US To Maintain Ties With Hamas-Backed Gov’t: ‘Because Jews Are Expendable’

Washington, DC, June 14 – Officials at the State Department restated their intention to recognize and maintain dealings with the Palestinian unity government despite the kidnapping yesterday morning of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinians, explaining that by nature, the lives of Israelis carry less weight than those of other nationalities.

Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters today that at this early stage of its existence the Palestinian government could not be expected to exert total control over its constituent elements, which include Hamas, an organization the US itself designates as a terrorist group. Moreover, she declared, the threats to Israelis are an unfortunate consequence of the unity deal, which does not call for Hamas to cease its efforts to harm them, but a tolerable one, since the diplomatic niceties of relations with that government trump such petty concerns as whether or not Jews are safe in their own land.

A potentially complicating factor has been that one of the sixteen-year-olds taken hostage also holds American citizenship, but Secretary of State John Kerry dismissed any difficulties this morning by pointing out that after Israelis, US citizens are next on the list to be sacrificed for the Obama administration’s vision for the Middle East. “Why should soldiers be the only ones whose lives the government risks in its pursuit of policy?” he asked. “Especially if we’re talking about Jews.”

Earlier this week Hamas launched rockets into southern Israel. In an interview, Ms. Psaki had assured a reporter that the US would constantly monitor its policy toward the nascent unity government, implying that a certain level of harm to Israelis was acceptable, provided Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made all the right noises about condemnation of such attacks. There was no explicit expectation, said Psaki, that Abbas would actually rein in or punish the perpetrators, as such a demand would imply that Jewish lives actually have value, a position the administration has been careful not to adopt because it might complicate relations with the Palestinians.

Psaki explained there was nothing new in the rationale, as it dates back to the days of the Second World War. At the time, despite the availability of resources and the comparatively small demand on those resources, allied bombers were never sent to bomb the railways to the major extermination camps in Poland, let alone the camps themselves. The Allied leaders believed it was more important to conduct bombing raids of dubious impact on German manufacturing, at higher risk to pilots and aircraft, than to compromise the Third Reich’s ability to gas thousands of Jews daily at Auschwitz-Birkenau.