Joe Biden’s enabling of a genocide in Palestine was in keeping with a career spent pushing bloody war in the Middle East. His action and inaction on Gaza was brutal, unjustifiable, and unforgivable.
Eight babies in Gaza froze to death this month ahead of the announced cease-fire. Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, in one of Joe Biden’s final acts as president, his administration asked Congress to authorize another $8 billion in weapons to Israel (coming on top of the $17.9 billion Biden has given Israel since October 7, 2023).
Biden spent the majority of his life trying to fulfill his dream of becoming president of the United States. He succeeded. As he exits the office, his hands are drenched in blood. From his key role in leading the United States to war on Iraq in 2003 to his loyal support of Israel’s genocide, Joe Biden will be remembered by hundreds of millions around the world for the mass murder hidden behind the sterile diplomatic jargon of his administration.
It’s been fifteen months since Israel’s onslaught on Gaza began. The Gaza Health Ministry has reported that over 46,006 Palestinians have been killed during the ongoing aerial and land invasion of the small strip of land roughly the size of Philadelphia. The number killed is a drastic underestimate. A Lancet study released earlier this month estimates that the number of deaths has been underreported by around 41 percent. According to the United Nations (UN), Israel has destroyed nine out of every ten homes in Gaza, and at least 92 percent of all roads have been destroyed or damaged. This has left over 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza displaced, most living in makeshift tents, which are routinely bombed by Israel. In one such bombing, Israel targeted a tent hospital in Deir al-Balah where dozens of Palestinians were being treated. Two days before his twentieth birthday, Shaban al-Dalou was one of four patients burned alive as he was being treated, IV in arm, at al-Aqsa Hospital tent camp.
Nearly nine months before al-Dalou was killed, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released a statement asserting the plausibility of Israel’s acts in Gaza constituting genocide. Israel was given thirty days to comply with measures laid out by the ICJ, including the demand to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel did not comply, and nothing happened after the allotted period elapsed. In fact, Biden wholly dismissed the ICJ’s ruling and continued to give Israel hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons.
Biden spent his last year as president funding the destruction of Gaza and ethnic cleansing measures against two million Palestinians. On day eighteen of Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2023, when over six thousand Palestinians had been killed, nearly half of them children, Biden said in a televised address, “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
Within the first few weeks of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in October and November 2023, as the death toll climbed to ten thousand, Biden’s administration vetoed every single UN resolution calling for a temporary halt to the bombing. With every veto, and with every speech doubling down on support for Israel’s genocide (a term introduced as early as November 2023), Biden and his spokespeople continued to tout the importance of “diplomatic negotiations” as the only way forward. In fact, after vetoing a UN Security Council proposal that would have paused the fighting in order to allow critical humanitarian relief into Gaza, US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “We are on the ground doing the hard work of diplomacy. We believe we need to let that diplomacy play out.” Not much effective diplomacy played out under Biden’s watch, but gruesome mass death did.
Biden’s hawkish stance on Palestine, his complete bowing down to Israel’s whims, was not a break from his previous foreign policy positions. Perhaps one of the defining periods of his career was in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, when he acted as the driver for war within the Democratic Party. As Branko Marcetic wrote for Jacobin in 2019, shortly before Biden’s election,
Biden was one of seventy-seven senators who voted to give Bush the authorization to wage war on Iraq, joining fellow Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Dianne Feinstein. Twenty-one Democratic senators, including Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden, and Patrick Leahy, voted against it. “At each pivotal moment, [President Bush] has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation,” Biden said on the Senate floor. “I believe he will continue to do so. . . . The president has made it clear that war is neither imminent nor inevitable.”
Just like Biden lied to the public about the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002, he lied to the public about the events of October 7, first by touting lies about beheaded babies and rape allegations, which were either disproved or lack substantial evidence (though Biden continued to repeat the false claims for many months), then by claiming humanitarian aid was of utmost important to his administration. In reality, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was fully aware Israel was preventing aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza and did nothing about it for fear that acknowledging this blatant violation of law would require the United States to halt weapons shipments.
Biden has committed to endless military funding, specifically weapons shipments, to Israel for nearly two decades. As vice president under Barack Obama, Biden personally flew to Israel to secure “the largest single pledge of military assistance” in US history, providing Israel with $38 billion in military funding over ten years. That number now seems small when considering the whopping $17.9 billion Biden gave to Israel in the year after October 7 and the other $8 billion his administration is trying to push through Congress in his last week in office.
The movement to end the genocide and win a cease-fire and arms embargo on Israel has grown unevenly but tremendously in the last fifteen months. But it could not force a halt in brutality against Palestinians, and it often could not overcome the endless resources marshaled by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel groups against progressive voices in the United States that spoke out against the war. Such voices were too few and far between within the Democratic Party, which lost credibility among large swaths of voters in part due to its inability to deliver what millions of Americans were demanding, a cease-fire. On the campaign trail, Biden and then Kamala Harris repeatedly either ignored or openly mocked and downplayed the importance of Gaza and a cease-fire, despite multiple polls indicating it was an issue close to the hearts of many voters in swing states. In fact, even now, in the last moments before he leaves office, Biden has allowed Donald Trump to take the reins in achieving a cease-fire after fifteen months of standing by as Israel crossed every “red line” he drew.
Many postmortems of Biden’s administration will no doubt ignore or downplay his role in Israel’s genocide. But Palestinians and their many supporters worldwide will never forget his actions and inaction. Biden should be haunted for the rest of his days by the screams of Gaza.