How the US could stop Israel’s war

Sam Hawley: Five months since the war in Gaza began, the death toll has climbed above 30,000, according to Gaza health authorities, with about a third of them children. Today, Global Affairs Editor John Lyons takes us to the Middle East as part of a special Four Corners investigation into Israel’s approach to the war and the role its ally, the United States, is playing. I’m Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.John, you’ve been covering the war for five months and you’ve really, in your investigation for Four Corners, turned the focus back on Israel and the United States. Just tell me about that.

John Lyons: Well, Sam, what we wanted to do was turn the cameras almost literally from Gaza, where obviously we need to keep following the news every day, it’s a catastrophic war, but turn the cameras around to speak to key people inside Israel’s defence, intelligence, political circles, to actually challenge them about the conduct of the war. Could the war be conducted differently? Why are so many civilians being killed? And there’s a moment where I’m interviewing Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister and one of Israel’s most decorated soldiers, and I say to him, why does the most powerful military in the Middle East need to be or is killing so many children?

Ehud Barak, fmr Israeli Prime Minister: I don’t think that anyone made a deliberate decision to kill children.

John Lyons: I’m not saying it was a deliberate decision. I’m asking why did the most powerful army kill so many children?

Ehud Barak, fmr Israeli Prime Minister: No, I want to describe it in a different way. So Israel called upon the population to leave the area for some two or three weeks repeatedly.

John Lyons: And we interview nine key people and four or five defend Israel and the way it’s conducting the war, and four contest it and say that it’s just not acceptable.

Sam Hawley: And what I really want to do with you in this discussion is unpack this relationship between Israel and the United States. But I do think we should start in Gaza because as you mentioned, the situation on the ground is just incredibly dire. So concerning that the US has been dropping aid from aeroplanes into Gaza.

John Lyons: That’s right. And I think that image summarises the firstly the rift between the US and Israel over this war. But secondly, the catastrophic situation. We’ve been getting reports there of children burying children because there are according to UNICEF now 19,000 orphans and they are the children having to bury the children. Sometimes at hospitals, hospital workers have said that they’ll see a two or three year old child just walking around by itself. And there’s quite a chance that that child’s parents have been killed. So these lost children sort of scavenging around, sort of looking for food and protection. And Red Cross workers say that the situation in Gaza is so horrible and so horrific in the hospitals, they won’t even describe it verbally.

Sam Hawley: And as you said, you spoke to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and asked him directly about the children being killed in Gaza. But he said Israel never set out to kill children, but it had to respond to the horrendous terrorist attack on October the 7th last year.

John Lyons: That’s right. It’s worth us remembering what triggered this particular war was on October 7, as many as 2,000 or 3,000 Hamas. They weren’t all Hamas, but as many as 3,000 people, largely Hamas, broke through the border into southern Israel and over the next 12 or 15 hours committed unspeakable atrocities, killing, maiming, torturing, kidnapping, taking hostages. Now, it’s important to understand, I think, for a good discussion on this subject, that really Israel had to respond. Australia would respond to somebody coming and killing 1,200 of our people and taking, kidnapping 240 others and taking them as hostages. I don’t think anybody disputes the right of Israel, a, to protect itself and fortify its borders, and b, to defend itself and try to make sure this doesn’t happen again. But when I asked people like Ehud Barak and others about why so many children are being killed, they are saying that Hamas deliberately to try to protect itself from such a powerful army as Israel will set itself up near schools, near hospitals, et cetera. And there is a truth to the human shield argument, but then the next part of that discussion is, is there any other way that Israel could have done this without such a horrendous civilian casualty?

Sam Hawley: Right, and that’s a sort of question you also put to Ami Ayalon, who’s a former Israel security chief.

John Lyons: Why does the most powerful military in the Middle East, Israel, backed by the most powerful military the world’s ever seen, the United States, need to kill so many children?

Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet: We don’t need to.

John Lyons: But you are.

Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet: There was no war like this ever fought. When we fight Hamas, it is the most populated battlefield ever fought.

Sam Hawley: John, others you spoke to, including Amira Hass, who’s an Israeli journalist, really disagree with that and they argue that what is happening in Gaza is genocide.

Amira Hass, Israeli journalist: This genocidal war is still going on in Gaza and against Gaza. My first thing that I say is there must be a ceasefire.

John Lyons: That word genocide, obviously, with the International Court of Justice and so forth, it’s become a very legalistic word. And the ICJ has made a ruling initially that it’s plausible that the allegation needs to be investigated, etc. Amira Hass, one of the top journalists in Israel who lives in the West Bank, in the Palestinian territories, her argument is whatever are the legalistic definitions, the devastation, the carnage, the destruction is so major that she believes that the word genocide is appropriate.

John Lyons: Why do you use the word genocidal?

Amira Hass, Israeli journalist: Because the enormity of the killing, the enormity of the wounded, the enormity of the destruction, the enormity of the fear that each person, including so many of my friends, pass every moment of their life now for almost five months, the enormity of it is genocidal.

John Lyons: Obviously, Israel strongly rejects that. Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, just absolutely rules that out and says we are not deliberately targeting Palestinians, we are targeting Hamas.

Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet: Genocide starts with something very, very clear. The intention to kill a race or a people. We do not have this intention. That’s it. We are facing a major threat and we are fighting against a threat. We are doing many mistakes, but it is far from being genocide or far from being a genocide intent. That’s it.

Sam Hawley: John, I want to move now to look at the role of the United States in this war and its standing in the Middle East. Since 1946, the US has provided an extraordinary amount of military aid to Israel, something like $260 billion in military aid to Israel, hasn’t it?

John Lyons: That’s right. It’s Israel’s strongest supporter in every sense, militarily, politically. The bombs being dropped on Gaza at the moment are American bombs. Israel’s essentially ran out of its stockpile of bombs fairly early in the war. And there’s been a huge number. According to the Wall Street Journal, between October 7 and December 15, which is only about a third of the war, Israel dropped 29,000 bombs on Gaza. I’ve done the numbers on that. That’s about 79 bombs per square kilometre. A square kilometre is a shopping centre these days, a shopping mall in Australia. So you can imagine 79 bombs dropped on that. The fascinating thing about the relationship between the US and the US and Israel is that Joe Biden has said that Israel’s bombing of Gaza is indiscriminate, which is, when you think it through, it’s a strong thing to say that a country is indiscriminately bombing such a densely populated area. The United States has been trying to, for months, always pressuring Israel to try to reduce the number of civilian deaths and to dramatically increase the amount of humanitarian aid going in there. Israel has not listened.

Sam Hawley: And it has been noted, John, as Israel was dropping American-made bombs on Gaza, America’s military was dropping aid from the air.

John Lyons: Well, yes, what an extraordinary juxtaposition that is.

Sam Hawley: And, John, we know, as we’ve mentioned, that President Biden is a staunch supporter, of course, of Israel, but his language has been changing, hasn’t it?

Joe Biden, US President: Israel also has a fundamental responsibility, though, to protect innocent civilians in Gaza. This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined.

John Lyons: That’s for two reasons, I think. The American public is seeing the pictures that the Israeli public are not, the ones of the dead and the wounded Palestinian children and women. And so I think the American public is becoming increasingly horrified by that. And I think Joe Biden feels that America is now somehow complicit in all of this killing of civilians. But secondly, politically, there’s three or four states in the US where the Democrats are in real trouble over this issue. And so I think that Joe Biden is now feeling it quite acutely. However, within Israel, their view is, we’re pushing back. So Netanyahu in particular has always had that view that, yes, it’s good to be friends with America, but we will make our own decisions.

Sam Hawley: John, the United States, as we’ve been talking about, is providing the bombs to Israel to conduct the war in Gaza. But the world is increasingly shocked about the humanitarian catastrophe that’s unfolding on the ground there. So I guess the simple question is, could the United States end this war now, today?

John Lyons: The United States could end it tomorrow by cutting off the tap, by cutting off the supply of bombs. The Americans could just decide, Joe Biden could just say, enough is enough, that’s it. And it would be fascinating politically what that would mean with that American Arab vote. US presidents in the past, some of them have been much tougher on Israel. But Joe Biden is a lifelong supporter, once said that if Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. He sees Israel as crucial for America’s strategic interests in the Middle East. He also believes that the Jewish people should have a secure and strong homeland, and that is Israel. So he’s a very strong defender of Israel. But the United States could end the war tomorrow.

Sam Hawley: And tell me, John, from all the interviews that you’ve conducted, did you get a sense at all about how much longer this war would last?

John Lyons: Well, Avi Dichter, who’s part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, who we’ve interviewed for the Four Corners program, I ask him how long does he think the war will go, and he says that, you know, it could be another year or two. As I say in the Four Corners program, people often say that this conflict is impossibly complicated, and it is, and it’s got harder since October 7. But having lived there for six years in Jerusalem and done a lot of stories on it and talked to a lot of Israelis and Palestinians, it boils down to the fact that Israelis want to be secure in their borders of Israel. They want security, and the Palestinians want an independent state. So if the Israelis were prepared to end their occupation of the Palestinian territories, and the Palestinians were prepared to completely sideline groups like Hamas and agree to the security of Israel, I think there is a possible solution.

Sam Hawley: John Lyons is the ABC’s global affairs editor. You can see his Four Corners report on ABC TV tonight at 8.30. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald and Nell Whitehead. Audio production by Sam Dunn and Anna John. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.