Gaza and the US election

It's not at all clear to me that there's a lesser evil

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
  Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
  That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
  Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

-W.H. Auden

It’s election day in America. Eight years ago the democratic party lectured its voters about how it wasn’t realistic to expect universal healthcare. Today the democratic party is lecturing its voters about how it isn’t realistic to expect us to stop sending Israel 2000 pound bombs to drop on schools and hospitals. I held my nose in the voting booth eight years ago but today I have to draw the line at murdering 15,000 children. Sorry for the unrealistic purity test.

What I’ve found most disorienting about this election cycle is how many people seem to think what’s happening in Gaza and now Lebanon isn’t much out of the ordinary. For your average Republican or Democrat it’s just another war in the Middle East. For those with radical politics it’s just what the Amerikkkan empire does every day. Both these views are incorrect.

In one year more women and children have been killed in Gaza than in any other conflict in the 21st century. This is based on a death toll that is almost certainly a vast undercount. This is worse than Iraq, worse than Afghanistan, worse than Libya, worse than the sanctions on Iran and Cuba and Venezuela. This is something new in our era and quite terrifying for the precedent it will set.

To find an analogous crime committed by a US administration you have to go back to the Vietnam war. In both Vietnam and Gaza the euphemism “war” was employed to describe indiscriminate mass slaughter of non-combatants through saturation bombing and free fire zones. Public protest in the 60s and 70s did put some restraint on US policy makers. Gaza is a gruesome reminder that we can go backwards. A portent for a nightmarish new normal in the 21st century.  

I feel this country getting more evil every day. There’s a mercenary nastiness percolating throughout the West. When mass murder is background noise to daily existence human life becomes cheap and empathy disappears. Americans are currently managing more interest in one euthanized squirrel than in dozens of children shot in the head by Israeli snipers. This is a sign of collective sociopathy. 

I have found two small causes for optimism. The first is that it has never been so easy to know who you shouldn’t trust or rely on. Gaza is the most basic moral test in the world and those who fail it are either too stupid or too wicked for their opinion to hold any weight. I would consider myself a failure if those people didn’t hate me. 

Take the example of Bari Weiss, an obese Israeli spy who operates in the US under the cover of being a journalist. She is hosting an election watch party through her dark money funded propaganda outlet The Free Press. I would sooner leave my drink unattended with the guests at a Jeffrey Epstein dinner party than take seriously anybody who works with The Free Press. This is slightly redundant as I am describing two Israeli influence operations. 

Probably half the people paling around with Bari Weiss don’t much care about Israel they just recognize it as a good career opportunity. You could form a human chain across this country of people willing to defend Auschwitz if it meant a chance to be a regular on CNN. That naked cynicism and self interest stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of those actually being subjected to Israel’s killing spree.

For more than a year Israel promised some of the poorest people on Earth $400,000 and a chance to escape death if they betrayed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. None of them would do it. Back here in the richest country on Earth people stay silent about genocide to protect their acting careers. 

When I visited Belgrade’s military museum I walked through exhibits showcasing artifacts of Nazi and Ustasha terrorism during the occupation. In one photograph you see a man the Nazis have hung from a lamppost. In another you see several dozen splayed bodies who had been previously put up against a wall and shot. Some fat uniformed German is standing over one of them with a Luger in his hand, about to put the finishing bullet in his temple. He looks like any other office bureaucrat.

Those exhibits are followed by artifacts from the Yugoslav partisans who fought and defeated that evil. Visiting the memorial to those who died liberating Belgrade I felt unworthy to be around even the memory of people who sacrificed so much for others. Today the partisans live on in every man and woman who violently resists Israeli occupation and genocide. This is my second cause for optimism.

The post-war world was far from perfect but global revulsion at fascist crimes brought us the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. We must do what we can to stop the Israelis from ripping them up.

The solution isn’t complicated. There needs to be an immediate US arms embargo on Israel. This does not require any act of Congress, it just requires the White House to obey the law. 

Under the Leahy Law the US cannot arm foreign military units when there is “credible information” that they have committed a gross violation of human rights. In order to equip the Israeli extermination campaign in Gaza the Biden-Harris administration set up a special process within the State Department to violate this law. Israel is the only country on Earth that gets this treatment. This is criminal activity as egregious as anything Richard Nixon did. 

Today American voters are presented with a choice between two parties owned by an Israeli state that is at war with civilization itself. It is not at all clear to me that there is a lesser evil here. While the carnage is on the hands of the democratic party their defenders are not wrong when they say things can always get worse. Israelis are salivating at the possibility that Trump will give them their US war with Iran.

I’ll be honest though. I fear most for the future where what has happened the last year carries on for another four. The lesson that people will take from a Kamala Harris victory is that Gaza doesn’t matter. The liberals will go back to brunch and international law and human rights will become just words on paper.

Maybe it would take the shock of the orange man coming back to make Americans realize that we are allowing the world to slide back to what it was in the 1940s. It is doubtful the results of a bourgeois election will change much but at least if the democrats lose there will be some consequences for what was done. To be clear my hope is not that Kamala Harris loses: my hope is that she along with every other senior member of the Biden administration spends the rest of their lives inside a prison cell.

But I know that just like universal healthcare or a US foreign policy that follows basic decency, expecting that is not realistic.