A Letter To Joe Biden

“You enable massive death and destruction. Your position and that of the Democratic Party turns my stomach.”

By David Barsamian

Your support of Israeli mass murder of Palestinians is insufferable. 15,000 dead and counting. More than a million displaced. Gaza’s hospitals are “morgues.”

According to B’Tselem—an Israeli human rights organization—Israel is a “Jewish supremacist” state. B’Tselem has concluded along with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that Israel is practicing apartheid. You have no clue as to the realities on the ground in the Middle East in general and Israel/Palestine in particular.

As UN Secretary-General  Antonio Guterres said, the Hamas attack of 7 October “did not happen in a vacuum.” Gaza has been under siege and blockade since 2007. As has been said by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein and many others, “Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison.”

Meanwhile, large parts of the West Bank—supposedly the future home of a Palestinian state—have been de facto annexed by Israel. Recently more than 200 Palestinians there have been killed by settlers, they should be called colonizers, and the Israeli military. Several thousand Palestinians have been arrested and are being held in administrative detention, i.e., imprisonment without trial or charge. Their homes have been demolished, cars destroyed, olive trees uprooted, crops burned.

Collective punishment is illegal under international law. In violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, 700,000 Israelis are colonizing the West Bank, E. Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel is a classic example of a settler colonial state. Its retrograde policies are backed by you. You enable massive death and destruction. Your position and that of the Democratic Party turns my stomach. Shame on you.

PS—Also Mr. President, Bravo for standing by and doing nothing while 125,000 Armenians were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). And thanks too for supporting autocratic regimes in Baku and Ankara. Armenians, Palestinians, Kurds and Kashmiris are disposable people. But Blinken probably already told you that.

David Barsamian is the Director at Alternative Radio