Red lines? What red lines?

If anyone has any remaining doubts about the outgoing Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza—even after Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump—they can safely put them to rest. As Joe Biden reminded his longtime “personal friend” and “friend to our nation” Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the Oval Office on November 12, “the United States’ commitment to Israel is ironclad.”

That same day Biden made good on his promise, as he has repeatedly done—at whatever cost to Palestinians and to the Democrats’ electoral prospects—throughout the last year. Joe may be a lame duck president, but nothing is going to stop him from going the extra mile for his Zionist buddies while he still can.

A month prior, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had warned Israel that unless within 30 days it demonstrated “a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining” concrete measures “to reverse” what they euphemistically termed “the downward humanitarian trajectory” in Gaza, there might be “implications for US policy under NSM-20 and relevant US law (weapons supply).”

This was widely reported as a threat to cut off, or at least to limit, the flow of American arms unless Israel dramatically improved its treatment of Palestinian civilians, especially in north Gaza, which the IDF had been brutally besieging since early October.

Key demands in the letter included expediting (rather than blocking) the flow of aid into Gaza; facilitating “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting to allow aid to be distributed; allowing the Red Cross to visit Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons “in light of reports of abuse”; and ending “the isolation of northern Gaza Strip” and “officially announc[ing]” that Israel “has no policy of forced evacuation of Palestinians from northern Gaza Strip to the southern Gaza Strip.”

These were indeed—for the first time—concrete, measurable benchmarks by which to assess Israeli progress in meeting the US’s alleged concerns.

The timing of this “leak” of what the White House claimed was “a private diplomatic communication” raised widespread suspicions at the time that this might be no more than an electoral ploy designed to stem the hemorrhage of Muslim, Arab, and youth support for Harris shown by the “uncommitted” movement in key swing states.

Now that the election has come and gone, the doubters have been proved right. As the 30-day deadline expired on November 12, the State Department announced it “has concluded that Israel is not currently impeding assistance to Gaza and therefore is not violating US law.” The flow of American weapons to Israel continues as before.

A post-apocalyptic environment

Israel’s own figures show that less aid entered Gaza in the last month than at any time since December 2023. While the Blinken-Austin letter demanded that Israel allow 350 aid trucks to enter Gaza per day, ”with five days remaining in the 30-day review period, just over 1,000 total trucks had crossed into Gaza, an average of just 42 trucks a day.”

I quote here from a “Gaza Scorecard” drawn up by independent experts on behalf of eight humanitarian groups, including Save the Children, MercyCorps, and Oxfam. The report shows that of 19 US benchmarks set out in the letter, Israel failed to comply with 15 and only partially complied with four.

Meanwhile, “Israel … concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza. That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”

Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on November 14, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini described Gaza today as “a post-apocalyptic environment,” with “people just waiting to be killed, either by airstrike, by disease, or even by hunger.”

Ignoring another demand in Blinken and Austin’s letter, on October 28 the Israeli parliament overwhelmingly passed two laws criminalizing UNRWA—the only body with the resources, experience, and staff capable of coordinating any competent relief effort in Gaza—as a “terrorist organization” and banning it from operating in Israel, including within the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The Israeli government has since confirmed that these laws will take effect within 90 days.

Lazzarini warned that “dismantling UNRWA will collapse the United Nations humanitarian response [in Gaza], which relies heavily on the Agency’s infrastructure.” EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell Fontelles was another who urged “Israeli authorities to reconsider, in order to prevent disruptions to UNRWA’s life-saving services and ensure continued and unhindered humanitarian access for UNRWA to the Palestine refugees that it was set up to serve,“ adding for good measure: “This legislation stands in stark contradiction to international law.” These appeals fell on deaf ears.

On November 5, IDF Brigadier General Itzik Cohen let slip what was really going on. “There is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes,” he told Israeli reporters. “Humanitarian aid would be allowed to ‘regularly’ enter the south of the territory but not the north, since there are ‘no more civilians left.’”

The Israeli daily Haaretz had no hesitation in calling a spade a spade. Its lead editorial on November 10 proclaimed:

The Israeli military is conducting an ethnic cleansing operation in the northern Gaza Strip. The few Palestinians remaining in the area are being forcibly evacuated, homes and infrastructure have been destroyed, and wide roads in the area are being built and completing the separation of the communities in the northern Strip from the center of Gaza City.

Two important independent studies published on November 14 concur. In a damning report starkly titled “Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged”: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, Human Rights Watch concluded that “the Israeli government’s acts of forced displacement … amount to a crime against humanity. Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.”

The latest report of the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People went still further, concluding that “Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population,” all of which are methods of warfare “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”

I won’t speculate here on how far Israel’s recent actions are an attempt to implement the so-called General’s Plan (to depopulate North Gaza prior to turning it into a free-fire zone) or form a prelude to resettling the area with Jewish settlements, West Bank–style, as has been advocated by the more extreme members of the Israeli government.

Suffice it to say that the US State Department’s claim that Israel is “making progress” in meeting the demands set out in the Blinken-Austin letter is a sick joke.

So too are the repeated assurances that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are “working tirelessly” “around the clock” for a ceasefire in Gaza and a solution to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. On November 20—for the fourth time—the US used its veto to block a UN Security Council resolution mandating an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. The other 14 members of the council all voted in favour of the resolution.

It is not reality on the ground that matters here. As Guardian columnist Owen Jones succinctly puts it, “no matter what the people of Gaza endure, the narrative prevails.”

The most moral army in the world

Honed in the hasbara factories of Tel Aviv, parroted by Western politicians across the spectrum, and amplified by Western media ad nauseam, the narrative to which Jones refers has more than a whiff of Orwellian doublethink (“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”) about it.

While this narrative affirms the sanctity of supposed Western values of national self-determination, democracy, human rights, and the international rule of law, it defends gross violations of these same principles with equal passion in the case of Israel. The IDF, we are assured after every massacre, is “the most moral army in the world.”

This doublethink requires us to believe that this is a war of “children of light” against “children of darkness,” of civilization against barbarism, of the enlightened West against the benighted rest. It requires us, in short, to buy into the most racist tropes of the Western colonialist heritage in order to defend a present-day colonialist genocide.

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,” ran the party’s slogan in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Winston Smith goes on to say “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

In many Western countries today, the freedom to say that two plus two make four is no longer always granted—at least, not in relation to speech concerning Israel and Palestine. The prevailing narrative prevails not because it is true but because other voices, other stories, have been drowned out.

If—with the imprimatur, let us remember, of the UN, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), leading international NGOs (Oxfam, Save the Children, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, etc.), and a growing number of Western nations (Ireland, Spain, Norway, Belgium, among others)—you dare to reject the doublethink and insist that irrespective of the undoubted war crimes Hamas committed on October 7, Israel is guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and (by now more than “plausible”) genocide in Gaza on an infinitely greater scale, you are likely to pay dearly.

It may cost you your job, your opportunity to publish, exhibit, or perform, and even put you behind bars.

Last month in Britain, pro-Palestinian journalists were woken by dawn police raids and had their phones and computers confiscated under “terrorism” legislation. Canadian authorities soon emulated their UK colleagues by sending a SWAT team to the Vancouver home of the international coordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which they recently (and controversially) declared a “terrorist entity.” In both cases the intent seems to be to intimidate: no charges have yet resulted from either raid.

Across North America, university authorities have called in baton-wielding police to break up protest encampments and disciplined hundreds of students and faculty for doing no more than exercising their right to say two plus two make four. Some now have criminal records, while others merely lost their housing, health insurance, and degrees.

This week’s Joe Biden prize for doublethink must surely go to Harvard Divinity School, which has just suspended students from using its library for two weeks after 55 graduate students, many of whom are Jewish, held a “pray-in” there. “In and of itself, advocacy for the cause of people under duress—whether in Israel, Gaza, or other parts of the world—is noble,” explained the Dean. So what exactly was the problem?

In Canada, MP Anthony Housefather, “senior advisor to prime minister Trudeau on antisemitism,” announced in July that he was working with Deborah Lyons, former Canadian ambassador to Israel and “Canada’s special envoy on preserving holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism,” to put pressure on Windsor University to cancel an agreement it had made with its own students to consider their demands for divestment from Israel in exchange for their peacefully ending their encampment.

The German parliament is currently considering a government resolution that would enforce the IHRA definition of antisemitism (which has been widely condemned for conflating criticism of Israel or of Zionism with antisemitism) and remove state funding for artistic and scientific endeavours from any individuals or organizations supporting boycotts of Israel. The same IHRA definition forms the basis of a new “handbook” for combatting antisemitism issued in October under the auspices of Heritage Canada.

Though the handbook, prepared by Lyons’ office, assures us that it is “non-legally binding” and “does not constitute a legal opinion or a legislative interpretation of antisemitism”—best cover your ass against future Charter of Rights challenges, eh?—its recommendations add up to a chillingly totalitarian apparatus of moral regulation.

Among its suggestions are “Incorporating the definition into school policies and campus codes of conduct—helping administrators and institutions draw the line as to what is and what is not antisemitism.”

Since October 7 state power has been mobilized across the “free world” to suppress dissent and ensure that the prevailing narrative continues to prevail. There is little doubt about who can speak and whose voices are not to be heard.

I’m speaking!

Nowhere was this suppression of Palestinian voices and erasure of the Gaza genocide more evident than in Kamala Harris’s campaign for the US presidency.

Ahmad Ibsais, who describes himself as a “first generation Palestinian American and law student,” summarized the experience of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans during the 2024 election. These American communities certainly didn’t feel the “joy” that was—obscenely, some might think, given the circumstances—touted as Harris’s hallmark.

Just look at how the Democrats campaigned in the state I live in, Michigan. A crucial swing state where elections can hinge on mere thousands of votes, Michigan is home to some 200,000 Muslim Americans. Over the past year, these voters made it clear, in every way they could, that their vote was conditioned on the party pledging to end its financial, political and military support of massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and Yemenis. The “uncommitted” campaign—looking to end the Democratic Party’s support for Israel’s genocide—secured more than 100,000 votes in the state’s Democratic primary.

The Democratic Party did not listen. Harris not only refused to abandon Biden’s staunchly pro-Israel policies on Palestine but also personally supported continued bloodshed in Gaza by publicly insulting anti-genocide campaigners in the state. When pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a Harris rally in Detroit by simply stating that they “won’t vote for genocide”, she shut them up with her catchphrase, “I’m speaking”. She then sent former President Bill Clinton to the state to deliver a speech that tried to justify the mass killing of Palestinians. Liz Cheney, the Republican daughter of Iraq war architect and war criminal Dick Cheney, also made an appearance in the state to campaign for Harris. Congressman Ritchie Torres, who spent the past year accusing anyone demanding an end to the bloodshed in Gaza of being an anti-Semitic terrorist, was another surrogate Harris sent to Michigan.

As a result, understandably, Muslims in Michigan did not vote for Harris.

Palestinian voices were kept off the stage at the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago, despite the uncommitted movement offering to endorse Harris’s candidacy as well as having their representative’s speech vetted in advance.

“I’ve had some pretty crushing days, but to be honest today took the cake,” Ruwa Romman, a Georgia State representative who was one of the speaker candidates uncommitted submitted to the Harris campaign, posted on X. “I do not understand how there’s room for an anti-choice Republican [presumably Liz Cheney] but not me in our party. I need someone to explain to me what to do now.”

Jamaal Bowman, the pro-Palestinian New York congressman whom the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other superpacs spent a reported $23 million to unseat in a special election in June, says he offered to campaign for Harris in Michigan (where he is popular) but his offer was declined in favor of Cheney, Clinton, and Torres.

Steve Salaita, who was hounded out of the tenured position he had been offered and accepted as a Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois after a series of tweets criticizing Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza—this “war” did not begin on October 7—gets to the heart of things:

Liberals can tolerate you only when you behave: vote (as per their demands), show up for diversity photoshoots, ease up on the religion, and don’t make too much noise about Palestine. They see you as children to be marshalled into civic duty every few years according to their own convenience. The moment you reject their delusions of lesser evilism, even when the supposedly lesser evil is incinerating your kin and leading the world to the brink of catastrophe, they no longer feel obliged to maintain decorum. It’s now obvious that liberals were itching for an excuse to unleash a lot of deep-seated animosity. All it took was your principled rejection of genocide.

Harris’s electoral collapse

Although some votes still remain to be counted, as of November 19 Kamala Harris had won 73,966,464 votes (48.3 percent) in the November 5 election as against Donald Trump’s 76,581,025 (50 percent). This gave Trump a majority of 312 to 226 in the Electoral College, beating Biden’s 306 to 232 score in 2020. Trump also won the popular vote, the only Republican candidate to do so since 1988, apart from George W. Bush in 2004.

Nevertheless, 2024 is less an election Trump won than an election that Harris lost—spectacularly. Despite it being widely billed as a “historic” election that Americans considered “the most important in their lifetime,” overall turnout was down by nearly three million over 2020, from 65.8 to 63.5 percent. A lot of folks chose to stay home, and the numbers suggest that many of them were Biden voters in 2020.

In Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, turnout was down by a whopping 20 percent. Trump matched his 2020 vote, but Harris’s total was more than 417,000 votes adrift of Biden’s.

Though Trump’s share of the national vote rose from 46.9 percent in 2020 to 50 percent in 2024, he increased the actual number of his votes by only a modest 2.3 million (from 74,224,319 to 76,581,025)—in an election in which an additional four million eligible voters were added to the rolls since 2020. Harris’s vote, by contrast, fell precipitously. It was down by more than seven million on Biden’s 81,284,666 total in 2020.

These patterns hold both nationally and in the seven battleground states that decide the outcome of most American presidential elections, and in particular in the three “blue wall” states that Trump took from the Democrats in 2016 and Biden recovered in 2020—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

These were must-win states for the Democrats, and Kamala Harris spent a lot of time campaigning there.

This year Trump won all seven battleground states by narrow but clear majorities, and posted margins of 1.8 percent in Pennsylvania, 0.9 percent in Wisconsin, and 1.4 percent in Michigan. This compares with Biden’s margins of 1.2 percent in Pennsylvania, 0.6 percent in Wisconsin, and 2.8 percent in Michigan. These were all tight races and small swings, but Michigan—where Abdul Ibsais and 200,000 other Muslim Americans live—registered the biggest shift.

Where Biden racked up 2,804,040 votes in Michigan in 2020, Harris managed 2,724,029—a net loss of some 80,000 votes. A significant part in this loss was clearly due to Arab American and Muslim voters either abstaining, voting for third-party anti-war candidate Jill Stein, or shifting their vote to Trump.

In the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, where 55 percent of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent and Biden got 69 percent of the vote in 2020, Trump won 42.48 percent of the vote, Harris 36.26 percent, and Stein 18.37 percent. In Dearborn Heights, where 39 percent of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent, Trump defeated Harris by 44 to 38.3 percent, with Stein at 15.1 percent. In Hamtramck, the first majority-Muslim city in the US, Harris got 46.2 percent—as compared with Biden’s 85 percent in 2020—while Trump got 42.7 percent and Stein 8.96 percent. Lost Muslim votes are also likely to have impacted Democrat performance in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Had Harris won the three blue-wall states and the rest of the results stayed the same, she, not Donald Trump, would now be US president-elect.

It is significant, then, that Trump’s combined margin of victory over Harris in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and therefore, the difference between the Democrats’ holding or losing the White House—was a razor-thin 232,000 votes. Additionally, Jill Stein got 91,475 votes, many of which might otherwise have gone to the Democrats had they moderated their stance on Gaza.

These numbers by no means prove that Gaza was the only factor in Harris’s collapse, but they certainly show that it cannot be ignored.

We might reasonably ask whether, if Harris had been less adamant in her insistence that “I’m speaking!” and more willing to move on Israel, she might have persuaded enough of Biden’s 2020 voters—not only Muslim Americans, but college kids, other young people, and progressives who campaigned hard for the Democrats in 2020 but were nauseated by Biden’s policies on Gaza—to support her. Instead, they flipped or stayed home.

Gaza’s revenge?

I suppose it is heartening to see Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who endorsed and campaigned for Kamala Harris whatever their reservations on Gaza, co-sponsoring a Senate motion of disapproval on the Biden administration’s continuing to supply arms to Israel despite the latter’s failure to meet the conditions set out in the Blinken-Austin letter.

Sanders now thunders: “There is no longer any doubt that Netanyahu’s extremist government is in clear violation of US and international law as it wages a barbaric war against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Warren now warns: “The failure by the Biden administration to follow US law and to suspend arms shipments is a grave mistake that undermines American credibility worldwide.”

Really, senators? What took you so long? Even some of your less performatively progressive colleagues like Tim Kaine and Chris Van Hollen (who told Zeteo: “President Biden’s inaction, given the suffering in Gaza, is shameful. I mean, there’s no other word for it”) have long demanded conditioning on the supply of offensive weapons to Israel.

Unsurprisingly, the motion failed. But at least 18 Senate Democrats seem to be belatedly developing a conscience, now that it is too late to influence policy.

US support for Israel’s genocide was important not only because it cost Harris substantial support in battleground states—we’ll never know how much, because exit polls by definition don’t capture the reasons millions of voters stayed home—but also as the most conspicuous symptom of a deeper sickness in the Democratic Party.

And the country.

Exploring how and why the election result has left him “disappointed, fearful, numb,” prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen puts it well. The source of his disappointment and fear is not just the prospect of a second (and likely much worse) Trump term:

Donald Trump does not represent something new in the United States. Instead, he is part of a fundamental contradiction that the United States was born from, a contradiction that has never gone away. On the one hand, the beauty of democracy, opportunity, freedom, and equality (for some). On the other hand, the brutality that made that beauty possible: colonization, genocide, enslavement, occupation, and war. Some willingly embrace the brutality, others are willing to look away from it. That is why the Democratic Party’s loss of its moral compass on Gaza and calling what Israel is doing a genocide was not simply a “single issue,” but a symptom of the rot within a party that hoped that the beauty of multiculturalism and diversity would somehow be enough to overcome the brutality.

There are limits to doublethink. If you campaign on “ironclad support” for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, you are saying there are no moral limits on the means you use so long as the ends are worthy. Don’t be surprised if people then conclude it’s fine to vote for mass deportations, internment camps, jailing of political opponents, and using the military to quash dissent at home in support of their (decent, Christian, patriotic) doublethink agendas. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

In its contempt for the rule of law in international affairs, not to mention its acquiescence in domestic suppression of free speech on Palestine, the Biden-Harris administration has helped prepare the ground for the coming Trump tyranny at home.

Trump’s triumph will not stop Israel’s assault on Gaza. Palestinians know that very well, and they do not need Pennsylvania’s Democrat junior senator John Fetterman to lecture them (“Congratulations, you’re going to love the next Muslim ban,” he sneered) on the dire consequences of their refusing to vote as Bill Clinton told them to.

The election result could be seen as Gaza’s revenge for the Democrats’ hypocritical indifference to Palestinian suffering while campaigning on abortion rights, the price of eggs and gas, and “saving American democracy.” Now liberal America will suffer too.

So, unfortunately, will many others.

Derek Sayer is professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent book, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in European History.