Maeve Higgins: The US deploys Samantha Power as its Israel-backing 'face of concern'
The action Samantha Power takes every day does not stop the killing in Gaza, it hastens it, says Maeve Higgins. Picture: Alex Wong/Getty
With these dual roles, she provides material support and diplomatic cover for Israel’s mass killing of the besieged Palestinians in Gaza.
It is notable that a person raised in Ireland, a country that recognises Palestine and shares a history of colonial oppression, apartheid, and forced starvation with the people there, should support Israel’s genocidal project now.
The Irish flag is prominent in Power’s social media profiles, signalling a connection to this place that has long been valuable for politicians in the US. Power is fond of quoting Irish poetry, but only the gentle stuff — not Pádraig Pearse, never Bobby Sands.
Like President Biden, she often refers to the Irish Famine but is careful to omit the murderous intent of imperialism behind it, lest the parallels of today become too clear.
There are other parts of Power’s public identity that force deeper questions about her purpose. The contradiction of sending aid through USAid to people being attacked with munitions you have provided through the NSC is unresolvable, but Power makes it work.
Then there is her previous work as a journalist and human rights advocate.
Her 2003 book, , won awards for its account of America’s inaction during genocides around the globe.
Her 2019 book, , covered her time as an Obama adviser and the US representative to the UN. She casts herself as a rebel with a strong moral core, struggling to change things from the inside.
Because of this, many Americans, including USAid staffers, have accused her of hypocrisy during this genocide. But Power is no hypocrite; she is not watching a genocide unfold from the sidelines like she accused her predecessors of doing. Power is living her interventionist truth and getting stuck in — helping Israel in every way she can.
Harrison Mann, a US army major and intelligence analyst who recently resigned over US policies in Gaza, puts it like this: “The problem was not lack of information within the bureaucracy or lack of understanding about what was happening in Gaza or what the consequences of Israeli operations there would be.
The action Power takes every day does not stop the killing; it hastens it.
Israel could not do what it does without support from top officials in the Biden administration. In the past eight months, America sent Israel billions of dollars’ worth of munitions that have helped kill almost 40,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Thousands of people remain missing under the rubble of Gaza’s destroyed homes and civic infrastructure.
estimates that unless policies change, 186,000 deaths or more will be attributable to the conflict, and that seems likely. With American support, Israel kills Palestinians quickly with bombs and bullets and also slowly, by blocking food, water, and medicine.
As USAid lead, Power presided over the agency when it cut off funding to the single-largest provider of humanitarian assistance in Gaza: UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
The Americans ostensibly made this decision in response to Israeli accusations that 12 UNRWA staff members took part in the October 7 attack, but it would be dishonest not to note Israel’s long-standing mission to dismantle UNRWA completely, as well as America’s unflinching dedication to achieving Israel’s goals.
Power cut funding when the agency was already, in the words of UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini, “staggering under the weight of relentless attacks”. Funding Israeli attacks, at the same time as crippling UNRWA financially, implicates the US government both directly and indirectly in what virtually every credible international human rights organisation has called gross violations of human rights by Israeli security forces.
US-backed Israeli soldiers recently described to +972 Magazine “the near-total absence of firing regulations in the Gaza war, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, and leaving corpses on the streets — all with their commanders’ permission”.
Power sets those truths aside; she understood early in her career that her desired trajectory in US political life would be helped immensely by fealty to Israel.
When working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2007, a college TV interview resurfaced in which she described a hypothetical need for a “mammoth protection force” to police a peace accord between the Israelis and Palestinians.
When accused of hostility toward Israel, she quickly disavowed her comments. reports what happened next: “In a departure for a journalist, she quietly asked the host of the interview to remove the video from the Web, though portions of it still circulate online.
“To repair the damage, she subsequently approached Shmuley Boteach, a celebrity rabbi who ran for Congress in New Jersey, Abraham Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League, and other prominent defenders of Israel, who endorsed her UN nomination.”
As the US government’s “top humanitarian” who admitted there was famine in Gaza back in April, it is significant that Power is the face of concern deployed to the US public when necessary.
In an interview aired on MSNBC on June 20, the host Andrea Mitchell asks Power: “What is making it so difficult for UNRWA, for the UN relief agencies, to safely get the aid delivered to the people who need them?”
The truthful answer is obvious, but Power’s response is a word salad straight out of Orwell’s darkest imaginings: “Well, it is in some ways a kind of doom loop because the paucity of assistance getting in over such a long period of time, gave rise to such desperation on the part of families that every time a truck shows up or goes through a part of Gaza, there’s a feeling this might be the last truck and there’s not that regularised flow of assistance that we need in order to give people that confidence that they need that more will continue to flow. So that’s one aspect.
Holding Palestinians in Gaza responsible for their own suffering and death is a stretch, particularly when Power’s Israeli allies clamour to take credit for it. But there is logic to Power being the one to cover for Israel: Her words and actions carry weight because of her carefully crafted public persona as an intellectual, a humanitarian, and an Irish immigrant.
This persona involves appearing fair and good, and to that end, Power followed up her victim-blaming with this. “And then of course, there is IDF, Hamas fighting, there’s just war, which makes it difficult for unarmed humanitarians to move convoys from point A to point B. So it’s a perfect storm of really difficult circumstances.”
When Power does a TV interview demonising Palestinians and justifying Israeli atrocities, she makes Americans comfortable with the bloodshed they pay for with their tax dollars.
That is the doom loop, that is the perfect storm, and it’s blown in from Ireland.
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