Meanwhile, in Gaza
How many children should die during our presidential campaign?
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is riding on a wave of enthusiasm. One consequence of this is that she has to a great extent been able to avoid speaking specifically about issues. The issues themselves, however, are still there.
On July 23, just after Joe Biden announced he would not run for reelection, a coalition of America’s biggest labor unions, representing six million workers, released a letter calling on the US government to halt military aid to Israel. On July 31, the UN published a report detailing the extensive use of torture against thousands of Palestinians who are prisoners of the Israeli government. This week, Kamala Harris’s national security adviser confirmed that she does not support an arms embargo on Israel. Also this week, the US government released another $3.5 billion to Israel to be spent on weapons.
Here are some pictures of what we are paying for in Gaza. These pictures, which are all from Getty, were taken in the past week, as Kamala Harris began campaigning in earnest.
How many of your children would you allow to be killed in order to give Kamala Harris more time to think about the possibility of cutting off military aid to Israel? How many of your child’s legs would it be acceptable to blow off in order to ensure that Kamala Harris does not experience any political discomfort on this issue? Who is more deserving of empathy: Kamala Harris’s campaign manager, or the mother sitting in the dirty and overcrowded hospital with her injured and traumatized child? Every single day that passes without a change in US policy represents more civilians blown to pieces by bombs that you and I pay for.
Kamala Harris has been the vice president of the United States for the entire time that these atrocities have been occurring. She has said she is unwilling to change Joe Biden’s policy of supplying the weapons that have killed nearly 40,000 people in Gaza so far. Donald Trump did not do this. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did. You may say, “Donald Trump would be worse.” So? What does that statement mean to the grandmother mourning her dead grandson? Should the mother whose child was crushed by concrete when their house was bombed by US-supplied weapons take comfort in that theoretical comparison? If I shoot you in the face and then say, “The other guy would have shot you twice,” is that a sufficient answer?
Kamala Harris and her campaign want to minimize this issue. They want to talk about it as little as possible. The activists who are protesting and making noise and disrupting her campaign appearances are the only significant force that are making the Democratic Party at large face this issue publicly. Those activists are deserving of your respect. There is a very clear way to get people to stop protesting: Stop sending Israel the money and weapons that allow them to carry out this atrocity. Every child that dies as a result of the Biden administration’s failure to make this policy decision is a moral weight that Kamala Harris deserves to carry. The children in Gaza are no different from your own children. Would any of the political explanations of the choices being made on Gaza policy satisfy you if the dead child was your own?
See you at the DNC.
Also
Related: The Point of Politics Is to Stop This; It Would Be a Shame if You Sacrificed All This Good Domestic Policy in Order to Kill a Bunch of Kids; Don’t Make Your Voters Step Over Dead Bodies.
This week I went on Doug Henwood’s radio show to debate the mythical idea of a “working class Republican agenda” with Sohrab Ahmari. You can listen to that here. I also spoke to Forthright Radio about my book, and you can listen to that here. My book about the labor movement, “The Hammer,” is available for order wherever books are sold. I’ll be announcing a few new book tour dates in Vegas, Florida, and elsewhere soon.
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Thank you, Hamilton. Thank you for recognizing the protesters deserve respect for trying to force the Democratic Party to account. I’ve been involved in multiple actions & protests every single month since October now, trying everything from phone calls to actually switching my party registration from Independent to Democratic so I could participate in the Uncommitted Vote movement in my state, to being arrested at the Senate. The level of disrespect & maybe worse, contemptible silence, I’ve received back, including from friends & family, has been extremely depressing. I’ll keep going, because my respect & concern for the Palestinian people is much more powerful than that disrespect (& frankly my “sacrifice” is embarrassingly small), but it’s encouraging to get a supportive message from journalists like you.
It’s been maddening watching a party I’ve always supported prop up and fund a genocide and bat away any and all criticisms of it. It feels like the Democratic Party at large has long been just putting out fires rather than having a long vision, and now they aren’t even visionary enough to see a world where we don’t send weapons and billions of dollars so that Israel can slaughter children and entire families. It’s so disheartening and rings so hollow, especially when we basically just switched from a geriatric president’s genocidal policy to a girl boss one.