Supporters of Palestine in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza have gotten in the news with their contentious protests on college campuses, but they should temper their anger about President Joe Biden’s support for Israel, when the alternative is Donald Trump, who undoubtedly would make things much worse.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have been calling Biden “Genocide Joe” for his role in arming the Israel Defense Forces, which reportedly have killed more than 34,000 Gazans since Oct. 7, when Israel declared war in retaliation for the surprise attack by Hamas fighters who killed 1,143 people in southern Israel, including 695 Israeli civilians (36 children and 270 fans at a music festival), 71 foreign nationals and 376 members of Israeli security forces, and left 3,400 wounded. Sexual assaults of Israeli women also were reported. Hamas took 252 hostages from Israel (including 30 children) across the border into Gaza.
Arguably, Hamas would have caused more civilian casualties if they had an air force, but they got the disproportionate response they expected from Israel. Hamas, supported by Iran, continues to fire missiles into Israel, and retaliation after the Hamas attack succeeded in sidelining the normalization of relations between Arab nations and Israel, which had started under the Trump administration when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accounts, bilateral agreements with Israel, in September 2020. Sudan joined in October 2020 and Morocco joined in December 2020.
Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken was working on normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but in June 2023, Blinken warned Israel that rising tensions with the Palestinians, including settlement of Israelis in the West Bank, threatened the expansion of normalization agreements with Arab nations. Speaking alongside Blinken earlier in June 2023, the Saudi Foreign Minister had stated that “without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people ... any normalization will have limited benefits.”
After Oct. 7, the Saudi demand for a pathway to a Palestinian state, as a condition for normal relations with Israel, threatens to put the United States on a collision course with Netanyahu, who has said he opposes any postwar plan that includes a Palestinian state, Isaac Stanley-Becker noted in the Washington Post Feb. 10.
The Abraham Accords represented “one of the reasons” for the Oct. 7 attack, which “obstructed and complicated all strategies and agreements … that deny the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people,” said Abbas Zaki, a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, the political faction that controls the Palestinian Authority. The attack, he added in an interview, “put the Palestinian issue back on the international agenda,” Zaki told the Post.
But Biden has been urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a right-wing coalition, to moderate attacks against purported Hamas targets in Gaza and focus on negotiating with Hamas to free the hostages Hamas is still holding.
Trump is a longtime ally of Netanyahu, and in March he called on Israel to “finish up” the war in Gaza, mainly because it was bad PR.
In an interview with Time magazine in April, Trump said he was “not sure a two-state solution anymore is going to work.” He also said he wouldn’t hesitate to use the National Guard against pro-Palestinian protesters, while also leaving open the possibility of using the broader US military against them and deporting Muslims when possible.
Seeking to take advantage of domestic unrest, Trump recently said the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 was “like a peanut compared to the riots and the anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our country,” Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post. In recent months, Trump said Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and boasted about cutting off aid to Palestinians. And he has vowed, if elected, to reimpose his travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and “expand it even further.”
So it’s entirely consistent that, in Wisconsin on May 1, Trump said he’s “restoring the travel ban, suspending refugee admissions and keeping terrorists the hell out of our country.” He went on: “We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad. Look at Paris, look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.”
Trump, on Sean Hannity’s show, called the demonstrators at Columbia “paid agitators” and “brainwashed.” At his Wisconsin rally, he condemned the “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers at Columbia and other colleges.” He called for authorities to “vanquish the radicals,” many of whom “come from foreign countries,” Milbank noted.
This is the same guy who called thousands of National Guard troops to Washington and federal police to Oregon in 2020 to combat racial-justice demonstrators after the George Floyd killing; who held a Bible-wielding photo op in Lafayette Square after authorities cleared a peaceful demonstration with tear gas; who, according to his own former defense secretary, suggested to military leaders that they shoot demonstrators; who calls the free press the “enemy of the American people”; who defended the “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville; and who called those convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “hostages,” Milbank noted.
The pro-Palestinian protesters’ disdain for Biden is reminiscent of the antipathy of protesters against the Vietnam war to Hubert Humphrey, who was to be nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Humphrey was a liberal, but as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president he was reviled by antiwar leftists — who were unaware that Johnson’s efforts to end the war were sabotaged by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The chaotic protests outside the convention hall, magnified by the notorious Chicago police and televised nationwide, undermined the Democratic nominee and gave Nixon a head start going into the general election.
In late October 1968, as Johnson was nearing a deal to end the war, Nixon ordered H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, to find ways to sabotage Johnson’s peace talks, so a frustrated American electorate would turn to the Republicans as their only hope to end the war, Anna Chennault, a Republican fundraiser, became Nixon’s back channel to the South Vietnamese government, and was heard telling the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington to “hold on … We are gonna win.” — but Johnson hesitated to expose it because he had no proof Nixon had personally directed her actions.
Nixon narrowly won the presidency, and the Vietnam war went on four more years, costing 24,000 more American lives, for a total of 58,220 US military fatalities, 500,000 more Vietnamese lives (Vietnam’s estimate), and hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Laos. The Paris Peace Talks finally called the end of the war in January 1973, along pretty much the same lines as the Johnson administration could have gotten in October 1968.
Trump operatives will surely be encouraging, and perhaps ensuring, a replay of chaos in Chicago in August to undermine Biden.
Don’t be fooled. Biden will try to do what’s best for Israel and Palestinian statehood. Trump will do what’s best for himself, and send in the National Guard to clear out protesters, while his son-in-law is looking forward to developing beachfront property on the Gaza Strip as soon as Netanyahu can clear out the Gazans. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2024
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