[News] Voting against genocide: How Gaza defeated the Democratic establishment

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeastmonitor.com
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241112-voting-against-genocide-how-gaza-defeated-the-democratic-establishment/>
Voting against genocide: How Gaza defeated the Democratic establishment
by Dr Ramzy Baroud <https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/6-author/178473/>
<https://twitter.com/RamzyBaroud>
November 12, 2024
------------------------------

Arab and Muslim American voters did not remove Democrats from office, nor
did they cost Kamala Harris the Oval Office. They merely sent a strong
message that Palestine matters, not only to Arabs and Muslims but to many
Americans as well.

The ones who cost the Democrats the elections are the Democrats themselves.
Their humiliating defeat on 5 November was due largely to their undeniable
role in the Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.

Peter Beinart put it best in his 7 November op-ed in the New York Times,
entitled
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/opinion/democrats-israel-gaza-war.html>
“*Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party*.”

“Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S.
taxpayers and live-streamed on social media,” according to Beinart, has
“triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a
generation.” The writer correctly indicates that the core of this activism
was “Black Americans and the young”.

Undeniably, for the first time in US election history, Palestine has become
a domestic American political issue – a nightmare realisation for those who
laboured to maintain US foreign policy in the Middle East as an exclusive
Israeli domain.

Aside from Arab voters, black voters and voters from other minority groups
prioritised Palestine, many white Americans felt the same way. This claim
is particularly important as it suggests that American voters are
challenging the identity politics paradigm, and are now thinking around
common struggles, values and morality.

“Democrats may no longer be able to rely on young voters to boost numbers,
as Harris appears on track to have the lowest support among voters aged
18-29 in this century,” a report in the UK’s *Independent *newspaper noted
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/election-trump-harris-demographic-breakdown-b2643412.html>.
Knowing the relatively strong support for Palestine among young Americans,
US politicians have much to worry about in coming elections.

We already know that support for Palestine is overwhelmingly strong among
young Democrats. A poll conducted
<https://news.gallup.com/poll/472070/democrats-sympathies-middle-east-shift-palestinians.aspx>
by Gallup in March 2023 indicated that, for the first time, Democrats’
“sympathies … now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49%
versus 38%.”

Even more astonishing, the overall US Democratic constituency is more
pro-Palestine than Israel. According to a poll
<https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/younger-americans-stand-out-in-their-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/>
conducted by the Pew Research Centre last April, the overall young American
population “are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinian people than
the Israeli people.” While a third of adults under 30 sympathised “entirely
or mostly” with Palestinians, only 14 per cent sympathised with the
Israelis.

*OPINION: The PA’s misplaced optimism
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241107-the-pas-misplaced-optimism/>*

These numbers did not seem to matter to the Democrats who continued to take
for granted the votes of youth and other minority groups. They made a grave
mistake.

The Biden Administration has played a central role in funding and
sustaining the Israeli war machine, thus facilitating the Israeli genocide
in Gaza. Millions of Americans took notice and acted upon their sense of
collective rage to punish the Democrats for what they had done to the
Palestinian people.

According to a report
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael> prepared
for Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Biden Administration has
granted
<https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-us-military-spending-8e6e5033f7a1334bf6e35f86e7040e14>
Israel a record of at least $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel in the
first year of the war. Additionally, according to a report
<https://www.propublica.org/article/israel-gaza-america-biden-administration-weapons-bombs-state-department>
published on 4 October by the non-profit investigative newspaper
ProPublica, “the US has shipped
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240827-israel-receives-500th-us-military-supply-aircraft-since-7-october/>more
than 50,000 tons of weaponry” to Israel since 7 October, 2023.

Merely hours after the US presidential election results were announced, the
Israeli Ministry of Defence signed
<https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2024/11/07/israel-to-buy-25-f-15s-with-eyes-on-long-distance-combat-punch/>
a deal “to acquire 25 F-15IA combat jets from U.S. manufacturer Boeing for
$5.2 billion, with an option to get 25 more,” according to *Defense News*.
In other words, Biden remains unrepentant.

Biden, Harris and others may twist the logic
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/31/bill-clinton-criticised-for-saying-israel-forced-to-kill-gaza-civilians>
to justify their support for Israel in any way they wish. However, there
can be no denying that their administration has played a leading role in
the Israeli genocide in Gaza. For this, they were duly and deservedly
penalised by American voters.

The understandable euphoria among many of Palestine’s supporters in the US
notwithstanding, we must not harbour any illusions. Neither President-elect
Donald Trump nor his entourage of right-wing politicians will be the
saviours of Palestine.

We must recall that it was Trump’s first term in office that paved the road
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/world/middleeast/trump-jerusalem-israel-capital.html>
to the complete marginalisation of the Palestinians. He did so by granting
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20171206-trump-recognizes-jerusalem-as-israeli-capital/>
Israel sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem, recognising the illegal
settlements
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190321-breaking-trump-says-time-for-us-to-recognize-israeli-sovereignty-over-golan/>
as legitimate, waging financial warfare
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180908-trump-cuts-aid-to-palestinian-hospitals-in-occupied-jerusalem/>
against Palestinians, and attempting to destroy
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180829-report-us-to-end-all-funding-for-unrwa/>
the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, among other actions.

If Trump returns to his old destructive policies in Palestine, another war
will certainly start.

This means that the pro-Palestine camp, which has managed to convert
solidarity into decisive political action, must not wait for the new US
administration to adopt a more sensible political line on Palestine.
Judging by the history of Republican support for Israel, no such
sensibility should be expected.

Thus, it is time to build on the existing solidarity among all American
groups that voted against genocide in the latest elections. This is the
perfect opportunity to translate votes into sustained action and pressure
so that all aspects of the US government may hear and heed the deafening
chants of ‘ceasefire now’ and ‘free, free Palestine.’

This time around, however, these chants are backed by solid evidence that
American voters are capable of destabilising the entire political paradigm,
as they did on 5 November, 2024.

*READ: Genocide is embedded in US diplomacy
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241031-genocide-is-embedded-in-us-diplomacy/>*

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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