Top U.S. intelligence officials refuse to reject claim that Israel is "exterminating" Palestinians

Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Williams Burns, director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday. Sen. Tom Cotton asked Haines and Burns whether they agreed with allegations that Israel is “exterminating” the Palestinian people.

For any honest, non-biased intelligence director, answering would be easy. Of course, Israel isn’t exterminating the Palestinian people; nor is it attempting to do so.

Yet, neither Haines nor Burns disavowed this slanderous claim. Cotton gave Burns two tries. Both times, Burns refused to disagree with the slander, choosing instead to mouth non-responsive Biden administration talking points about the need for a cease-fire, etc.

Cotton then asked Haines the same question. She replied that she fully endorses Burns’ (non) response. You can watch these exchanges here, beginning at around the 1 hour, 8 minute mark

The answers Burns and Haines gave are disgraceful. One can be “mindful” of the deaths of innocent civilians in Gaza, as Burns said we should be, without lending credence to the calumny that Israel is exterminating the Palestinian people. But neither of Americas two top intelligence repudiated that charge.

The charge is manifestly false. According to Hamas, Israel has killed around 31,000 Palestinians in Gaza. This number is garbage, but let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that it’s accurate. And let’s add in the nearly five hundred Palestinians that, allegedly, have been killed in the West Bank.

Prime Minister Netanyahu says that Israeli forces have killed approximately 13,000 Hamas terrorists. I have no reason to doubt this figure, but let’s say, again for the sake of argument, that the real number is half of what Netanyahu claims.

Under these assumptions, all of which are highly favorable to the Hamas propaganda machine, Israeli forces have killed approximately 25,000 Palestinian civilians, around 24,500 of whom resided in Gaza. The population of Gaza is around two million.

“Exterminate” means to destroy completely. Clearly, there has been nothing resembling an extermination.

Nor, especially in light of Hamas’ strategy of hiding among civilians, has there been an attempt at extermination. Given Israel’s massive military superiority, if its forces were trying to exterminate Palestinians, they would have killed many times more of them than they have.

Yet, America’s two top intelligence chiefs wouldn’t deny the calumny — a modern day blood libel — that Israel is exterminating Palestinians.

What should we make of this? I can only conclude that the Biden administration hates Israel. I understand that Biden wants Arab-Americans in Michigan to vote for him, but I don’t regard this as an adequate explanation for the extraordinary testimony or Burns and Haines.

Is anti-Semitism at work here? I don’t know.

It’s not anti-Semitic to sympathize with Gaza’s civilian population. It’s not anti-Semitic to criticize strongly Israel’s war effort or its pre-war policy towards Palestinians.

But lending credence to an allegation that Israel is engaging in the most heinous of conduct where that allegation is not just unsupported but absurd, does at least raise the possibility of anti-Semitism, notwithstanding that Haines is Jewish.

Haines’ unwillingness to repudiate the charge that Israel is committing genocide isn’t just despicable; it’s also hard to understand in the context of her testimony as a whole. Haines testified that Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas is stoking a “generational” threat of terrorism — in other words, inspiring people to commit terrorism against the U.S. and throughout the world.

If this is true, one would expect Haines and Burns to deny any suggestion that Israel is trying to exterminate Palestinians. By not denying it, Haines enables those trying to recruit terrorists and induce acts of terrorism to say, truthfully that America’s own intelligence agencies can’t deny that Israel is committing genocide — and that America is abetting the genocide.

But the real problem here isn’t the oddness of Haines’ testimony. It’s the absurdity and implicitly slanderous nature of it — along with what the testimony of our two top intel officials says about the depth of Biden administration hatred of Israel.