One would have to be cynical indeed—and I am not such—to enjoy the dilemma of Samantha Power, who once advocated U.S. intervention to avert whatever even looked like genocide at the drop of a hat, and who is now, as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, presiding over what looks an awful lot like genocide in Gaza, where two million Palestinians are being treated as collateral damage while Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s armed forces pound the infrastructure of Gaza to pieces, with the clear intent of making that area an uninhabitable ruin for another decade and ensuring the impossibility of a meaningful “two nation” resolution to the status of Palestinians in the Middle East for at least a generation.
Over at New York magazine, Jonathan Guyer has an excellent take on Power’s moral misery, The Price of Power America’s chief humanitarian official rose to fame by speaking out against atrocities. Now she’s trapped by one. As is clear, Power essentially can’t quit, and also can’t “make a difference”, because Biden and his real foreign policy team, of which Power is clearly not one, are never going to make a change with their “all in with Israel” policy in the Middle East, particularly with only about three months left in the administration’s lifetime.
Power, if she leaves now, will change nothing, nothing except her career opportunities for the hypothetical Harris administration, whose reality I would welcome as much as Power, even without the lure of “serious” employment—for why not dream of secretary of state? If you’re going to dream at all, dream big!
But even beyond that, Power knows that if she leaves she will be inevitably be seen as agreeing with those who call Israel’s operations in Gaza “genocide”. And by doing so she would be cutting her own throat with the U.S. foreign policy establishment, aka “the Blob”, and particularly enraging the potent “Israel lobby”—headed, of course, by AIPAC—dooming her chances of playing any significant role anywhere within the reach of “the Blob”, which not only includes the area within the Beltway itself but its many outposts, like the Ivies and the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. I remarked, in my own long take on Samantha’s career, written back 2019 on the occasion of the publication of her memoir, The Education of an Idealist, that in her memoir, and in her previous book, A Problem from Hell, she loved to write about lone, brave individuals who are not afraid to see evil and denounce it for what it is, even if no one wants to listen. She loves to write about such people, but she doesn’t want to be one.
Afterwords
Power finds herself in precisely the same position as all the “Good Republicans” like Nikki Haley who “honestly” wish Donald Trump would drop dead already but support him in public, both out of the hope of somehow rising to a position of influence in a potential Trump administration or, preferably, being able to obtain a “real” position of influence in a post-Trump Republican Party, something they could never achieve if they openly, and honestly, opposed him. Unfortunately for Samantha, AIPAC is never going to drop dead already.
I don’t believe it is true to say that Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to kill every single Palestinian in Gaza. But if they were all suddenly to somehow disappear, thanks perhaps to a deadly disease that somehow only kills Palestinians (without, of course, any involvement on his part), I think he would feel relief rather than remorse. Over at the Washington Post, Josh Rogin describes what he calls Israel’s “calculated strategy that punishes an already impoverished and besieged civilian population.”
