How Can You Vote for the People Committing a Genocide?

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 14, 2024 | 1:35pm
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Elections Democratic Party
How Can You Vote for the People Committing a Genocide?

Just before going to bed last night, I watched someone hooked up to an IV burn to death in yet another Israeli bombing of a hospital in Gaza (Warning: graphic photo here). The horrors in this genocide have been endless, but this feels like a new, more sinister development, where Israel is publicly saying they are blocking food for 13 days and counting, and CNN and the Associated Press either hide Israeli complicity from their headlines altogether or downplay Benjamin Netanyahu’s final solution for northern Gaza as just a “plan,” all while the United States offers nothing more than their hypocritical words which have proven to be useless, feckless and insulting as Israel bombards hospitals and the tent hospitals that replace them.

If Russia were starving hundreds of thousands of people you can bet your bottom dollar that CNN and the AP would correctly use the term “war crime” in a headline, but when it’s Israel, all of a sudden that term is largely absent unless Hamas is also accused of them too. Here’s how journalists at Drop Site News described Israel’s massacre at Al Aqsa Hospital in Gaza last night, where the Tel Aviv-headquartered IDF yet again used the excuse that Hamas militants were supposedly embedded among civilians, therefore they can kill whoever they want:

At least four people died and 70 others, mostly women and children, were wounded with many suffering severe third degree burns. The death toll is expected to rise dramatically, as local medical officials have described many of the injured as being in critical condition. The hospital was already operating well over capacity and many patients are treated on the floors or in hallways. “We’re already dealing with the overflow from mass casualty incidents and the general baseline level of trauma that we get and then you add to that we have patients who get significant, high percentage burns. Unfortunately their fate is sealed, they won’t even make it to the ICU. They will die. Many children, many women with significant burns die. That’s the reality on the ground here,” Dr. Mohammed Tahir, a surgeon from the UK who is volunteering at Al Aqsa Hospital, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a horror show here. It doesn’t feel real anymore. Honestly, sometimes I feel this is not real life, that this can go on and this degree of suffering is allowed to happen in this world. It’s unimaginable.”

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ administration is abetting the Israeli genocide of Palestine, allowing Israel to intentionally starve 400,000 people in the north for nearly two weeks and counting while calling on the farce that is international law the week after Israel fired on U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon (twice). The American press has largely functioned as a propaganda organ for the Israeli government this past year, whitewashing their crimes against humanity, while an acceptable form of antisemitism has taken root amongst this country’s power centers invested in the Israeli colonial project. Future historians will compare New York Times apologia of Israel’s genocide to Haaretz reporting significant chunks of Israeli depravity to demonstrate Israel’s fundamental colonial nature.

This is the most horrific thing I have ever seen. It’s literal Nazi shit.

Kamala Harris said on The View last week that she would do “nothing” different than Joe Biden, and the facts that much of her campaign and staff are still filled with Bidenworld and her platform says she will further Biden’s policies buttresses that notion. Taken at her word, the path ahead in a Harris administration is clear: the barbaric images from Gaza will endure unabated and Israel’s most extreme elements will continue to be emboldened by an American empire in decline pretending it cares about international law as we put troops on the ground and sleepwalk towards outright war with Iran.

I got my ballot this weekend. Despite all my bluster on the internet, if you looked at my voting record, you’d never know I was one of those annoying online lefties always parading around uncomfortable facts about the sadistic United States government. When it comes to voting, I accept the strategic nature of it, and generally do not ascribe much of a moral value to my vote when it matters. I have been a good soldier and voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 2004.

On my ballot, every bubble next to my local Democrats is already filled, while the one next to Kamala Harris’s name is still blank.

I do not know what I am going to do yet. My first article for new Splinter was “Should you vote for Joe Biden?” and since then I have made no progress coming to grips with this hellish reality we are presented where we must deny Trump the presidency so we can hand it to someone helping to perpetuate a genocide.

I don’t need to be lectured about the danger of Trump. I’ve already detailed for Splinter how he’s likely to bring us the worst thing that can happen to an economy and I also believe that a man with a long-held fascination with America’s nuclear arsenal is likely to use it against Iran. I earned my digital badge of honor writing during the Trump administration and remember more from those insane days than most people have forgotten. I covered the entire Russia saga for Paste Politics and am probably the only lefty on the web who thinks there was really something to all that. You don’t have to tell me orange man bad, I am well aware.

But Trump never did anything as evil as what Biden has aided in Gaza. I can’t abide by this. As a Jew it is doubly painful to see how this failed policy to use any real American power as leverage over an indicted autocrat gleefully perpetuating a genocide is setting back the Jewish cause for at least a generation. The Jewish ethnostate of Israel is the world’s premier symbol of apartheid, genocide and western colonialist hypocrisy at least for the rest of my life. It is where the 20th century global order has gone to die, which benefits only the autocratic Chinese state who is also carrying out their own genocide of the Uyghurs. Joe Biden is a foreign policy failure of world-historic proportions and yet Kamala Harris says she would do “nothing” different. Donald Trump set foreign policy back decades and he still didn’t do this much damage to America’s international standing.

For me, not voting for Kamala Harris wouldn’t be about trying to send a message to the Democratic Party or hoping to drag them left or forcing any kind of political outcome. It’s about whether I can look myself in the mirror going forward. After watching the last year unfold, I’ve given up hope that the Democrats in the White House and State Department will change their policies to align with positions that most Democratic and Independent voters agree on. Actions mean more than words, and at this point if you haven’t done anything to really try to stop this, then I can only assume that this is what you want.

Women and children being boiled alive by fire. Entire families buried under rubble, shrapnel from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon’s bombs filling their bodies. Mass starvation as an openly stated policy for over a year with 83 percent of food aid not making it into Gaza, now approaching Israel’s version of its final solution in the north. All done with the explicit support of the Biden-Harris administration.

How am I supposed to vote for this?

If your response is “Trump would be worse,” while I generically agree with that prescription, what specifically would he do to make this worse? After a year of horrors I have never seen before, I cannot envision something worse than this. What’s worse than bombing hospitals housed in tents next to a bombed-out hospital on the near anniversary of a hospital bombing that the U.S. media pretended to give a fuck about? What’s worse than mass starvation as a widespread policy? What’s worse than bringing back polio? What’s worse than killing women and children at a staggeringly higher rate than any war in modern history?

Joe Biden’s entire White House and State Department do not deserve to be in power. They deserve to be locked away in The Hague for the rest of their lives.

I’m not declaring I’m not voting for Kamala Harris yet. I’m certainly not voting for Jill Stein, I respect my own intelligence a lot more than to vote for a vanity candidate for suckers. I’ll write in the name of a Palestinian martyr if I don’t vote for Harris. I just don’t know, three weeks out, whether I can live with myself if I voted for the administration helping to carry out a genocide in my people’s name. I feel a deep responsibility as an American man to protect vulnerable people in America from Trump, but if it comes at the expense of the lives of people in Palestine…I just don’t know right now. I really don’t.

I know Democratic partisans are well-trained to chastise voters when feelings like this are raised, but fun fact: it’s the job of politicians to earn people’s votes, and this administration has had an entire year to show me that they care one iota about Palestinian suffering and their actions prove they do not. They could have earned mine and many others’ votes by doing things that Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did. Those in the Uncommitted Movement did not ask for much, and yet, here we are–still watching a genocide unfold every day with no change in American policy over the last year.

If I lived in a swing state, my strategic logic on voting would come into play and I would be a good soldier again, but I live in one of the 43 states that don’t matter, so I can afford to idealize my vote. In that instance, how could I ever waste it on someone helping to carry out a genocide, while saying there’s “nothing” she would do differently? We’re just supposed to accept the extermination of the Palestinian people as a tradeoff for denying Donald Trump the presidency? What a hopeless world we live in.

 
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