" #Biden can pick up the phone and end the bombing of Gaza today" - Superb opinion piece, must read, on the #US ability to end the #genocide in #Gaza by #Israel, by Mehdi Hassan in today's #Guardian. (I have the greatest respect for him, moreso since he was fired by #MSNBC for being too good and honest a commentator and reporter). As Mehdi points out, #Reagan (of all people!) did exactly this when Israel was going to destroy #Lebanon in 1982. Reagan picked up the phone and the #Israeli bombing stopped 20 minutes later.
"Picture the scene. An Israeli prime minister launches airstrikes on an #Arab population. Civilians are killed in their thousands. An #American president, stunned and shocked by the scenes of carnage on his TV screen, makes a call to his Israeli counterpart. And … within minutes … the bombing is over.
Sound crazy? Or maybe simplistic? Perhaps naive, even?
Yet, the year was 1982. What was supposed to have been a limited incursion into southern Lebanon by the Israeli military over the summer, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, then defense minister (remember him?), morphed into a months-long siege of Beirut and an all-out assault on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Between June and August, the Israelis cut off food, water and power to the Lebanese capital in a brutal attempt to destroy the PLO, whose fighters were holed up inside a tunnel network below Beirut. (Sound familiar?)
On 12 August, in what would later be dubbed “Black Thursday”, Israeli jets bombed Beirut for 11 consecutive hours, killing more than 100 people. That same day, a horrified Ronald Reagan placed a phone call to Menachem Begin, then Israeli prime minister, to “express his outrage” and condemn the “needless destruction and bloodshed”.
“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan told Begin.
Yes, an American leader used the H-word in conversation with an Israeli leader. Begin responded with sarcasm, telling the US president that “I think I know what a holocaust is.” Reagan, however, didn’t budge, insisting on the “imperative” for a ceasefire in Beirut.
Twenty minutes. That’s all the time it took for Begin to call back and tell the president he had ordered Sharon to stop the bombing. It was over. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” a surprised Reagan told an aide, upon putting down the phone."
