Demanding that voters vote for the lesser of two evils when the evil in question is genocide is not a winning strategy, write political strategist Hanieh Jodat and former socialist Buffalo mayoral candidate India Walton.
By Hanieh Jodat and India Walton, Jacobin
For more than ten months, we have witnessed the unimaginable suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. By official estimates, over 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s incursion into the territory began. Some researchers estimate a much higher death toll, with hundreds of thousands possibly dead in the small territory of around two million people. Despite this incomprehensible slaughter, in which at least forty-five Palestinians are dead for every Israeli killed on October 7, US military support for Israel has continued without interruption. Just recently, $20 billion of US tax dollars have been diverted to Israel. That US taxpayer support for Israel’s arms and materiel continues — amid numerous credible allegations that the country has violated human rights and committed large-scale atrocities against civilians — is a national shame.
This deadly addiction to war is not confined to the Gaza Strip. At home in the United States, the Israel Defense Forces have engaged in joint training and intelligence sharing with US police agencies. This has included training in racial profiling and violent suppression of protests, according to the 2018 report Deadly Exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of US-Israel Law Enforcement Exchanges. Among the organizations that fund these exchanges is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has also recently made headlines for pouring millions into successful campaigns to defeat members of the Squad in Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, for the high crime of speaking out against Israel’s never-ending bloodbath.
As lifelong supporters of the Democratic Party, it has saddened us greatly to see the party’s complicity in the slaughter in Gaza, as well as its refusal to address the corrosive effects of dark money in politics. We were proud supporters of the Uncommitted movement and worked as part of RootsAction to get Joe Biden to step aside, largely over his failure to stop or even publicly challenge Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign.
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