Israeli Genocide and the US Election

For Republicans, Israel provides a model for a repressive, religious ethno-state

I thought I would try to write, today, about Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, from my admittedly limited perspective, and what the impact of this could be on the United States election and the future, more broadly. I believe the Democrats need to reverse their position on this war and cut funding to the Israeli military immediately. At the very least, Kamala Harris would be well advised to sharply differentiate herself from Biden’s position on this, as a means to save her campaign.

Last winter, I spent a few months reading as much as I could about Israeli history, as seen from different sides. I even read a very anti-Semitic, yet well-researched, book on Jewish history and Zionism as well as Rise and Kill, on Israel’s targeted assassination program. At that point, I admit I blocked the subject for a bit. I am Jewish through my mother, but I was not brought up with any connection to the religion or to Israel.

Today, The New York Times published a devastating report from Dr Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who worked in Gaza last spring: “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.” What this doctor and many of his colleagues report is that children in Gaza are being systemically targeted by the Israeli military and its snipers: “Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die.” The author concludes (I am putting in a lengthy quote so people can follow the links if they want to):

What American physicians and nurses saw firsthand in Gaza should inform the United States’ Gaza policy. The lethal combination of what Human Rights Watch describes as indiscriminate military violence, what Oxfam calls the deliberate restriction of food and humanitarian aid, near-universal displacement of the population, and destruction of the health care system is having the calamitous effect that many Holocaust and genocide scholars warned of nearly a year ago.

American law and policy have long forbidden the transfer of weapons to nations and military units engaged in gross violations of human rights, especially — as a 2023 update to the United States Conventional Arms Transfer Policy makes clear — when those violations are directed at children. …

For the past 12 months, it has been well within our government’s power to stop the flow of U.S. military aid to Israel. Instead, we fueled the fire at almost every opportunity, shipping over 50,000 tons of military equipment, ammunition and weaponry since the start of the war, according to a late-August update from the Israeli Defense Ministry. This amounts to an average of more than 10 transport planes and two cargo ships of arms per week.

Now, after more than a year of devastation, estimates of Palestinian deaths range from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands. The International Rescue Committee describes Gaza as “the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker, as well as the most dangerous place to be a civilian.” UNICEF rates Gaza as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” Oxfam reports that in Al-Mawasi, the area Israel has designated as the humanitarian safe zone in Gaza, there is one toilet for every 4,130 people. At least 1,470 Israelis have been killed in the Oct. 7 attack and the following war. Half of the hostages who remain in Gaza are reportedly dead. And, while American officials blame Hamas for prolonging the war and hindering negotiations, Israeli news outlets consistently report that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sabotaged cease-fire talks with both Hamas and Hezbollah while recklessly escalating the conflict instead of reaching an agreement that could achieve many of Israel’s stated war aims, including the release of Israeli hostages.

Was this ghastly outcome for the Palestinians and Israel worth corrupting the rule of law in our own society? Certainly, the Biden-Harris administration can’t say they didn't know what they were doing. Eight sitting U.S. senators, 88 members of the House of Representatives, 185 lawyers (including dozens working in the administration), and 12 civil servants (who resigned in protest of our Gaza policy) have told the administration that continuing to arm Israel is illegal under U.S. law. In September, ProPublica reported the lengths to which the Biden-Harris administration went to avoid complying with the laws that define clear consequences for countries, like Israel, that are blocking humanitarian aid.

It is clear that, both in Gaza and Lebanon, Israel has expansionist aims, intending to annex these areas for Jewish settlers, permanently displacing the indigenous populations. Added complexity: I understand that many in Lebanon want Israel to dismantle Hezbollah, which is an agent of Iran’s fundamentalist extremism and a destructive force.

On her recent 60 Minutes interview, Harris was excruciatingly weak on the subject of Israel: “The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles,” she said, vacuously, when asked about the deaths of children there and Netanyahu’s apparent unresponsiveness to Biden’s directives. I think it is quite possible that Harris will lose the election on this single issue. She needs to take a much stronger stand.

One unfortunate piece of the puzzle is that Netanyahu very much wants Trump to be our next President. He believes the Republicans — the party of White Christian nationalism — will give him an even freer hand, and he is right. Trump “has promised that he will crack down on pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses,” according to Al-Jazeera, calling the students part of a “radical revolution.”

Biden is obviously mentally weak at this point, hobbling through his last few months. Israel has been a long-term ally and asset of the US Empire. One of Netanyahu’s calculations must be that intensifying the conflict now, as he has been doing, while ignoring US appeals for ceasefire, will help defeat the Democrats in November, as he considers the Republicans as better allies.

I believe that the Democrats will be the better leaders, by far, in the Middle East conflict, but I can understand, at this point, considering the weak statements of Harris and the ongoing atrocities occurring there, that many people in the US cannot make that distinction, and will prefer not to vote for her because of this issue.

It is not as if the Republicans are better than the Democrats on Israel. In fact, they are much, much worse. Trump amped up the tensions in the region in so many ways. He made a series of terrible decisions and horrifying blunders, which most people don’t seem to remember, including withdrawing from a nuclear deal with Iran. Trump’s bad decisions led to the Gaza War. I thought I would quote at length from Sylvan Crispel who reviewed Trump’s impacts on the region after his term, in an afterword to his excellent book, The State of Israel Vs the Jews:

Donald Trump is gone, leaving in his wake a field of ruin in the country and the world. In the Middle East, as pledges to his most loyal supporters — ultranationalists and evangelicals — Trump spent four years showering Israel with diplomatic and military “gifts.”… “The United States’ withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 20182 was the crudest example of the Trump administration’s contempt for international law and institutions. His decision was greeted with enthusiasm by the Israelis, for whom disregarding international norms they dislike is a permanent feature of their behavior. This was accompanied by the many gifts to Israel, all designed to remove management of the Palestinian conflict from United Nations auspices and impose by force what Israel hadn’t been able to acquire by law.

The list of these gifts ranges from the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel to public support of its wholesale annexations in the West Bank. It includes recognizing the annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, eliminating the word “occupation” from the American diplomatic vocabulary, affixing a “Made in Israel” label to products from Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, closing the PLO offices in Washington, canceling USAID subsidies to Gaza and the West Bank, canceling American support of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees, signing a presidential decree making criticism of Israel and Zionism the equivalent of anti-Semitism…and the list goes on. As William Burns, Biden’s choice to head the CIA, has written: “In all my time as a diplomat, I never saw an American president concede so much, so soon, for so little, with so much potential for collateral damage.” It’s no surprise that the Israelis feel bereft at Donald Trump’s departure.

Particularly the moving of the Israeli capital to Jerusalem was a catalyst for the war. It was something the US government had not allowed, knowing it would enflame tensions in the region. Soon after this move, Israeli security forces attacked Muslim worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The Al-Aqsa Mosque — a sacred place for Islam — is on the site of what was once the Temple of Solomon, twice-destroyed, and the building of the third Temple there is part of the prophecy driving the region toward catastrophe. The Hamas attack was called Al-Aqsa Flood because it was retaliation for the Israeli attack on the mosque.

It is not that I think the Democrats are excellent, perfect, or even that good, but at the very least there is a much deeper understanding of context, history, and diplomacy than we find on the Far Right. People who think that Trump is going to be better at keeping the US out of future wars are very deluded, in my opinion. I believe Trump’s election is far more likely to lead to devastating wars and even nuclear conflict.

In Deep by David Rohde, a book about the conspiratorial ideas that have become prevalent about a malevolent “deep state,” begins with an anecdote about Trump’s first tenure in power:

The government source who leaked the story to me about the first phone call between President Trump and Vladimir Putin seemed genuinely frightened. Published by Reuters several weeks after Trump took office in 2017, the piece contained no bombshell disclosures about coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. Instead, it exposed politically embarrassing details regarding how the new American president had conducted himself. During the hour-long conversation, Trump had denounced the primary nuclear arms agreement between the United States and Russia as one of many bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration. When Putin raised the possibility of extending the treaty, known as New START, Trump paused and asked his aides what the treaty was, according to my source and an official who had spoken with my colleague Jonathan Landay. … Throughout the call, Trump also ceaselessly bragged to Putin about his own popularity.

I understand that many people feel fury and betrayal at the Democrats and progressives for many terrible decisions and for continuing the Empire’s “business as usual.” A main reason we are in this horrible situation today is because the Democrats under Clinton and Obama basically sold out the working class as the Democrats allied themselves with the elite financial and managerial class. But of course, even that is too simplistic.

One crucially important point that Crispel makes in The State of Israel Vs the Jews is that the Christian nationalists in the US back Israel for a number of reasons (including their fixation on prophecy), but one main reason is that Israel is the model for the kind of religious ethno-state they want to make in America: A religious ethno-state that gets away with ruthlessly oppressing its disenfranchised ethnic groups. Previously this was done, in Israel, through occupation and assassinations, but now, with Gaza, they have moved into straight-out genocide, executing children in large numbers.

All of this is why I strongly recommend that, even if Harris doesn’t publicly recant and change her position as she really should, people of good conscience who want an end to Israeli genocide and a resolution to the horrors in the Middle East should still vote for the Democrats in November. I also suspect it isn’t possible for us to fully understand the internal pressures faced by Democratic candidates on this issue, but I also refuse to cut Harris slack on this, as she must take more responsibility, even if she can do nothing now.

Okay, one last thing for those who have stayed with me this far: