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July 23, 2024
Joe Biden Is Still a Danger to Gaza. He Must Resign Now.
Palestine can’t afford six more months of this president. We have to demand that he goes immediately, and then pressure Kamala Harris to change course.
President Joe Biden is greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after arriving at Ben Gurion International Airport, October 18, 2023, in Tel Aviv.
(Evan Vucci / AP)
For many Americans terrified of a second Trump term, Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he is ending his reelection campaign augured immediate relief. So did the Democratic Party’s swift consolidation around Kamala Harris as Biden’s presumptive replacement.
But for the Palestinians of Gaza who have suffered for more than nine months under Israel’s genocidal onslaught—a campaign only possible because of the military assistance and de facto diplomatic immunity provided by the Biden administration—there is no relief in sight. Biden is committed to serving out the rest of his term, meaning that, for the next six months, he will remain a key player during a period that could prove pivotal both for the scale of the atrocities inflicted on Gaza and for the trajectory of the region as a whole. And while he has shaken up the US presidential race, there is no evidence at all to suggest that Biden’s malign influence on the horrors in Gaza will abate.
As things stand, Israel’s genocidal military campaign continues unabated, despite contrary directives from the United Nations Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court. The United States has not only armed Israel to the teeth and blocked any international effort to end the war. It has participated in the genocide directly by defunding UNRWA, the only international agency capable of meeting the humanitarian needs of Palestinians in Gaza. And as those needs become increasingly dire, aid flows are drying up; since Israel’s Rafah invasion began, the delivery of food, water, and medicine into Gaza—already significantly hampered by arbitrary and punitive Israeli restrictions and delays—has dropped off significantly. An article in the respected medical journal The Lancet conservatively estimated that a hypothetical cease-fire reached on June 19 would mean an ultimate death toll in Gaza in excess of 186,000 people. It is unclear what the toll would be now, over a month after that imagined date.
In the face of these horrors, the Biden administration has essentially just shrugged, insisting that this is why we need a cease-fire deal. But despite the president’s announcing a plan for the permanent cessation of hostilities in late May—confusingly introduced as Israel’s proposal despite an insistence from Benjamin Netanyahu that the war would continue—the United States has continued to shield Israel from any consequences. A single weapons shipment of high payload munitions, paused in advance of the Rafah invasion, was unpaused. No further “sticks” appear to be under consideration.
Meanwhile, the low-intensity regional war that began on October 8 with the opening of Hezbollah’s solidarity front in Israel’s north has expanded both geographically and qualitatively, sitting precariously on the edge of further escalation. The drumbeat of all-out war grows louder, with Israel threatening a ground invasion of Southern Lebanon, apparently already approved by the military leadership, for later this summer. The Houthis in Yemen have also opened a military front, firing directly on Tel Aviv in a drone strike last week and declaring war on Israel. And back in April, Iran proved willing to engage in direct military confrontation with Israel. Escalation risks drawing in direct US military involvement, something Biden administration officials insist they don’t want.
The only off-ramp to this spiral of violence is a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. “We can attack Iran’s axis as much as we want,” one former Israeli intelligence officer explained to The New York Times, “but without such a cease-fire, we cannot end this war.” Hezbollah too insists that Hamas negotiates on their behalf, and that a deal would close their front. Hamas has publicly accepted the deal laid out by the Biden administration, so long as it has meaningful guarantees that Israel will agree to the end of the war. But such a guarantee is a nonstarter for Netanyahu, as it would practically end his coalition, and with it, his political career. Instead, Netanyahu is demanding a cease-fire that allows him to resume the slaughter at some future date—in other words, not much of a cease-fire at all.
Current Issue
Biden has control over US policy with respect to the United Nations and the flow of military assistance to Israel. But he refuses to use any hard power to force Israeli acceptance of the deal he purports to want, leaving the genocide to continue unabated and the region stuck in a protracted and escalating conflict. Perhaps this is because he supports the eradication of Palestinians. More likely, he simply believes that the Israelis can eventually be brought to heel under the guidance of American patronage, and has no appetite for playing hardball with his favorite allies. The advisers with influence over him appear either out of their depths or simply victim to the sunk-cost fallacy, and the administration’s only attempt to solve the crisis is to pursue the same fantastical grand Middle East peace bargain that helped precipitate October 7 in the first place.
This is the foreign policy of a senile and stubborn old man, and if allowed to persist for another six months, it is guaranteed to bring devastating consequences. As such, people of conscience in the United States should demand that Biden step down immediately. Whatever political leverage we may have had to influence Biden administration policy evaporated along with his presidential campaign.
Harris is, by all indications, at least as pro-Israel as the average Democrat. And despite some slightly tougher rhetoric, she has shown no contrition for her administration’s genocidal policies thus far. However, she seems minimally competent to act in the interests of the United States.
Were Harris to assume the presidency before January, she could condition military assistance to Israel on a cease-fire deal—again, already proposed by the Biden administration and accepted by Hamas—to end the war, begin the reconstruction of Gaza, and avoid a regional conflagration likely to draw in US involvement and drag out for years. In his convention speech, Trump bragged about being able to end wars with a phone call. In this situation, he’s correct: The relative positions of the United States and Israel make it such that any US president could end this war tomorrow.
This would be, of course, no panacea. There is no world in which Harris becomes the champion of Palestinian liberation. A lasting political solution to the conflict remains far from view. And there is no reason to think that achieving even this minimally sensible outcome is likely. Many people, including most congressional progressives, have apparently given up on shifting Biden’s Israel policy before the election, instead trading their political support for campaign promises. This acquiescence is, to my mind, a shocking abdication of responsibility and must be opposed wholesale. We may not succeed, but the stakes are simply too high not to try.
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Dylan Saba
Dylan Saba is a civil rights attorney and writer. He lives in Queens, New York.