What Biden Has Done for Palestinians

Americans cannot forget the monstrous war that our government is still backing after more than nine months of slaughter and destruction.

Joe Biden wants you to know about all the things he’s done for the Palestinian people:

“By the way, I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure that – I got the Egyptians to open the border to let goods through, medicine, and food,” Biden said.

Biden said this during an interview in which he was being asked why Muslim and Arab-American voters should support his reelection. It is hard to know if Biden genuinely thinks his meager token efforts to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza are worth boasting about. It seems that he thinks the pitiful amount of assistance in question should somehow outweigh and erase his responsibility for enabling the war and supporting the government that is deliberately starving more than two million people to death.

More than nine months after the war started, Biden has refused to put any serious, sustained pressure on Israel to stop restricting the delivery of aid. He has done nothing to stop the man-made famine in Gaza except for ridiculous failed stunts like the ill-fated floating pier. He continues to send the Israeli government more weapons while they massacre civilians in indiscriminate attacks on designated safe zones like this one in which at least 91 people were killed. That is what he has done for the Palestinians in Gaza.

The president didn’t have to answer any hard questions in this interview. He should have been asked about the recent conclusion of U.N. experts that the Israeli government is engaged in an “intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people” and that this is a “form of genocidal violence” that “has resulted in famine across all of Gaza.” He should have been asked about how Israel’s offensive in Rafah cut off the last trickle of aid into Gaza and caused the displacement of more than a million people, and then he should have been asked why his administration responded to all of that with a shrug. Someone should have asked Biden why the U.S. continues to send more 500-pound bombs to a government that has repeatedly used U.S.-made weapons in the commission of war crimes. Maybe someone could ask why he launched an illegal war in Yemen rather than try to rein in Israel. Presumably the president would evade the questions or deny reality, but at least he would be forced to confront the horrors that he has helped to create.

The presidential election has pushed coverage of the war in Gaza to the background, but Americans cannot forget the monstrous war that our government is still backing after more than nine months of slaughter and destruction. In a saner world, the president would be facing hard questions every day about the atrocities he is enabling and the atrocity famine that he has failed to end. There should be demands for the president to abandon his reelection campaign not because he is too old but because he has aided and abetted the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people.