The world feared what Donald Trump would do to Muslims upon winning the presidency in 2016. But in the year since October 7, a genocide of a mostly Muslim population has been overseen and made possible by his liberal opponent, Joe Biden.
A Palestinian woman and her children flee the area after Israeli bombardment in central Gaza City on March 18, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images)
When Donald Trump came to power in 2017, I had a worst-case scenario in my head: the new president, easily manipulated, quick to endorse violence, and surrounded by warmongers and various extremists, would use the immense power of the office he had tripped and fallen into to facilitate some far-right government’s campaign of ethnic genocide. He would recklessly threaten countries that might stop it with war, repress and prosecute those who resisted it at home, and wage war on the fragile but irreplaceable system of international law that could constrain it. The world would be forced to sit helplessly and simply watch horror after horror take place.
It has been a grim year to find this nightmare coming true — only not under Trump, but under Joe Biden, the liberal president who was meant to exorcize Trump from political life and “heal the soul of the nation” from his presence in the White House.
Much of the press and political leadership will spend this day exclusively mourning the victims of the October 7 attack itself. They should, as we all should, mourn the civilians massacred by Hamas a year ago today, as well as those killed by friendly fire from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). What happened to them was unspeakable.
But October 7 was more than the shocking violence of that one day. What it set into motion was the culmination of years of genocidal rhetoric that had become alarmingly normalized and common in Israeli discourse, and of the steady ratcheting of Israeli state violence against ordinary Palestinians, who, instead of Hamas and other militants, were more and more viewed by Israelis as the enemy that had to be wiped out.
The shocking violence carried out by Hamas provided the pretext, resolve, and political legitimacy for an increasingly far-right Israeli leadership to make good on years of those threats. The result has been a pitiless campaign of mass murder against Palestinians that is somehow still going as you read this today, and which has been recognized as a genocide by more and more experts and scholars, many of them Jewish and Israeli themselves — all of it underwritten and authorized by the US government against the wishes of the majority of American citizens.
Genocide By the Numbers
With Trump’s Democratic opposition taking up so many of the policies that made Democrats hate him in the first place — from the border wall and tech censorship, to “unleashing American energy dominance” and brutal sanctions regimes on disfavored Latin American countries — it’s easy to forget what exactly people originally feared about him becoming president. The prospect of genocide was one, and against Muslims specifically.
Condemnation of Trump spanned the United Nations’ (UN) top genocide expert, liberal media outlets, and even some Republicans for his indulging a racist supporter’s “quasi-genocidal conspiracy theory,” for praising Saddam Hussein’s killing of terrorists, and for generally drumming up hatred toward Muslims, leading to letters turning up at mosques around the country threatening that Trump would “do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.” Yale professors condemned in the Washington Post Trump’s “open and outright threat to commit genocide” at a UN speech against North Korea. “This is how every genocide begins,” warned Foreign Policy about his retweets.
Yet this ultimate act of evil didn’t wind up happening under Trump. Instead, it’s been facilitated, ensured, and approved by the man who talked about restoring decency and democracy; who tore into Trump for palling around with racists; who promised to bring experience and competence and people who knew what they were doing back to decision-making on foreign policy; and who vowed to end this era of endless US warmongering.
It’s this president, with what we’re told are his bottomless reserves of decency and compassion and empathy, who has carried out not just one of the most vile and monstrous crimes of this century, but of any US president in the last four decades.
If you’re tempted to wave this away as hyperbole, look at the numbers. The war has so far killed more than 6,000 of Gaza’s women and more than 11,000 of its children, far outdoing the records set by any other conflict in the last two decades at least — even Syria and Yemen, wars known as killing fields for the young and innocent. American medics report seeing daily evidence of young Palestinian kids being deliberately killed by Israeli gunmen.
And that’s all if the official death toll of nearly 42,000 is actually correct. But it is not: the real number is magnitudes higher thanks to the famine and disease Israel has intentionally spread through the territory — nearly 119,000 dead according to recently returned American health care workers, or at least 186,000 by the Lancet medical journal’s estimate, which would mean Israel and the US government have killed between roughly 5 and 8 percent of Gaza’s population.
Israel could not have done any of this without the United States’s unlimited political and military support, or without the president and his advisors breaking multiple US laws and helping to cover up Israeli crimes.
When we think of warmongering depravity this century, we would probably point to Russia’s abhorrent war on Ukraine that killed an estimated nearly 11,000 civilians — kids, adults, elderly — after two years. Now consider that the US-Israeli war has killed just that number of children alone and in half that time. And it is a US war since, as Israeli security officials keep telling us, Israel could not have done any of this without the United States’ unlimited political and military support, or without the president and his advisors breaking multiple US laws and helping to cover up Israeli crimes.
It is a war that has reduced an entire society to physical rubble on an equal or vaster scale to the carpet-bombing of World War II, that has damaged or destroyed the majority of its houses, hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches, its basic infrastructure, and has now expanded to a completely different, neighboring country, where it is currently on track to do the exact same thing. A war so destructive, it’s introduced rarely used or even entirely new terms to the political vocabulary: domicide, scholasticide, urbicide, and maybe most chilling, WCNSF — “wounded child, no surviving family.”
Think of the worst single thing your least favorite modern US president has done, and the rate, and sometimes even the scale, of murder will not stack up to Gaza: not Barack Obama’s drone bombings, not the battle against ISIS in Mosul, not the US-backed war on Yemen, not twenty years of the Afghanistan War. Even the Iraq War’s civilian death toll of 210,000 took twenty years to accrue, and that total could still be overtaken in Gaza once the dust has settled and the bodies are counted. So could Ronald Reagan’s wanton slaughter in Central America, including his support for genocide in Guatemala, which saw more than 200,000 people killed in that country alone over the course of three years. As the war expands to Lebanon and if it also swallows up Iran, it could easily leave even this total in the dust.
The war’s supporters often ask why American protesters single out Gaza. Besides the fact that their own government and tax dollars are responsible for it, Israel’s assault on Gaza is one of the worst things we have seen one group of human beings do to another in this century of bloodshed so far.
This orgy of barbarity has happened under what is sold as the liberal opposition to American fascism, and a policy deliberately ensured by what are meant to be the country’s sensible, experienced foreign policy thinkers. Trump was rightly and widely declared a monster for separating families at the border. But his liberal opponent has overseen the extermination of dozens of entire families in Gaza. Worse, he’s been widely defended and even applauded for it among the liberal establishment.
What we’ve seen for the past year in Gaza from Biden is Trumpian policy, right down to the expansion of the war to Lebanon and now possibly Iran, as we can see from Trump’s public demands to let Israel “finish the job,” his cheering on of an Israeli attack on Iran, and his son-in-law’s recent celebration of the “opportunity” that Israel’s destruction of Beirut provides to “reshape” the Middle East, echoing the thoughts of Biden officials themselves.
Yet while anything and everything Trump did drew howls of outrage and Democratic vows of “resistance,” Biden’s policy for the past year has been seemingly unassailable. Even though Democratic voters back a cease-fire and arms embargo; even though hundreds of his own party officials do, too; even though hawkish Democrats called on him months ago to use the leverage of US military aid; and even though centrist Democrats themselves recognize Biden’s policy might cost them the upcoming election, none of it has translated into any meaningful challenge to the president from Democratic officials. They have lined up in loyal support.
There is not even so much as idle talk of bringing a War Powers Resolution to a vote to force Biden’s hand, which Democrats had successfully passed, for the first time in US history, when Trump was in office to halt a different US-backed war waged by Saudi Arabia in Yemen — another appalling conflict that was still less deadly, disastrous, and politically risky than this one. That the US government has, in the process, empowered Israel to kill numerous Americans, allowed it to do so and even covered for it, all while practically abandoning Arab Americans trapped in places being carpet-bombed by American weapons, goes unremarked by almost all prominent Democrats. All of it is justified by the specter of Trump, his racism and violence, and the need to keep him from the White House.
This is, apparently, what electing the better, more competent, more liberal of the US parties gets you: one of the world’s worst fears of regarding a far-right presidency made real.
This is, apparently, what electing the better, more competent, more liberal of the US parties gets you: one of the world’s worst fears of regarding a far-right presidency made real, only with a fraction of the outcry. Americans often rightly criticize their politics as dysfunctional. But a political system that produces an outcome like this is something worse.
A Strategic Self-Defeat
The war comes at an awkward time for the foreign policy establishment, who are making plans to “win the twenty-first century,” looking uncertainly at a rising competitor in China and warning that its emergence would undo the post–World War II global order. Yet for many of the world’s citizens, Washington’s support for this despicable war has undercut the dire warnings about what might happen in a world where the United States is no longer the only superpower.
In Arab nations, the share of people who view the United States as the biggest threat to peace and stability in their region has soared to 51 percent in the Arab Center Washington DC’s polling following the Gaza war, significantly higher than in previous years and, incredibly, a whole twenty-five points higher than the share who said the same for Israel — very much unlike results in earlier polls, where Israel led. Other surveys have likewise seen US standing across the Arab world plummet as a result of the war, including an October 2023 survey by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee–founded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which found that “America’s trust and influence among Arabs in the region has reached its lowest point historically” and that Arab populations posted “the lowest favorability ratings for America” in more than twenty years of polling.
Biden’s unconditional support for Israeli genocide has achieved an incredible feat: not just doing more damage to US standing in the Middle East than George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq did, but making the United States more feared and hated in the region than the country that is physically carrying out that genocide.
And it’s not just the Middle East. At the precise moment the US foreign policy establishment wants to ensure “that America, not China, wins the competition for the twenty-first century” by elbowing China from influence in the “Indo-Pacific,” Biden’s Gaza policy is alienating that part of the world, too.
A recent survey of elite opinion in Southeast Asia found that the United States had lost substantial ground in terms of being the preferable choice for which country to align with, going from dominating a majority of respondents, to China just edging it out — losing the most ground in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, and directly because of Gaza. It mirrors what happened in the Middle East, where polls don’t just show US standing plummeting but the standing of its geopolitical rivals China, Russia, and even Iran gaining ground. This is surely one of the great geopolitical own goals in the history of great power jostling.
In fact, as one of those polls found, there had also been “a growth in attitudes that have helped fuel past ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or even militia terrorism recruitment.” Sure enough, given the numerous warnings from national security officials that anti-American resentment and terrorism threats are on the rise as a result of US complicity in the war — and given that US backing for Israeli crimes was one of Osama bin Laden’s major motivations twenty years ago — ordinary Americans who have no love for Biden’s decisions have not just been dragged into the moral mud by the president, but have also had themselves and their loved ones put in danger.
Arguably even more damaging for the United States is not the rivers of blood Biden has enabled, but the fecklessness and incompetence he has displayed. Month after month, the world watched the planet’s most powerful man walked all over by the leader of a tiny nation wholly militarily dependent on him: publicly drawing lines, making demands, or even signaling disapproval of a particular Israeli action, only to walk it back and fall into line after being ignored by Netanyahu — even leaking to the press that he’s being constantly played and humiliated.
Many will chafe at the idea that incompetence has any role in this parade of horrors. There is a strong temptation to believe it’s all part of a master plan and that Biden is playing his part, claiming uselessness to cover for the fact that Israel’s odious behavior is really serving his imperial ambitions.
It is almost as if Israel, with US backing, has gone down the list of norms and international laws and tried to see how many it can violate.
But as Biden’s undermining of his own anti-China strategy — and the vehement, widespread objections from within the administration itself on the grounds that it is hurting US interests — shows, this is not really true. As much as Biden’s policy has been driven by both heartlessness and a disregard for Arab lives, it has also been a failure on its own terms.
At almost every step of the way, Biden and his closest advisors have misjudged the moment, made the wrong bet, and undermined their own goals. They thought continuing Trump’s Abraham Accords was bringing peace to the region; it helped lead to the abhorrence of October 7. They thought the war would save Biden’s reelection; it ended up becoming his biggest liability. Biden was sure hugging Israel tight would give him more influence over it; it gave him less. They thought Biden could pivot to a two-state solution after the war and become a hero; Netanyahu is now busy making a two-state solution impossible. They thought the war would last a few months and then Netanyahu would be gone; instead, they propped him and his war up so long that he’s now politically in the strongest position he’s been in all year.
So self-defeating and irrational is Biden’s policy, it has even jeopardized the one thing we know for sure he and his administration want to get: regional normalization deals with Israel.
The burning rage the war has ignited across the Middle East has seen already weak public support for the agreements collapse and year-long protests in signatory countries like Morocco calling for the deals already signed to be ripped up. Saudi Arabia may be a despotic monarchy, but it still needs to be mindful of public opinion, which is why it’s now explicitly conditioning any such deal with Israel on a two-state solution. But Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners are outright rejecting and sabotaging the possibility of a Palestinian state, while Biden refuses to use US leverage to pressure them to stop. Just like his failed attempts to prevent a regional war, Biden is caught here in a catch-22 of his own making, trapped by his own exceptionally cowardly inability to lean on Israel.
For a while simply exasperating and infuriating, Biden’s professed inability to rein the country in now appears even worse, as the world looks on aghast at the prospect of Netanyahu igniting a Middle Eastern–wide war and one of Israel’s own regional partners warning that the Israeli prime minister “must be stopped.” The Washington establishment’s penchant for resorting to force over diplomacy is not exactly news. But its current incompetence at basic imperial management, to use its power ruthlessly and swiftly to ensure global stability and secure its own interests — or to simply check a client state that the US president openly acknowledges is trying to politically undermine him — will only add to rising global doubts about the Washington elite’s fitness for global leadership.
Rules-Based Disorder
That’s all without mentioning the damage done to the post–World War II global order. The US-Israeli campaign has often been a literal war on that order, with Israel killing, sometimes deliberately, more UN workers than any country has ever killed and wantonly bombing UN buildings.
But it’s also been a figurative war on almost every pillar of civilization that the US government itself led the world in erecting nearly eighty years ago. It is almost as if Israel, with US backing, has gone down the list of norms and international laws and tried to see how many it can violate: using chemical weapons; indiscriminately bombing, destroying hospitals, historical sites, and other protected structures; targeting and killing medics, journalists, and children; inflicting collective punishment; and kidnapping and viciously torturing civilians, to name a few. That’s all when the US and Israeli governments haven’t verbally attacked and slandered UN officials for criticizing this law-breaking, dismissed UN cease-fire resolutions as having no legal weight, or even stripped the UN of funding and threatened International Criminal Court prosecutors and their families.
What we’ve seen since October 7 for the past year is the dreadful endpoint of almost everything wrong with politics this century.
Even recent history’s most hated pariah states — think Hussein’s Iraq or North Korea — have not done half of this. And it has been so pervasive, so relentless, that the world has become numb. Crimes that triggered global headlines and outcry in the war’s early weeks, like the bombing of a hospital or an attack on a refugee camp, have become simply regular elements of Israeli warmaking that go by with little to no comment, and which Israel doesn’t even bother to fire up its PR machine to smooth over.
That’s because US officials and an army of commentators across the Western world have been deployed to pretend they don’t know if any of this violates international law, or even to explicitly justify the crimes, on the basis that Israel’s “right to defend itself” gives it a moral and legal license to massacre and invade at will, or that the United States would act no differently. This isn’t just laying the foundations for an even meaner, more lawless world, one that endangers US civilians and troops as America’s enemies watch and wonder why they should abide by the laws of civilization if their opponents don’t. You start to suspect we’re seeing the preemptive justification for irresponsible US leaders to order their own spree of war crimes sometime in the near future.
All of it will make it vastly more difficult for Washington to marshal the world against its next adversary. US officials already struggled to get much of the world’s buy-in for their attempt to punish Russia for its criminal war, with countries looking skeptically at US appeals to protecting a system of international law that Washington has often ignored. Those same countries are unlikely to forget the sight of US spokespeople smirking as they discuss Palestinian deaths, or pretending to cry about Ukrainian civilians while glibly telling reporters “innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward” in Gaza.
When Will It End?
The US-Israeli war in the Middle East feels like it’s designed to drive anyone who follows it insane: a “nihilistic regional murder spree,” as one US official put it, that goes on and on with no endgame, no strategic logic, and no accomplishment beyond the steady piling up of children’s corpses and the accruing of anti-American and anti-Israeli hatred.
It is an utter failure of leadership for Joe Biden. But it is bigger than just the president: the fact is that a young and healthy Kamala Harris has the same exact position on this war as Biden, as do vast portions of both the Democratic Party behind them and the media establishment meant to be keeping them in check. What we’ve seen since October 7 for the past year is the dreadful endpoint of almost everything wrong with politics this century, from decades of US coddling of Israel and the unleashing of unlimited oligarch money into the political system, to a culture of law-breaking that has become endemic in US foreign policy and the virulent and pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism that September 11 awakened.
A year on from the repulsive massacre that set this wretched war into motion, we are still floating in the middle of an ocean of uncertainty. But there’s no doubt it’s an enormous, self-inflicted strategic defeat, for Israel, for the United States, and quite possibly for the Democratic Party, depending on what happens a month from now. And there’s one thing we know for sure: its costs won’t be borne by those responsible, but by the ordinary people in the Middle East who are the principal victims of this horror show, and by the ordinary Americans who overwhelmingly opposed it, but will suffer the inevitable blowback anyway.