Does Biden’s Victory Offer Any Hope to Palestinians?
Occupied Palestine Might Foretell the Future of Increasingly “Occupied” America
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike: Chronicles of a Self-Serving Environmentalist)
During his campaigns in 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders regularly pleaded for treating the Palestinians with dignity. Referring to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, he declared, “This occupation must end,” and referred to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as a racist.
Following Sanders’ defeat in the 2020 primaries, his rival Joe Biden ordered the removal of any reference to the Israeli occupation from his campaign program just days before it was released on July 15.
The Trump administration went further to crush the Palestinians, with a blitz of bilateral agreements between Israel and anti-Palestinian Arab monarchies, while his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo openly supported the Israeli settler movement.
Israel once garnered sympathy for being surrounded by enemy states. Today, it’s the Palestinians who are encircled by hostile Arab nations.
And things are becoming even worse for the Palestinians. As Common Dreams reported, “With World’s Eyes on US Election, Israel Bulldozes West Bank Village in Biggest Single Demolition in 10 Years.” This Israeli action destroyed homes, animal shelters, latrines and solar panels. Thus Israel’s right-wing, pro-colonial regime acts with impunity, largely propped up uncritically by American governments of both parties.
Ever since the release of Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2007), it has become mainstream to oppose the Israeli settlements, except in the American electoral system, which is the outlier in world opinion. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, American electoral politics are the dominant obstacle to justice in the Middle East. Israeli peace activists also recognize that in the long run such an unbalanced U.S. policy will hurt Israel as well.
Even when Palestinians have been mentioned in previous election campaigns, the perverse Israeli assault on vital water rights (with dire consequences to the health and food security of Palestinians) is never at issue. According to Amnesty International:
While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and water network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements — that are illegal under international law. The Israeli state-owned water company Mekorot has systematically sunk wells and tapped springs in the occupied West Bank to supply its population, including those living in illegal settlements with water for domestic, agricultural and industrial purposes. While Mekorot sells some water to Palestinian water utilities [at exorbitant prices], the amount is determined by the Israeli authorities.
The go-to source for methodical recording of life under the occupation is the courageous Israeli NGO B’tselem. Since 1989 it has been “documenting human rights violations that come under Israel’s purview as the occupying power.”
This NGO continues to report on the entire range of Israeli human-rights violations, such as state-backed settler violence, home demolition as collective punishment, open fire policy, expulsions, administrative detention (imprisonment without charges), torture and abuse in interrogation, military courts, bombing of crowded areas and, since B’tselem objectively records everything, attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinians.
The vast majority of American voters have never heard of B’tselem, which calls for ending the occupation:
“Israel’s ongoing, prolonged control over millions of people, whose lives are subject to its wants and needs, is unjustifiable, inexcusable and unacceptable.”
Since the American government is largely responsible for supporting the Israeli occupation, both financially and diplomatically, it is outrageous that the victims of this occupation, the Palestinians, received no empathy and not even a mention in the Biden vs. Trump election campaign.
The Palestinians are the big losers in this election.
With “occupied territories” banished from the electoral lexicon, the only remaining option would be a one-state solution that grants one person one vote, as in South Africa. Nobel Peace Prize winner and anti-apartheid activist Bishop Desmond Tutu has compared the Israeli occupation to South African apartheid.
In the long run Israel might effectively bulldoze away its own identity as a nation. By chipping away at the West Bank and establishing settlement control over land, roads and water, the two-state solution looks dead. That means there is only one state. If that state were to be a democracy, the Palestinians would have the same rights as Israelis to put up candidates and vote.
Ralph Nader has eloquently noted other ways annexations will hurt Israelis.
“Domestically, a majority of American Jews oppose this annexation and other Israeli policies that seriously harm Palestinians and also undermine democratic freedoms in Israel.”
With both major American parties accepting annexation, and thus abandoning the two-state solution, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has become, by default, the sole means for getting Israel to respect international law.
Incoming Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who supported the catastrophic Iraq and Libya wars, is not known for empathy toward the Palestinians.
Empathy for the Palestinians may only develop when we all become Palestinians. In the absence of a large economic stimulus package in the USA, unemployed workers, victims of systemic racism, indebted students, evicted renters and those who have become bankrupt from healthcare debt will have a taste of what daily life is like in an occupied territory. But in the U.S. case, the occupiers are the 1%, the American financial, tech and lobbying elites who have profited handsomely from the pandemic.
How Israel Aids in the Occupation of America: Knee on the Neck of the 99%
How Israel Aids in the Occupation of America: Knee on the Neck of the First Amendment
With a dozen or so exceptions, such as Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib, our elected officials will show no empathy for any Palestinians, not the ones in the Middle East nor their pandemic-stricken brothers and sisters in Occupied America.
