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This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I'm Jeremy Scayhill.

And I'm Murtaza Lussain.

Maz, I think that people who listen to this show Intercepted are following very, very closely the state of siege right now that's happening in Gaza with Israeli officials basically saying that they are locking the entire place down.

And that they're implementing scorched earth bombing. There's talk of a full scale ground invasion and reservists are being called up and we're already seeing in the aftermath of the heavy civilian death toll.

Among Israelis, that was a result of Hamas's blitzkrieg attacks against Israel over the weekend.

We're now seeing skyrocketing.

We're now seeing skyrocketing numbers of Palestinian civilian deaths as a result of the Israeli military campaign.

And we're going to be talking to the political analyst Marwan Basharra in a moment.

But Maz, you wrote a really good piece for the Intercept this week called Biden double down on the Abraham Accords to devastating consequences.

Subtitle of it is the Biden administration's policy of ignoring conditions in Gaza contributed to this weekend's explosion of violence.

Talk about that piece, Maz, and what you were writing about.

Sure, I think essentially the Biden administration's Middle East policy has been to attempt to ignore the Palestinians and to proceed with a Jared Kushner Donald Trump approach of building arms deals and diplomatic agreements between Israel and countries with which it doesn't have any direct conflict like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates.

And this very thorny, difficult issue of diplomacy between these two countries with a great history of enmity and hatred and violence between them, two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, to sidestep that issue and get these flashy diplomatic wins mostly for domestic consumption in lieu of that.

And I think we see now that was a very short-sighted immature strategy, really a simulation or similar kind of what real diplomacy should be like, which is about making tough deals between enemies and putting conflicts to an end.

And that policy of ignoring the Palestinians and ignoring conditions in Gaza which were reaching such a horrifying breaking point in the recent years has really proven its downfall at this moment.

At very, very tellingly, a few weeks ago, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to the White House, he was saying that the Middle East is more peaceful that's been in many, many years just before this catastrophe.

So you can imagine the level of hubris and the short-sightedness that was prevailing within the administration.

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