MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Reality check: For the Middle East, Biden is no better than Trump

The polarized nature of American politics often makes it difficult to address fundamental differences between the country’s two main political rivals, Republicans and Democrats. As each side is intent on discrediting the other at every opportunity, unbiased information regarding the two parties’ actual stances on internal and external issues can be difficult to decipher.

Regarding Palestine and Israel, however, both parties’ establishments are quite clear on offering Israel unlimited and unconditional support. The discrepancies in their positions are, at times, quite negligible, even if Democrats, occasionally, attempt to present themselves as fairer and even-handed.

Judging by statements made by Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, his running mate, Kamala Harris, and people affiliated with their campaign, a future President Biden does not intend to reverse any of the pro-Israel political measures adopted by the Donald Trump Administration.

Moreover, a Democrat administration, as revealed, will not even consider the possibility of conditioning US financial and military support to Israel on the latter’s respect for Palestinian human rights, let alone international law altogether.

“Joe Biden has made it clear … he will not tie US security assistance to Israel to political decisions Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more,” Harris, who is promoted enthusiastically by some as a ‘progressive’ politician, was quoted as saying in a telephone call on August 26. The call was made to what Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, termed as “Jewish supporters.” The Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel referred to this crucial constituency as “Jewish donors.”

Although the view of the party’s rank and file has significantly shifted against Israel in recent years, the Democrat’s upper echelon still caters to the Israel lobby and their rich backers, even if this means continuing to mold US foreign policy in the Middle East so that it serves Israeli interests.

Republicans, on the other hand, have cemented their support for Israel, but no longer around geostrategic issues pertaining to Israel’s ‘security’ or US interests. The speeches made by Republican leaders at the Republican National Convention (RNC), held in Charlotte, North Carolina last month, were all aimed at reassuring ‘Evangelical-Christian Zionists’, who represent the most powerful pro-Israel constituency in the US. The once relatively marginal impact of Evangelical-Christian Zionists in directly shaping US foreign policy has morphed, over the years, to define the core values of Republicans.

Regardless of the nature of the discourse through which Republican and Democrat leaders express their love and support for Israel, the two parties are decidedly ‘pro-Israel’. There are many recent examples that corroborate this assertion.

On November 18, 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Washington would no longer consider Jewish settlements illegal or a violation of international law. That position was later cemented in Trump’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’, published on January 28.

Democrats, however, continue to perceive illegal Jewish settlements as, indeed, illegal. “This decision harms the cause of diplomacy, takes us further away from the hope of a two-state solution, and will only further inflame tensions in the region,” Joe Biden’s campaign said in a statement, in response to Pompeo’s declaration.

Although markedly different, it is hard to imagine a Democrat administration upholding the above position, while simultaneously refraining from reversing previous decisions made by the Trump administration. It can only be one or the other.

One’s cynicism is fully justified, as we recently learned, that the Democrat establishment has refused to even use the word ‘occupation’, with reference to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, in their party platform released on July 15. According to Foreign Policy, the decision “followed heavy last-minute lobbying by pro-Israel advocacy groups.”

On December 6, 2017, the Trump administration made one of the boldest pro-Israel decisions, when he formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. A few months later, on May 14, 2018, the US embassy was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a brazen violation of international law.

The legal foundation of Trump’s decision was the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. This Act was the outcome of bipartisan efforts, bringing together Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Interestingly, leading Democrats, such as Joe Biden and John Kerry, were the main cheerleaders of the embassy move, back then. Only one Democrat senator, the late Robert Byrd, voted against the Bill. In the House of Representatives, only 30 out of 204 Democrats voted ‘no’.

Even though many Democrats rejected the timing of Trump’s implementation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act, their criticism was largely political, primarily motivated by Democrats’ attempts to discredit Trump. The fact that the Biden campaign, later on, made it clear that the decision will not be reversed should he become president, is a further illustration highlighting the moral bankruptcy of the Democrat establishment, as well.

The truth is, US unconditional backing for Israel is a common cause among all American administrations, whether Democrat or Republican. What they may differ on, however, is their overall motive and primary target audience during election time.

Political polarization and misinformation aside, both Democrats and Republicans head to the November elections with strong pro-Israel sentiments, if not outright support, while completely ignoring the plight of occupied and oppressed Palestinians.

All over the Middle East, the problems caused by the US shall remain, despite a lip service to show otherwise. It was announced on September 9 that the U.S. Administration would reduce troop numbers in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,000 by the end of the month. The commander Central Command, General McKenzie, said the withdrawal was to take place because of “the great progress the Iraqi forces have made” and that the “ultimate goal” was having local forces who were capable of preventing a resurgence of Islamic State in the country.”

In April 2003 the U.S. invaded Iraq in a wave of exuberant militarism that amongst other things was intended to stabilize the Middle East. As one means of achieving stabilization the deposed ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was tried by a kangaroo court in 2006 and hanged in a disgusting travesty of justice, which summed up the direction in which Iraq was headed.

The Washington administration of the era, headed by the pathetic oddball George W Bush (he of ‘Mission Accomplished’), was responsible for initiating the chaos which fell on the region, and no occupant of the White House has managed to achieve stability in the Middle East — or anywhere else, for that matter. The policy of the times was encapsulated by Vice-President Cheney, a truly foul person who will be best remembered for his lip-curling malevolence. Six months before the invasion he declared that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a downright lie that was enthusiastically embraced by a wide spectrum of gullible idiots, including present presidential contender Joe Biden, who said America’s war on Iraq would be part of “a march to peace and security.”

Cheney went much further, with the mainstream media lapping up his bizarre predictions, especially when he forecast that “Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region” and that after the war, “With our help, a liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again . . . Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognized and protected.”

The results have been starkly contrary to everything predicted by Cheney and all the other war-slavering savages who helped plunge Iraq and the region into chaotic carnage. The country’s territorial integrity is threatened by nationwide instability and, for example, as the UK Foreign Office states, “Turkey conducts regular military action in the north of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and, occasionally, further south. There is particular risk in mountainous areas . . . and near the border with Turkey.”

The government in Baghdad is hardly democratic, because under the quota system “the president comes from the Kurdish minority, the speaker of the parliament from the Sunni Arab minority, and the prime minister from the Shiite majority. Influential ministry posts are divided among the country’s religious groups” — but not, of course, of religions that are at variance with Islamic theocracy. The Council For Foreign Relations noted in August that “experts say the system contributes to entrenched corruption in Iraq, which ranks as one of the most corruptcountries in the world,” and the regular summation in the Iraq Daily Roundup by Margaret Grifis of Antiwar is indicative of the ever-increasing carnage and chaos in that stricken land.

As recorded by Associated Press, there are many militias, some being strongly supported by the loony leaders of Shia Iran and none of which contribute to “recognition and protection” of ethnic or religious communities which even under the tyrant Saddam Hussein were indeed treated in such a fashion. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Jews had constituted “a privileged group, protected and left to worship as they wished.” So far as is known, there are about five Jews left in Iraq.

As for Christians, the Archbishop of Irbil, the Right Reverend Bashar Warda, said in London last year that since the US invasion the Christian community had fallen from around 1.5 million to just 250,000. He asked if “a peaceful and innocent people [will] be allowed to be persecuted and eliminated because of their faith? And, for the sake of not wanting to speak the truth to the persecutors, will the world be complicit in our elimination?” But there has been no answer to that, and no comment from the Bush people who started the war, or any of those who followed it up with their stupid “surge” and other futile fandangos. And not a word from the Trump or Biden electioneering merry-go-round.

Trump is the supposed Christian Believer who announced in February that “In America, we don’t punish prayer. We don’t tear down crosses. We don’t ban symbols of faith. We don’t muzzle preachers . . . In America, we celebrate faith, we cherish religion, we lift our voices in prayer, and we raise our sights to the Glory of God.” Biden believes that “Personally for me, faith, it’s all about hope and purpose and strength, and for me, my religion is just an enormous sense of solace.”

Unfortunately they are both hypocrites.

Trump is a hypocrite about religion because he doesn’t believe in anything but money and power, and it is significant that his bible-brandishing charade in June was described by the former Archbishop of Canterbury as “an act of idolatry . . . In a context where racial privilege itself has long been an idolatry, where long-unchallenged institutional violence has been a routine means for the self-defense of that privilege, the image of the President clinging to the Scriptures as if to an amulet is bizarre even by the standards of recent years.” Biden, on the other hand, appears to be a genuine Believer, but cynically uses religion to attract votes in his campaign to be president. For example, he was a longtime supporter of the Hyde Amendment that forbade use of government money to pay for abortions, but when it looked as if he was going to lose votes by that stance he performed what the Brits call a reverse ferret and joined the majority.

It is apparent that the Iraq policies of Trump and Biden don’t rest on religious belief or indeed any sort of conviction, and that both are prepared to change course as the voting breezes might blow. Trump’s order of troop withdrawal from Iraq is nothing but a public relations ploy and Biden’s declaration on September 10 that he “supports drawing down the troops” was entirely negated by his follow-up that he would keep a “small force” in the Middle East to “prevent extremists from posing a threat to the United States.” What garbage.

Nobody knows what the long-term U.S. policy might be for the country that Washington destroyed, and neither presidential candidate has the courage, conviction or ability to produce one.

Reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are depressing in their descriptions of the situation in Iraq, and it is obvious that Iraq is going further down the drain while Washington is incapable of preventing the slide that will ruin the lives of even more Iraqi citizens. Whether it’s Trump or Biden in the White House next year, Iraq too is doomed. As well as Yemen, and Syria, and Lybia, etcetera, etcetera.

PALESTINA

Palestine can never be truly understood through numbers, because numbers are dehumanizing, impersonal, and, when necessary, can also be contrived to mean something else entirely. Numbers are not meant to tell the story of the human condition, nor should they ever serve as a substitute for emotions.

Indeed, the stories of life, death – and everything in-between – cannot be truly and fully appreciated through charts, figures and numbers. The latter, although useful for many purposes, is a mere numerical depository of data. Anguish, joy, aspirations, defiance, courage, loss, collective struggle, and so on, however, can only be genuinely expressed through the people who lived through these experiences.

Numbers, for example, tell us that over 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip between July 8 and August 27, 2014, over 500 of them being children. Over 17,000 homes were completely destroyed, and thousands of other buildings, including hospitals, schools and factories were either destroyed or severely damaged during the Israeli strikes.

This is all true, the kind of truth that is summarized into a neat infographic, updated occasionally, in case, inevitably, some of the critically wounded eventually lose their lives.

But a single chart, or a thousand, can never truly describe the actual terror felt by a million children who feared for their lives during those horrific days; or transport us to a bedroom where a family of ten huddled in the dark, praying for God’s mercy as the earth shook, concrete collapsed and glass shattered all around them; or convey the anguish of a mother holding the lifeless body of her child.

It is easy – and justifiable – to hold the media accountable for the dehumanization of the Palestinians or, sometimes, ignoring them altogether. However, if blame must be apportioned, then others too, including those who consider themselves ‘pro-Palestine’, must reconsider their own position. We are all, to an extent, collectively guilty of seeing Palestinians as sheer victims, hapless, passive, intellectually stunted and ill-fated people, desperate to be ‘saved.’

When numbers monopolize the limelight in a people’s narrative, they do more damage than merely reduce complex human beings to data; they erase the living, too. Regarding Palestine, Palestinians are rarely engaged as equals; they persist at the receiving end of charity, political expectations and unsolicited instructions on what to say and how to resist. They are often the fodder for political bargains by factions or governments but, rarely, the initiative takers and the shapers of their own political discourse.

The Palestinian political discourse has, for years, vacillated between one constructed around the subject of victimhood – which is often satisfied by numbers of dead and wounded – and another pertaining to the elusive Fatah-Hamas unity. The former only surfaces whenever Israel decides to bomb Gaza under any convenient pretext at the time, and the latter was a response to western accusations that Palestinian political elites are too fractured to constitute a potential ‘peace partner’ for Israeli rogue Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Many around the world can only understand – or relate to – Palestinians through their victimization or factional affiliation – which, themselves, carry subsidiary meanings relevant to ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalism’, among others.

The reality is, however, often different from reductionist political and media discourses. Palestinians are not just numbers. They are not spectators either, in a political game that insists on marginalizing them. Soon after the 2014 war, a group of Palestinian youth, together with supporters from around the world, launched an important initiative that aimed to liberate the Palestinian discourse, at least in Gaza, from the confines of numbers and other belittling interpretations.

‘We Are Not Numbers’ was launched in early 2015. The group’s ‘About Us’ page reads: “numbers don’t convey … the daily personal struggles and triumphs, the tears and the laughter, the aspirations that are so universal that if it weren’t for the context, they would immediately resonate with virtually everyone.”

It is inspiring to hear young, articulate and profoundly resolute Palestinians such as Issam Adwan, the Gaza Project Manager, speaking a language that transcends all the stereotypical discourses on Palestine. They were neither victims nor factional, and were hardly consumed by the pathological need to satisfy western demands and expectations.

“We have talents – we are writers, we are novelists, we are poets, and we have so much potential that the world knows little about,” says Issam.

Khalid Dader, one of the Organization’s nearly 60 active writers and bloggers in Gaza, contends with the designation that they are ‘storytellers.’ “We don’t tell stories, rather stories tell us … stories make us,” he told me. For Khalid, it is not about numbers or words, but the lives that are lived, and the legacies that often go untold.

Somaia Abu Nada wants the world to know her uncle, because “he was a person with a family and people who loved him.” He was killed in the 2008 Israeli war on Gaza, and his death has profoundly impacted his family and community. Over 1,300 people were also killed in that war. Each one of them was someone’s uncle, aunt, son, daughter, husband or wife. None of them was just a number.

“‘We Are Not Numbers’ made me realize how necessary our voices are,” Mohammed Rafik told me. This assertion cannot be overstated. So many speak on behalf of Palestinians but rarely do Palestinians speak for themselves. “These are unprecedented times of fear, when our land appears to be broken and sad,” Mohammed said, “but we never abandon our sense of community.”

Issam reminds me of Arundhati Roy’s famous quote, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

It was refreshing to talk to Palestinians who are taking the decisive step of declaring that they are not numbers, because it is only through this realization and resolve that Palestinian youth can challenge all of us and assert their own collective identity as a people.

Indeed, Palestinians do have a voice, although silenced and unheard by Western mainstream media. And it is a strong, resonating voice at that.