By Xtn Alexander
First, it’s gotta be said that the masses taking to the streets against the war on Gaza and the Palestinians is righteous. It is an angry and determined righteousness. Lockdowns and street blockades. Walkouts and strikes. All are happening on a global level. New layers of folks, largely youth from a wide and varied background, have made it a priority to disrupt and resist this war and to challenge the narratives of the U.S and Israeli ruling classes. Supporting this new movement, being a part of it, and helping it develop confidence and capacity to become a broader resistance is what’s needed. Highlighting this as we move forward will be crucial.
But, for now this article is not that and instead it’s a focus on a main source of contempt and disgust: Genocide Joe.
- Total number of Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip since 7 October at more than 18,000 including 8,697 children and 4,410 women (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs 12/6/23)
- 50,594 Gazans injured with 7,780 Gazans missing/unaccounted for (Aljazeera 12/14/23)
- 63 Journalists and media workers, mostly Palestinian, killed (Committee to Protect Journalists 12/14/23)
- 1.7 million (81%) of Gaza’s population displaced; Israel intelligence drafted initial plans to have the entire 2.1 million Gazans pushed into the Egyptian Sinai (Rand Corp 12/4/23)
- 305, 000 residential units destroyed (over half of Gazan’s homes); 339 educational facilities damaged (Aljazeera 12/14/23)
- Functioning hospitals have dropped from 36 to 18; 203 attacks on hospitals, ambulances, medical supplies, and the detention of health-care workers; bed occupancy rate at operational hospitals stands at 171%, while in the intensive care units the occupancy rate is up to 221% (World Health Organization 12/4/23)
- $130 billion in U.S. military funding to Israel since its founding; 80% of Israel’s weapons imports have come from the U.S. (Axios 10/4/23)
- The Biden administration using emergency authorization to sell 14,000 tank shells to Israel without congressional oversight via the U.S. State Department’s Arms Control Act to an amount of $106.5 million (Guardian 12/10/23)
- Israel’s assault, named the Swords of Iron, has shown an unprecedented level of killing of Gazans through aerial bombardment (Haaretz 12/9/23)
We are seeing what Palestinians are calling, A Second Nakba (Catastrophe).
Don’t believe the U.S. state and Democratic Party propagandists that Biden and his administration are somehow the moderates or taking some kind of productive approach. While the Israeli state is acting on its own initiative, Biden and company have at every moment supported this assault.
When it emerged publicly (NYT 11/14/23), that hundreds of political appointees and staff members of the U.S. government – including the State Department – had made criticisms of U.S. policy supporting Israel’s war on Gaza and the Palestinians, within a day, pro-Biden forces including top advisors, longtime policy makers and leading Democratic Party officials signed a counter letter in support of Biden and the U.S. policy of supporting the war against Gaza and the Palestinian people. The letter opens with, “As former Biden and Obama administration officials and campaign staff, we are writing to express our deep appreciation for your moral clarity, courageous leadership, and staunch support of Israel” and “We support your request for an unprecedented $14.3 billion in U.S. security assistance to Israel”. It further reads, “we agree with you that a ceasefire is not possible at this time” (CNN 11/14/23). Even by this time thousands of Palestinians in Gaza had been murdered and IDF forces backing Israeli settlers were carrying out attacks and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. In regards to the scale and brutality of the attacks against Palestinians there was no ambiguity.
Reality makes clear that these signatories aren’t just engaging in Democratic Party apologetics in support of Biden. These are members of the political class, architects of modern U.S. policy, strategy and intervention. Biden may be the head but these people are the rotten body and brain. They should be treated as criminals and enemies of humanity.
In 2022, Biden gave his Independence Hall speech, the basis of which was his and the Democratic Party’s continuing “battle” to save “the soul” of America and democracy stating that “violence… can’t be normalized in this country”. That was Biden and the Dems in 2022. Coming after several years of government by Scumbag POTUS 45 and the rise of militant, popular and often murderous insurgent far-right and fascist forces, Biden used opposition to the threat of fascism as his administrations primary political plank. Biden and the Democratic Party were developing what we should see as a ruling class antifascist approach – mobilizing support and crafting a broad coalition to oppose Scumbag 45, MAGA and the assorted far-right (both its legal and extra-legal forms). The Democratic Party approach would be a defense of the system in the face of Rightist threats.
Now in 2024, Biden and company show exactly what the soul of America is. They’ve helped unleash a general barbarism against the Palestinians, they’ve made common cause on strategic and tactical grounds with the far-right and even self-proclaimed fascists of Israel’s government. While here on the home front supporters of Biden and U.S. policy rally with known anti-Jewish Christian Nationalist forces building politically contradictory coalitions whose primary point of agreement is to wage war on Gaza and the Palestinians.
Genocide Joe and his accomplices have shown exactly what their system is and what it does to people.
Almost two and half months of war on Gaza and Palestinians as a whole, and with a death toll likely to exceed twenty thousand, Biden and the United States government is still supporting this assault. The language may be shifting. There is a developing public critique of Israeli war policy, even an attempt at creating some kind of distance from aspects of the Israeli war. But Genocide Joe and the United States will remain the primary backers of this war against Gaza and the Palestinian people.
We can’t forget this.
No matter what developments arise, we must remember that Biden, the Democratic Party and the entirety of the U.S. political class in all its hues, categories, party affiliations or pretensions share in the horrible responsibility for this Second Nakba.