For an outsider, it’s hard to see how a Donald Trump win would make a difference to American foreign policy. Kamala Harris has been careful not to depart from Joe Biden’s policy of giving Israel the weapons it needs to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank. America has continued to arm Israel through its Gaza-style flattening of Lebanon. Harris’s campaigning proxy, Bill Clinton, recently made a speech in Michigan where, addressing that state’s Muslim voters, he declared that the slaughter in Gaza was down to Palestinian intransigence. Just in case they didn’t understand, he explained that the number of Palestinians killed made no difference to the rightness of
Israel’s war: “I am not keeping score that way,” he said, speaking on behalf of Israelis who might have lost family during Hamas’s October 7 attack. He’s right; the vibe might be different but neither Trump nor Harris is interested in counting the Palestinian dead.
A European acquaintance I met earlier this year was unmoved by the slaughter in Gaza on two counts: one, Hamas had started it and two, Gaza wasn’t the most important issue in the world. For Europe (and implicitly the West), Ukraine was the existential battlefield du jour. Since the ‘axis’ powers that opposed the West in Ukraine included Iran, the patron of Hamas and Hezbollah, Gaza’s claim on European and American empathy was small. In this latest civilisational conflict, the Palestinians were on the wrong side.
This person is a liberal, viscerally hostile to both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the world as it is, it isn’t unusual for Western liberals to both disapprove of ‘populists’ and be unmoved by ethnic cleansing. The two positions are, in fact, connected; the liberal centrists who run Western countries — Keir Starmer, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz — would prefer a non-Likud leader helming the slaughter with the right mix of handwringing and havoc than Bibi and his ghoulishly genocidal cabinet colleagues.
Through most of the first year of the war on Gaza, The Economist, the house organ of Western liberalism, tried to make the case that Israel’s murderous war was sanctioned by international law. It was a just war that couldn’t be delegitimised by the number of Palestinians killed. It has stopped making this case explicitly ever since the guardians of international law, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, began taking allegations of war crimes and genocide against Israel seriously, but, as with my European acquaintance, it continues to see dead Palestinians as collateral damage in a necessarily drawn-out war.
The threat that Trump will give Netanyahu a free hand to finish off the Palestinians is premised on the claim that Biden has reined Bibi in. This is a grotesque piece of special pleading: the United Nations secretary-general and the chiefs of UN agencies have warned that the entire population of northern Gaza faces imminent death from starvation, disease and bombardment. Apart from some performative tutting, the US government has done nothing to curb Israel’s now-explicit strategy of starving and bombing Palestinians out of north Gaza.
The mass killing in Palestine and Lebanon is happening with the blessing of Biden’s government. Israel’s usefulness as a strategic US outpost in the Middle East is obvious from the excitement generated amongst Western pundits by Israel’s strikes on Iran and its proxies. The reason there is no ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza is that America hasn’t been able to broker the total surrender that both Netanyahu and Biden see as the appropriate outcome of this year-long investment in slaughter.
The difference between Trump and Biden on the issue of Palestine is hard to see. The Abraham Accords were negotiated by Trump and taken forward by Biden and Antony Blinken. Finessing the Palestinians and helping Israel produce the conditions that make a Palestinian State impossible have been unspoken tenets of American foreign policy for a quarter of a century and more. A Democratic administration will dress up ethnic cleansing in Gaza as humanitarian relocation while Trump will be more explicit about Palestinian losers taking their medicine, but left to the American State, no other outcome is likely.
Ironically, the existential conflict in Ukraine that my acquaintance was concerned about isn’t likely to be materially affected by Trump’s election. The scare-mongering about Trump withdrawing support from Volodymyr Zelensky ignores the fact that even the most hawkish Western commentators now accept that Ukraine will have to negotiate an end to the fighting that will involve surrendering some part of its territory to Russia because the US and Europe can’t bankroll the war indefinitely. Trump represents Americans who don’t want to pay to police the world. The sooner Europe comes to terms with a parochial America, and the quicker this erstwhile hyperpower comes to terms with its relatively diminished standing, the better it’ll be for the rest of the world.
During the last US presidential election, it was possible to see Biden as the good guy because Trump had been so performatively wicked. The trashing of the nuclear deal with Iran, the anti-Muslim rhetoric, the bad faith of the so-called Abraham Accords, the anti-immigrant xenophobia and the misogyny made foreigners like me root for the Democrats. We live in a small world and the character of the American State matters. It is impossible, though, to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt again.
Not only did the Biden administration follow Trump’s lead in every substantive foreign policy matter (including China), but it also literally embraced Netanyahu’s violence in Gaza. He went along with the demonisation of the anti-war protests on US college campuses. Kamala Harris made no attempt to distance herself from Biden’s complicity in slaughter. She couldn’t even summon up the courage to allow a Palestinian to address the Democratic National Convention. Her calculation was that pro-Palestinian voters in Michigan and the rest of America either didn’t matter or had nowhere else to go.
We’ll know on election day if she got her math right, but we know already that on the great matter of our time, she got her morals wrong. As Biden’s deputy, she was complicit in the genocide. She crossed that line, not Trump. We don’t have to imagine the horrors that might come to pass under Trump; we saw in hideous video clips the unending horror of Gaza on her watch. Her best argument is that a MAGA presidency will deprive American women of their legal right to abortion. She’s right. But a liberal who reckons that the right of American women to choose can’t co-exist with an acknowledgement of the right of Palestinians to live is a moral void, not a liberal. There is something clarifying about that. Whichever way this election goes, America will be a shabbier place once the votes are counted.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
