 war, the highest-level U.S. officials have understood that the cycle of violence would likely recur unless conditions in Gaza improved. (5)

Heckuva job, Elliott, heckuva job!

Notes:

(1) What Trump’s return will mean for Israel - Elliott Abrams. Begin Center YouTube channel 12/04/2024. <https://youtu.be/TKxYGxdZrRw?si=eUmz6VhHNXSHsw3W> (Accessed: 2024-07-12).

(2) Pierce, Charles (2023): Congratulations to Elliott Abrams, Hype Man for Murderous Regimes Past, On His New Job. Esquire 07/05/2023. <https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a44444388/elliott-abrams-biden-appointment/> (Accessed: 2024-07-12).

(3) Israel's Cabinet Just Advanced Full-fledged Apartheid in the West Bank. Haaretz 02/26/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2023-02-26/ty-article/.premium/israels-cabinet-just-advanced-full-fledged-apartheid-in-the-west-bank/00000186-8a7e-d525-a9ef-9efe63060000> (Accessed: 2024-07-12). Note: This was seven months before the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.

(4) Abrams, Elliott (2024): The Two-State Delusion. Tablet 02/01/2024. <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/two-state-delusion> (Accessed: 2024-07-12).

(5) Hunt, Edward (2023): The Real U.S. Intelligence Failure in Gaza. Foreign Policy in Focus 10/12/2023. <https://fpif.org/the-real-u-s-intelligence-failure-in-gaza/> (Accessed: 2024-07-12).