Genocide, an Election Issue?

My thoughts on Israel's American-sponsored genocide as an important election issue

Photo by Peter Conrad on Unsplash

In his 09/03/24 article, Kamala Harris and the Disgrace of Denial, Patrick Lawrence took his scalpel to some of the more outrageous reader comments made on a 08/28/24 NYT guest essay, “This is Who Kamala Harris Fails”, Hala Alyan, a Palestian-American writer. While praising Alyan for writing “among the most persuasive, thoughtfully assembled arguments I have read for rejecting Harris”, Lawrence compares reading through the comments to wading “through an intellectual and moral cesspit”. As always, he’s bang on!

Of the various comments quoted in the article, and one is progressively more disgusting than the next, two punched me in the face:

• “There are more important issues in this election than petty ethnic whining about who owns what land in the Middle East.”

• “The author misses the big point. You have to look where each side starts from. Israel wants peace and prosperity for everyone. The Palestinians want death and destruction for everyone.”

Petty ethnic whining? Israel wants peace and Palestinians want death? What the fuck is wrong with these people? Are they that stupid, that vapid, that obtuse? Are they really so uneducated that they know nothing about the historical background to the conflict in Gaza? Are they so self-centred and self-absorbed that they see the world only in terms of themselves and their own immediate needs? Are they so emotionally and psychologically fragile that they must push away anything that makes them feel uncomfortable, unsettled, untethered? Or is it because there’s an election in the US, and in order for them to line up nicely and neatly on the side of their candidate, they must focus on only those issues that shine the best possible light on their man/woman? What the hell is going on in people’s heads? What is eating holes in their brains?

Genocide as an unimportant election issue

NBC News identified 7 important issues for American voters among which genocide is noticeably missing. Like the commenters in Lawrence’s article, most people would probably see these issues as completely unrelated to genocide. But are they?

1. Abortion. Regardless of whose life you value more—the woman’s or the fetus’s—victims of genocide have absolutely no choice over their lives or the lives of their born and unborn children. So shouldn’t anyone who values human life at an stage think that Israel’s American-sponsored genocide is a very important issue?

2. Immigration. People emigrate to western countries in order to escape poverty, war, crime and political persecution. So, shouldn’t anyone who wants to see a reduction in immigration consider the American-sponsored wars and genocide that drive immigration to be a very important issue?

3. Health care and prescription drugs. The rights to physical and mental health, and the highest standard of medical care and treatment are fundamental human rights. In Gaza, hospitals, medical care centres and health care professionals have been ruthlessly targeted in military actions that amount to war crimes under the Geneva Convention. Already at the end of May, the OCHA reported 24 hospitals out of service and 493 healthcare workers killed. So, shouldn’t anyone who values health and medical care consider Israel’s American-sponsored genocide to be a very important issue?

4. Taxes. Every tax dollar that supplies Israel with weapons—$12.5 billion since October 7, 2023 plus the additional $17 billion in military aid signed recently into law by President Biden—is unavailable for health care, education, social services, poverty reduction, alleviation of tuition debt, low income housing, childcare, climate mitigation, environmental protection, renewable energy, and other services of direct benefit to Americans and their future. So, shouldn’t anyone who’s not a millionaire or billionaire consider Israel’s American taxpayer-funded genocide to be a very important issue?

5. Judges and the Supreme Court. No country can claim to be civilized and democratic without upholding and enforcing not only its own laws, but international laws as well. Defined in Article II of the Geneva Convention as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part”, genocide is the most heinous crime on the books. So, shouldn’t anyone who believes in the law, particularly “thou shalt not kill”, consider Israel’s American-sponsored genocide a very important issue?

6. Trade. The US has a long history of imposing sanctions, euphemistically called unilateral coercive measures, to compel countries to change policies that ostensibly “violate human rights” or “sponsor terrorism” but essentially conflict with American interests. Oddly, Israel, a racist, fascist ethnostate, is not among the 26 countries, regions, companies or individuals currently under US sanctions. So, shouldn’t anyone who believes that it’s not only illegal but immoral to do business with Israel consider Israel’s American-sponsored genocide a very important issue?

7. National security and foreign policy. American support for Israel’s genocide has made the world more dangerous and more volatile, and American complicity has significantly damaged its standing in the world. So, shouldn’t anyone who thinks that US foreign policy should make America safer and promote peace instead of constant war consider Israel’s American-sponsored genocide a very important issue?

Putting the issues aside and looking at the two candidates for President—former POTUS Donald Trump and VPOTUS Kamala Harris— what do you see but two war enthusiasts who, generously funded by Zionist billionaires and AIPAC, harp on Israel’s right to defend itself, the need to bring the hostages home and an impossible two-state solution, all the while showing in Harris’s case only token sympathy for the 41,000+ murdered and 93,000+ wounded Palestinians and in Trump’s case an eagerness to finish off the remaining population. In order to look to Trump or Harris for leadership, you have to be as drugged up and brain-washed as a member of a religious cult.

Genocide as none of your business

Equally inane sentiments appeared in a Substack article, by Caitlin Johnstone who was asked on Twitter: “Why should I care about anyone that isn’t in a 20-mile radius of where I live?” Her answers: “Because we cannot continue to live like this” and “The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.” Johnstone, who never puts anything mildly, restrained herself this time.

The only reason I can see for not caring about the victims of an on-going genocide in Gaza is that the person is a deformed, deplorable, degenerate approximation of a human being (what Caitlin Johnstone would call a “shit human being”) with no heart, no soul, no functioning brain, no conscience, no compassion, no imagination, and no respect for life. These are people who are half-dead already and beginning to rot.

How would one of those commenters feel if 2,000 ton bombs were dropping on their heads? If their children were being blown to pieces and they had first to gather up bloody, unidentifiable body parts in a plastic bag before they could bury them in a shallow, sandy grave? If they had no home, no access to hospitals or schools or shops, no clean water, no food, no livelihood or means of support, no future, and they were being driven to increasingly crowded, contaminated, dangerous “safe zones” with the sea being their only route of escape from a living hell?

I will end this piece with Cara Marianna’s comment on Jonathan Cook’s article, At what point are we permitted to, in which he asked six questions, the first of which was: At what point does it become irresponsible not to compare Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people with the genocide westerners know best: the Nazi Holocaust? (I recommend that you read the other five!)

We have long since passed every one of those points. Yesterday I was on a train and I came very close to standing up and addressing the other passengers about the genocide and our collective silence and complicity. But instead, out of some horribly misplaced fear and cowardice, I sat silently. Why? To save myself embarrassment? At what point, I have been asking myself for months, do I finally start speaking out loud, addressing my fellow citizens in super markets, at the bank, on trains about the genocide the U.S. (my country) is enabling? At what point do I find the courage to pollute the polite sanitized silence of public space with the terrible truths and quit allowing myself and others to maintain our comfortable complicit silence.

This genocide in Gaza is about every single one of us, like it or not. Because if we do not make genocide an election issue in any Western country, if we do not care, if we do not cross our personal abyss and “pollute the polite sanitized silence of public space”, if we do not demand of those who want to be “leaders” the highest moral standards, then each and every one of us is as guilty as the soldier who fires the bullet, the pilot who drops the bombs, the general who gives the orders, the political leader who signs the bill. In doing so, we fail the Palestinians who need all the help in the world. We fail humanity. Worst of all, we fail ourselves.

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