If those
organizations and leaders don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, it’s
time to get off the sidelines and join the fight to stop the genocide.
The election is over. Trump won. While many in the United States are justifiably filled with fear and dread about another Trump presidency, our Palestinian and Lebanese neighbors are also filled with fear and dread about the U.S.-made bombs falling on their families.
“We cannot stand by as the United States supplies weapons used by the Israeli military to devastate Palestinian communities, wiping out entire families and targeting schools, homes and refugee camps,” urges Sandra Tamari, Executive Director of the Palestinian-led Adalah Justice Project.
“Progressive organizations that have remained silent must act now to block the arms shipments fueling these atrocities,” Tamari says.
Stefanie Fox, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, is similarly furious that the election provided an excuse for so many to keep quiet about Gaza.
“While the U.S. media turned its eyes to this election,” Fox says, “the Israeli government expanded its genocide in Gaza and carried out mass exterminations of Palestinians in Northern Gaza.”
“Right now is the moment for everyone to recommit to organizing to stop the flow of U.S. weapons to the Israeli government,” Fox says, “forcing the government to finally use this leverage is the only way to end these atrocities.”
Indeed, while progressive organizations were turning out the vote for Vice President Harris, Israel extended its scorched-earth campaign across Palestine and into Lebanon with weapons provided by the Biden-Harris administration. The scale of the devastation is unfathomable.
While the official numbers show Israel has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, those numbers are likely a dramatic undercount. Nearly the entire population of Gaza has been displaced and more than 1.8 million face extreme hunger.
The acting United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Joyce Msuya, warned last month that “The entire population of north Gaza is at risk of dying.” The day after the U.S. Presidential election, the Israeli army overtly confirmed its plans to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza, with military officials announcing “the complete evacuation” of the area and saying “there is no intention of allowing residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.”
Since October 2023, the U.S. government has provided Israel with at least $18 billion in weapons—much of it in violation of both U.S. and international law. Biden’s absolute support has emboldened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Our government has continued to provide Israel with weapons even after the Israeli Knesset banned the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from providing humanitarian aid and assistance in Palestine, likely in violation of international law. In fact, Israel has used weapons we supplied to bomb UN-run schools, blow up hospitals and launch air strikes on marked Red Cross and Red Crescent ambulances.
American arm sales keep flowing to Israel, even as the country repeats this same playbook in Lebanon, targeting healthcare and emergency response infrastructure in particular.
President Joe Biden’s unwavering support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who so plainly wanted to see Trump reelected, tore the Democratic Party coalition apart and alienated key constituencies. It was not just Arabs and Muslims who opposed his material support for Israel’s genocide. A June CBS News poll found that a whopping 77% of Democratic Party voters opposed sending weapons and supplies to Israel, as did 75% of Black voters, 64% of Hispanic voters, and 77% of voters under the age of 30.
In fact, a YouGov/Underpin poll released just five days before the election showed that 63% of strongly pro-Palestine voters in swing states who were still undecided would have been “much more likely” to vote for Harris if she supported an arms embargo.
Biden must heal these divisions before he leaves office for the Democrats to stand any chance at having a united front against fascism during Trump’s second term.
“The movement to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been one of the largest anti-war movements in history,” says Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center. “The energy and momentum of our movement would be critical to confronting the MAGA threat in the coming days.”
Instead of thumbing their nose at the Palestinian liberation movement, Biden and the Democrats need to start to repair the damage caused by their unabashed support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To do that, they must immediately enact an arms embargo. Even if Trump eventually reverses it, it will be an important sign that the party is finally listening to its base.
“Our work as a movement,” says In These Times columnist Eman Abdelhadi, who also organizes with Faculty for Justice in Palestine, “is to pivot to organizing a power base that we can leverage to apply structural pressure on the ruling class. First things first, we need to accelerate the demand for a weapons embargo nationally and mass divestment and boycott at every other institution.”
The National Steering Committee of Students for Justice in Palestine echoed this sentiment in a written statement to In These Times, saying, “Trump’s presidency will only serve to strengthen our call for divestment, an immediate arms embargo, and sovereignty for the Palestinian people.”
This month, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is planning to force a vote in the Senate to reject a $20 billion arms deal with Israel that Biden has already approved. This will be the first time in history there will be a standalone up-or-down vote in Congress on weapons shipments to Israel.
One concrete step we can all take right now is to push our U.S. Senators to endorse and support that effort.
“If the administration has been working tirelessly for a cease-fire, now would be the time to show it by enforcing an immediate arms embargo,” says Loan Tran, National Director of Rising Majority, which is a coalition of movement organizations on the Left.
“Our elected officials must vote to stop these weapons. Pick up the phone and call your senators. Sit in at their offices. Flood their email inboxes,” Tran says. “All of us must make sure they don’t have a minute of peace until this genocide ends.”
Fox affirms those organizing efforts and says that “in just a couple of weeks, the Senate will be forced to answer the question ‘Do you really want to keep sending more weapons to Israel?’ and it is up to us to organize with everything we have to make sure their answer is a resounding ‘No.’”
A Democratic president that many of us fought to get elected in 2020 is responsible for a genocide that we are all witnessing in real time. It is our responsibility to make it stop.
Many of us have held back over the past few months because we did not want to jeopardize the election. The election is over, but the bombs are still dropping. As you read this article, there are people trapped under the rubble of demolished buildings, slowly dying. We paid for that.
After Israel carried out horrific massacres in the Sabra neighborhood of Beirut and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp in 1982, June Jordan wrote:
I claim responsibility for the Israeli crimes against humanity, because I am an American and American monies made these atrocities possible. I claim responsibility for Sabra and Shatila, because, clearly, I have not done enough to halt heinous episodes of holocaust and genocide around the globe. I accept this responsibility, and I work for the day when I may help to save any one other life, in fact. I believe that you cannot claim a people and not assume responsibility for what that people do or don’t do. You cannot claim to be human and not assume responsibility for the value of all human life.
All of us must assume responsibility for our roles in Israel’s genocide. That starts with working to end the genocide right now by organizing for an immediate arms embargo.
We can stop the bombs from falling — if we stop giving them to the people dropping them.
>> The article above was written by Saqib Bhatti, and is reprinted from In These Times.
Comments
Post a Comment