With the US Election Over, Israel’s Genocide Continues With No End in Sight
My Palestinian American family is in great pain. Every member of my Arab American community lost a relative or a friend during the past 13 months. We are torn to pieces and outraged by the U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza and the ravages wrought in southern Lebanon. Having lost several family members and friends — among them artists, teachers and academics I’ve known and writers with whom I’ve worked — I too wake up every morning in pain.
I am in pain because my Palestinian parents died before they could realize their dream of returning to their home in West Jerusalem. My father used to lament and say: “We were expelled from our home even though we had nothing to do with the Holocaust. And yet, we Palestinians have paid dearly for Europe’s crimes.” I am in pain because my people have experienced unimaginable suffering for 76 years with no end in sight — especially those living and dying in Gaza today, who were expelled from their homes in 1948 and 1967 and have been under siege for the past 17 years. They have not known a single day of peace in their lives and are now suffering from a live-streamed annihilation in front of the eyes of the entire world.
Every day in Gaza is a day of massacres, slaughter, death and destruction. Every day in Congress and the White House is a day of complicity, violating U.S. and international law by continuing to arm and support Israel’s ongoing genocide.
Both major political parties support funding and arming Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, against the will of the majority of the American people. Since October 2023, U.S. taxpayers have paid for 70 percent of Israel’s military assault, which has resulted in the total destruction of Gaza, the death of at least 43,000 Palestinians and the displacement of nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s residents. According to the UN, 96 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.15 million people face acute levels of food insecurity as a result of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.
In southern Lebanon, Baalbek and parts of the Bekaa Valley, Israeli airstrikes have obliterated 37 towns and villages, including historic sites — claiming that Hezbollah turned them into fortified combat zones — killed more than 3,000 people, maimed and wounded thousands more and displaced over 1.2 million in a country that was already bleeding from an economic collapse and political paralysis.
The U.S. is the only reason Israel has been able to sustain its genocidal practices for 13 months.
In the 2024 presidential election, racism, reproductive rights, immigrants and border control, gun laws, the economy, our constitutional democracy — even fascism — were on the ballot. Genocide was not.
We Are Unlikely to See a Change in US Foreign Policy Toward Israel
Israel is hell bent on a war of total destruction and ethnic cleansing. It will do so with the overwhelming support of the majority of Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Congress. It will do so under the watchful eye of the president of the United States who will not have the will or the courage to stop the Israeli assaults, displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the ongoing Israeli land grab. For more than a year now, Joe Biden has not wavered in his material support of Israel as it conducts genocide. We can expect that support to continue under Donald Trump when he takes office again.
Since October 7, Donald Trump has urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to “finish the job” and “do what you have to do.” On the campaign trail, Trump promised “We’re going to do a lot for Israel; we’re going to take care of Israel.”
U.S. unconditional support will continue in order to help Israel achieve its endgame of the “out-of-state” solution: emptying Gaza of Palestinians and continuing its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem — and now southern Lebanon — in order to realize its ultimate goal of a greater Jewish ethnostate.
While Trump was in office, Netanyahu called him “the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” He called Trump’s victory this week “history’s greatest comeback” and “a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.” Other members of his far-right coalition have also expressed their praise for Trump and their excitement for his return to office.
Fighting US Complicity Must Continue Beyond the Election
Kamala Harris lost the presidential election in part because the Democratic Party has lost touch with the American people and abandoned the working class in exchange for war profiteers. The Biden-Harris administration’s active support for the Gaza genocide caused a significant shift in the voting patterns of the American Muslim and Arab American communities, which led a large percentage to ditch the Democratic Party. What’s more, Harris suffered a decline in support among young voters, Black voters and other key elements of the Democratic base. With the Vice President running to the right, the Democratic and Republican candidates looked as though they represented two sides of the same coin.
While there are major policy differences between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to domestic issues as well as international affairs, their unconditional support for Israel is not an issue of disagreement.
On the contrary, we’ve seen both parties on the campaign trail vigorously competing with each other to show us who is a better friend to Israel. President-elect Trump even went as far as saying President Biden was “like a Palestinian,” using the word as a slur or an insult to prove his greater love of Israel. Both Trump and Harris are staunch supporters of Israel and both said on numerous occasions that Israel has the “right to defend itself” even though international law clearly prohibits an occupier from bombing the occupied. Both candidates vowed to continue U.S. military aid to Israel and dismissed the calls from the majority of Americans who support a ceasefire and an arms embargo of the Israeli state.
So when it comes to the genocide in Gaza — and the war on Lebanon — Arabs and Arab Americans on the whole already knew their fight would continue regardless of the outcome of the election.
Trump’s Past Actions Give Us a Clue of Future Policy
In 2017, during his first term as president, Donald Trump moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in violation of international law and several UN resolutions. He also suspended U.S. opposition to the establishment and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.
In 2018, in another blow to Palestinians, President Trump shut down the office of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) mission in Washington, D.C.
In 2019, President Trump’s official recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in Syria upended half a century of U.S. Middle East policy.
In 2020, Trump initiated and mediated an agreement known as the Abraham Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that saw the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab countries — the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — breaking a long-held Arab policy of refusing to recognize the Israeli state until Israel ends its occupation.
In the same year, he announced the “Trump peace plan” for the Middle East in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The plan provided for a unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and the principal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, amounting to annexation of roughly 30 percent of the territory. The Palestinians would be offered some desert areas near the Egyptian border, limited sovereignty and a non-contiguous state with numerous Israeli enclaves. The New York Times wrote that “rather than viewing it as a serious blueprint for peace, analysts called it a political document by a president in the middle of an impeachment trial working in tandem with Mr. Netanyahu, a prime minister under criminal indictment who is about to face his third election in a year.”
Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has also offered some signal of what we might expect. When Israel dropped dozens of bunker buster bombs on Beirut in September, killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Kushner called it “the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough” in a statement that flagrantly called for Israel to expand its war across the Middle East with continued U.S. support.
Kushner, who was one of the brokers of the Abraham Accords, went on to say: “The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited. Do not squander this moment.”
What Next for the Palestine Solidarity Movement?
Over the last 13 months, we’ve witnessed incredible solidarity movements, with millions of people in the U.S. and around the globe organizing, marching and protesting against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and its apartheid system and inhumane treatment of Palestinians.
From ending the Vietnam War to dismantling the apartheid regime in South Africa, students have long been at the forefront of movements that made history by speaking up against injustice and endless wars. Today they are proving again to be the conscience of the nation by challenging the genocide in Gaza and standing up against the anti-Palestinian racism on their university campuses as they are being met with increasing repression and violence. Colleges and universities across the country have arrested students for peaceful protests; they have enacted policies that stifle pro-Palestinian activism; and have created a hostile environment for pro-Palestinian students, faculty, staff and members of the community.
Trump’s response to the student protest movement: “Deport pro-Hamas radicals.”
Still, those students remain determined to end the U.S.’s shameful policy of enabling Israel’s genocide and they are clearly not about to give up.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard wrote recently in Haaretz:
“Generations of Israelis will have to live with what we have done in Gaza over the last year … Generations of Israelis will have to explain to their children and grandchildren why we behaved that way. Some will have to explain why they didn’t refuse to bomb. And some will have to explain why they didn’t do more to stop the horror.”
We in the U.S. will also have to explain to our children and grandchildren why our country did nothing to stop the genocide.
While we are embarking on a period of political uncertainty, it is likely that the U.S.’s destructive foreign policy towards the Palestinians will continue. But so will our fight for Palestinian freedom, equality and an end to occupation.