Trump picks a fervent Israel first team, but the Democrats brought us here
In all the thoughtful - and less thoughtful - analysis and punditry following the US election, I haven’t seen anyone contemplate what it might actually have meant for the country, its people and their place in the world, if Kamala Harris’s forces of “joy” had somehow overcome Donald Trump’s forces of “darkness”.
Let’s stop, just for a minute, and consider the implications. Registering joy at a Harris win would have meant - what, exactly?
No matter the kind of mental, intellectual, emotional or political acrobatics involved, at least part of that joy would also have meant explicit support for the US participation in, and enabling of, the Israeli genocide still being perpetrated against Palestinians.
Would such a result not have also fully validated and presented, in a completely unadulterated fashion, the utter rot at the core of US policies and so many of its institutions?
Would it not, then, have dug an even deeper hole out of which an expiring US empire must finally find ways to climb out of? And lamenting her loss, as so many are now doing, has precisely the same meaning. There can be no other logical possibility.
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While the Democrats presented this election as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, at no point did they allow democracy to function within their own party, opting instead for the old adage from the US war in Vietnam of “destroying the village in order to save it”.
Beginning with the subversion of their strongest candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, back in 2016, the party elite continued their long-standing domination over the electoral process.
In 2020, campaigning from the basement with tightly controlled media and public exposure, Biden’s lacklustre campaign took off only after relentless focus on racial politics and the endorsement of Senator Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.
Unhinged Democrats
To come full circle, through an internal coup against Biden this year - after the party and the media protected him from scrutiny over his mental decline for years - the same interchangeable party donors and “leaders” who ditched Sanders (all unelected, of course), chose Harris as the candidate, without a single citizen having cast a vote for her.
Harris’s embrace of Republican politician Liz Cheney - while completely logical in a world where the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations helped to rehabilitate both her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and former President George W Bush, criminals from a previous war - was just another nail in the coffin of her moribund campaign.
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This is not even to mention the muzzling of Palestinian speech at the Democratic National Convention and elsewhere, since, after all, Harris was speaking.
Pundits and party leaders hectored the electorate non-stop to vote for Harris, primarily because of her identity and because she wasn’t Trump, rather than for her performance or her policies. Then, they turned around in the most unhinged fashion and blamed everyone but themselves for results that were obvious to anyone standing outside their media and ideological bubble.
With little, but still enough, time in office remaining, will the Biden administration dare to change course, even slightly?
Almost instantly, the usual suspects have started frantically and shamelessly fundraising in order to “safeguard” the very democracy they’ve been so busy destroying.
Pen America, after being castigated and boycotted by writers for its failure to take a position on the genocide in Palestine, is now concerned about “new threats to free expression we know are to come”, and about “authoritarians” who “pursue journalists”.
With his signature clarity, journalist Jonathan Cook’s recent column, titled “A year late, the Guardian finally permits us to use the term ‘genocide’”, excoriates the policing of language in “progressive” circles.
We can expect to see many more such instances of hypocrisy in action, of greater and greater consequence, as liberals and progressives all attempt to score points following the US election, and return us to the sickening cycle of consensus - each hurling invective from their own side, with fewer and fewer standing on principle.
Apocalyptic cruelty
All of this, of course, has been happening against the backdrop of the truly hallucinatory and apocalyptic cruelty and violence the current US administration continues to support, enable and fund with American taxpayer dollars, as Israel keeps upping the ante on its total impunity - as if daring the world to not just weakly say “enough”, but to actually try to stop its genocidal rampage.
With little, but still enough, time in office remaining, will the Biden administration dare to change course, even slightly?
As Israel continues decimating Gaza, separating men from women, executing people of all ages, assassinating journalists and academics, and destroying what is left of the healthcare system while preventing food and medicine from entering, will there be even a word of rebuke to the perpetrators - or a word of hope, sympathy or comfort to those being slaughtered, as if any of that would even matter at this point?
Israel’s genocidal intent is crystal clear. Even university students in Gaza, already attending or accepted at schools all over the world, cannot leave to resume or start their studies. In this way, in addition to having physically destroyed Gaza’s educational system and killed students, faculty and administrators, Israel wants to prevent any possibility of a future for Palestine.
And what about Lebanon? As Hezbollah pushes Israeli ground troops out of southern Lebanon, Israel continues its cowardly tactic of aerial bombardment, destroying villages, decimating cities and infrastructure, targeting journalists and healthcare workers, and killing civilians.
But what is there to show for it? Has this strategy quelled the resistance, or prevented rockets from raining down on northern Israel? Has it allowed Israeli residents to return to their homes?
The path ahead
While president-elect Trump might very well have the political will to reach a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine, his initial cabinet appointments point to a fervent Israel first, rather than America first, agenda - solidifying the immovable uni-party's bedrock policy of absolute Israeli impunity, no matter what it does.
Beyond the relentless and expected continuity of the US-enabled Israeli death machine, there is much that could take place between now and inauguration day.
In the background, the response of western mainstream media and politicians to the Israeli footballers’ rampage in Amsterdam - presented as a “pogrom” in which the perpetrators were portrayed as victims - points to a future of oncoming psy-ops and the production of “antisemitism” at an industrial scale, in an attempt to raise from the dead the idea of Israel as a “safe haven” for “persecuted” Jews.
These manoeuvres will be met on the ground with further acquiescence and invention from the media, as well as new laws equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism; new campaigns to ban various kinds of speech; and further violence directed at anyone standing up in protest, not to mention new forms of military coercion and destruction, aided by technologies field-tested by Israeli occupation forces, who will go down in historical infamy.
The US isn’t even close to accommodating a multipolar world in which the Israeli state in its current form - like the French occupation of Algeria, or the apartheid regime in South Africa - dissolves into the dustbin of history.
But ultimately, it is the peoples of the region, along with their supporters around the world, who will decide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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