We might have collectively blocked the Trump era from our memory, but if he’s allowed to rise to power again because of Biden’s Gaza credentials, a much worse version of it will play out – both at home and abroad
Linda Dayan
Haaretz
As someone living in a country rocked by war, political instability and the disintegration of democracy, sometimes my American friends and acquaintances will declare something that makes me want to launch myself through their phone screens and strangle them a little bit.
America is a young (248 today!) and thoroughly imperfect democracy. But it is stable enough that a subset of citizens with strong morals and convictions are comfortable saying that they will not vote at all if it means casting a ballot for President Joe Biden because of his Gaza policy. And when they say that, I see red.
That is because if they stick to their guns, they too will likely be seeing red. The United States, unfortunately, has a two-party system. Biden is currently polling a few points behind former President Donald Trump, and such a principled stand against the Democratic incumbent is all the more likely to hand the country to the Republicans once again.
There are reasons – and many of them are very good – not to want a second Biden term. His performance in the presidential debate caused a national shudder so massive that it practically registered on the Richter scale. He is clearly not as sharp as he once was. And, yes, he has been a key ally to Israel in the war on Hamas, and the weapons his administration supplies Jerusalem are a source of suffering and devastation in Gaza.
But at this point, it doesn’t look like he’s stepping down and letting another Democrat take the helm. Not voting for him will be a de-facto vote for Trump, who during that same disastrous debate said that Biden “said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas. Actually, Israel is the one that wants to keep going, and you should let them go and let them finish the job.” And that’s not going to be very good for the Palestinians at all.
Nor is having a president who used the national group as a slur, as Trump also did during the debate, painting his rival as “like a Palestinian, but they don’t like him because he’s a very bad Palestinian, he’s a weak one.” It is almost as if the man who signed an executive order to keep people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States is not a friend to Arabs.
There is also domestic policy. Roe v. Wade was overturned thanks to Trump’s past Supreme Court nominees – a decision that has had massive consequences. This time around, he is pledging halts to immigration as well as deportations of anti-Israel protesters on student visas in the United States. He has also said he would take action to make transgender healthcare significantly harder to access, and ramp up oil drilling.
I may not live in the United States anymore, but I would still like it to be the safest, sanest version of itself. We might have collectively blocked the Trump era from our memory, but if he’s allowed to rise to power again because of Biden’s Gaza credentials, a much worse version of it will play out – both at home and abroad. The accelerationist dream will never come true: Letting anti-democratic forces win in America will not engender a leftist revolution, nor will it free Palestine.