Gaza

The Spectre at the Chicago Feast

I had thought, watching the Democratic National Convention unfold this week, that I would write a piece about the near-miraculous transformation of the Democratic Party into an electoral machine that now has a fighting chance of defeating MAGA extremism in November, and confining Donald Trump to the rubbish heap of history.

I would like to have written about Kamala Harris’s astonishing metamorphosis into Trump’s potential nemesis; about the all-round decency of Tim Walz and his family; about Michelle Obama’s imperious oratory; Elizabeth Warren’s heartfelt speech, or the lucid eloquence, humanity and intelligence of Pete Buttigieg.

All these things were on display last week, and in an era like ours, when the nationalist-populist right galvanizes anger, bitterness, fear and paranoia in pursuit of its destructive political agendas, it was thrilling to see despair turn to hope and belief, to witness politicians and party commit to a different vision of America than the one that Trump and his minions are proposing.

When they fight they win, and I hope the Democrats do win a crushing victory in November, because America and the world needs Trump and Trumpism gone. But beyond the feelgood atmosphere and the hopeful vibes, there was a spectre haunting the feast that cannot and should not be ignored.

Gaza was not present in Chicago, except as a marginalised protest movement. The Palestinians and their supporters were effectively locked out of the convention, to the point when not even a single Palestinian speaker was allowed to address it. This was clearly a political decision from the party leadership, based on the calculation that Palestinian voices would be divisive and disadvantageous.

But even if the new revitalised party of Harris and Walz prefers to ignore it, Gaza was an absent presence on the fringes of the Chicago feast; bloody, battered, traumatised, starved, homeless, bombed from pillar to post, and somehow surviving this ongoing, daily massacre in the war that never ends.

No wonder the Democrats wanted Gaza locked out.

Consider the scale of the devastation. In December last year, Scientists for Global Responsibility estimated that Israel was dropping about 1,200 bombs a day on Gaza - 50 bombs every hour. That same month, the historian of bombing Robert Pape, predicted that Gaza would go down as ‘one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns’, with a rate of destruction comparable to the wartime bombing of Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg

So far, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 40,334 people are known to have been killed in Gaza - about 1.7% of the 2.3 million population of the territory. These figures include 25,000 women and children, but do not include the estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the rubble. Using ‘indirect death’ estimates that it once applied to the Iraq War, the Lancet has estimated that the death toll may rise to 186,000 - 7.9% of the population - due to ‘reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases’.

In the 48 hours before I began writing this piece, Israel killed 69 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 212. Over 100,000 Gazans have been wounded, of whom thousands have lost limbs, including 1,000 children who have had one or both legs amputated.

Today, more than 83 % of the population has been de placed, 59.3% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, and only 13 out of 36 hospitals are partly functional. All this has taken place in a tiny territory of 141 square miles about the same size as Sheffield, with the support of the same governments that once set out to implement ‘regime change’ across the world against ‘dictators who attack their own people.’

If Gaza is a genocide, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has said it might be, then it is a liberal, democratic genocide which has been sanctioned - whether reluctantly or otherwise - by a broad political and media consensus that reaches from Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden to Simon Schama, Tracy Ann Oberman and Tommy Robinson.

When people ask how genocides happen, this is how they happen.

It’s not complicated. You merely have to strip the humanity of an entire group of people, or lower the value of their lives, until you can do whatever you want to do to them and no one will oppose it.

If anyone dares to differ, and criticise this monstrous slaughter, you invoke magic words like ‘Hamas’ and ‘terrorist’ to erase the humanity of the Palestinians. You cry ‘antisemite’ to de-legitimise your critics - any critics. You use the atrocities carried out by your enemies to justify the even greater atrocities committed by your own side.

And very quickly, it becomes entirely logical and inevitable that two million all but defenceless people should be bombed day after day, month after month, in a display of force that is as strategically nonsensical as it is savage and immoral.

Many of these bombs were American bombs - liberal, democratic bombs delivered to a liberal, democratic country to enable it to ‘defend itself’ against a people it has occupied and oppressed for nearly sixty years.

JDAM guidance systems; 4,000 and 2,000 pound bombs; tank shells; components for 155 mm artillery shells; bunker busters; precision-guided munitions, combat aircraft - all these weapons have been transferred to Israel and used in Gaza. Even when the US itself believes that Israel has been violating international humanitarian law with the weapons that it had provided, it has not stopped sending them.

This month the Biden government approved $20bn in arms transfers in anticipation of war with Iran and Hezbollah. This not something that you want to talk about when nominating your presidential candidate. But when I watched the moving three-minute tribute to Joe Biden, I could not help thinking of these bombs.

I thought of Zaheeda, Tariq, Ahmed Abdullah and Mr T, and all the other Palestinians I once knew in Gaza back in the eighties. I thought of the grandmother I met during the first Intifada who once told me that Palestinians would continue to resist even if they had to eat leaves and drink the water from muddy pools.

I wondered, as I have done many times these last ten months, what happened to them, and whether they, their children and grandchildren, have survived this catastrophe.

I don’t think Biden is a bad man. But cruel and evil actions are not carried out by men with horns and tails. Geopolitics follows its own remorseless and pitiless logic that demands stronger and braver people than Biden to challenge the consensus - particularly the consensus that surrounds America’s death-embrace with Israel.

In her speech last week, Kamala Harris promised:

I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7th, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

I don’t defend what Hamas did in October. Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity that day, and unforgivably exposed its population to a war of annihilation, for the sake of a display of performative militarism that was designed to provoke the response it received.

But this banal recitation of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ does not even begin to address the imbalance between occupier and occupied within that equation, and the years of oppression and injustice that preceded October 7th - including the US’s own calamitous role in it. Nor does it question the disproportionate nature of Israel’s response to what happened on that day.

This is what Harris had to say about that response:

At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.

These are weasel words. The ‘scale of suffering’ is indeed heartbreaking and devastating, but it’s not the result of an earthquake or a hurricane. Israel is causing that suffering. And expressions of concern don’t mean much when your government is supplying much of the weaponry responsible for it.

Nor is there any sign that this suffering will end. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was planning to divide Gaza into ‘geographical “islands” or “bubbles” where Palestinians who are unconnected to Hamas can live in temporary shelter while the Israeli military mops up remaining insurgents.’

In these ‘bubbles, ‘ the WSJ suggested:

Palestinian civilians could be confined indefinitely to smaller areas of the Gaza Strip while fighting continues outside, and …Israel’s army could be forced to remain deeply involved in the enclave for years until Hamas is marginalized.

Other Israeli plans for post-war Gaza include hiring a network of local clans to control the strip, re-establishing settlements, and reinstating the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority.

How can the Palestinians obtain ‘dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination’ in these circumstances?

What form will self-determination take if settlers continue to run amok in the West Bank, and the US and Israel decide what kind of government the Palestinians will have? If Israel, the occupying power, must feel ‘secure’, what security does the occupied population deserve? Do the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, or is it only the occupier that has the right to defend itself?

How, if Palestinians are even allowed to remain in Gaza, will they rebuild their schools, their hospitals and neighbourhoods? How will they make a living? Who will treat the wounded, the amputees, and the traumatized?

So many questions.

I didn’t expect Harris or any other Democrat to answer or even raise them in a forum like this. But nothing in her speech, beyond her commitment to a ceasefire, suggests that a Democratic government will do anything to address them in the future.

At present, she remains in Tony Blinken’s handwringing world - wedded to a policy that is a moral stain on her government’s reputation - a policy of geopolitical idiocy that is paving the way for regional war.

I still hope Harris wins. I don’t see what is accomplished by standing back and allowing a man to win who would be so much worse, not only for Gaza and the Palestinians, but for America and the wider world.

The Democratic Party may have found itself again, but the bombs are still falling on Gaza, sent by the government that is now in power. These bombs may be accompanied by expressions of concern for those on the receiving end, but they will continue falling until the United States stops sending them.

And if Kamala Harris becomes president, and really wants the Palestinians to have dignity and freedom, then her government will have to do so much better, and be so much braver, than her speech suggests.