Again, thank you, Qasim, for unequivocally choosing humanitarian perspective and solutions.
This campaign is an appropriate, perhaps somewhat singular, moment to present to all Americans the problems US policy in the Middle East have led to. The horrible events in Gaza provide just one episode in the decades of remorselessly geopolitical, anti-humanitarian US official choices and actions.
The US bilateral agreement commitments for military aid could, if the commitments came with explicit mutual binding agreement to adhere to UN and other international norms, have been guided by the 'for defensive purposes' qualifier. Official or knowing violations could be responded to with confidence that humanitarian and international legal interests had primary status.
Such a commitment is realistic and has powerful international relations implications. How many Israeli government acts of aggression and violation of protections legally possessed by Palestinians (and others) may have been avoided ? What would the political and humanitarian realities be today if it had been?
Today, whether it be me, or you, or a candidate for US public office, any American should be asking about violations of international norms by the Israeli government, and we should be persuading the Congress to review all military aid agreements with the government of Israel.
I stand by my suggestion in my previous comment herein: Taking an ethical opinion is an imperative. Imperative to Palestinians and people everywhere is determining a path to durable peace, to Palestinian self-determination, to a reconstituting of regional relationships that support cooperation. A cease-fire, an immediate unhindered international aid effort, and an immediate international team to conduct a safe gathering of and return of hostages are the least that the US should partnering with other nations to achieve.
And citing another MERIP report, "Gaza Is a Crime Scene", Lisa Hajjar, In: MERIP 309 (Winter 2023):
" Since the start of Israel’s current bombing campaign on October 7, the Gaza Strip has become an enclave of death, displacement and destruction. An estimated 33,000 people have been killed, including 12,660 children and 7,000 missing and presumed dead beneath the rubble. More than 65,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many with lost limbs and other permanent disabilities. The IDF has targeted doctors, humanitarian workers, artists, scientists and professors, along with their families. Entire family lines have been obliterated. More journalists have been killed in three-and-a half months—an estimated 125 so far—than during any other war, irrespective of length.
The scope, scale and speed of Israel’s bombing campaign constitutes the most intense assault anywhere since World War II. There is no reciprocal high-intensity violence because Gaza has no army. ... Almost 85 percent of the population—1,955,000 people—has been displaced. Over a quarter million homes have been totally or partially destroyed ...[along with] massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure in residential areas. The destruction includes schools (326), hospitals and clinics (208), mosques (247), churches (3), heritage sites (199), factories (1,690), libraries, archives and cultural centers. All of Gaza’s universities have been leveled.[2] Even the dead are not safe. Military bulldozers have destroyed cemeteries and soldiers have desecrated graves.
At the start of this war, Israel exploited its capacity to exercise necropolitical control over aid-dependent Palestinians by cutting off Gaza’s access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity and telecommunications. Three months in, the food system, like the healthcare system and the infrastructure for clean water and sanitation, has completely collapsed. Man-made famine conditions have reached the catastrophic phase. Four out of every five starving people in the world are Palestinians in Gaza."
This is monstrous.
" 'Israel exploited its capacity...' ", while the US continues to provide materiel that enables exploitation. So, that is materiel clearly that must be with-held.
In their campaign, VP Harris and Gov Walz should be entirely candid about the changes in policy that are in fact needed. Any nation's defense is a humanitarian defense, a humanitarian need, and can he successfully carried on as a humanitarian effort and will attract international partners' support. That kind of defense is also a basic human community mutual security action.
The decades of unnecessary human tragedy that has been forced on the Palestinian people (as well as other peoples of the Middle East) by the policies of the governments of Israel and of the US (others, too) must be ended. The governments of US and Israel must be made to live with and fully support the UN and its member peoples.
Starting now, the Harris and Walz team should make explicit that the US, under their Administration will not wait, but will promptly act to end US deliberate denial of its violations, and that under their US Administration real and significant changes will constitutionally and in conformity with international law and norm be made.
Americans might forget the resolve that was demonstrated by Americans in constituting and effecting the US Constitution. We now need to show that resolve in living up to the humanitarian potentials of that Constitution and to show that, by means of it, Americans resolve to be participants in an international legal revolution in humanitarian norms activism by governments.
Already, the Ukraine is making international cooperation and action work toward this in its Ten Points Peace Formula.
Durable social relations require voluntary commitment and adherence to mutually constituted expectations, rules, procedures, and mechanisms to manage disputes toward reconciliation.
This is not straightforward policy thought nor process to make fundamental change. American conservatives and others have resisted it for decades, have exerted pressures on the UN, other nations, and in most international institutions to resist it.
That this change is necessary confronts us all. My recommendation is to carefully read and listen to authors, e.g., Philippe Sands, whose work in this area is extensive and novel. For example (a recent example): " Tales from the Legal Front Line: Philippe Sands in conversation with Monica Hakimi",
Yep, my brain hurts, my heart hurts, my inner child is dead, and I completely hate the fact that we don't have a say in where our tax dollars go, or what our congressman decide is best for us when really they just vote for whatever is best for them and their buddies in ALEC and all the bastards on that damn forbs list
Joe Biden needs to stop arming them, period. He will be threatened by the Republicans who will use this issue to attempt to win the presidency. News reports have been curtailed and sanitized. The Main stream media has sanitized it. Unfortunately, this will be used against VP Harris if Biden stops arming Israel. The assholes in the House will see to that. Personally, I do not like where the nation is on this. Most people don’t remember facts from a year ago, much less almost 60 years ago. Take away the weapons is my solution. We also need to get the AIPAC and all other PACs out of politics. Rich people have no business dictating foreign policy. Does anyone know how long Israel could go without US Weapons? Would some other nation supply them?
Netanyahu and his ultra Orthodox Cabinet members have made no secret of their determination to erase Palestinians from the historical Greater Israel. They have not only encouraged illegal settlement they have armed the settlers and totally failed to curb Settler violence against the legal occupants of Gaza and the West Bank.
It is useless to parse the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and questions of who, when or how the current holocaust erupted- a term that is NOT exclusive to any one set of victims. It applies to the Smallpox epidemics that destroyed the indigenous populations of the New World, especially as there is clear and convincing evidence of deliberate Colonial dissemination of smallpox infectious materials. Holocausts and genocide have been a human chosen weapon of mass destruction throughout human history. An end to it is no longer imaginable.
From my experience, one of the responsibilities of citizens in America which most Americans are discouraged from learning to choose is the responsibility for constituting the character and intent of American foreign policy in general.
Prof Timothy Snyder effectively has been helping instruct us in this very practical learning experience; I recommend Prof Snyder's many publications, public addresses and interviews, and the articles he publishes on his substack, Thinking about... .
Without a basic and shared understanding of who we are as people among people in the world, and without a humanist and mutualist core set of views about people in general, then what guides our national effort when choosing to participate in international cooperative programs looks like the 'national development' schemes and histories that marginalize basic mutual need and mutual interest activities of living and that depend on mutual cooperation that involves voluntary personal choice and, in place of these, force entire communities to change how they live and what they work for together to anomic, ideologically-motivated ends (comparative national power, corporate institutional welfare, elite group power-interest expansion,...) from which individual conscience, social inclination, and inter-generational and shared interest-outcomes are effectively removed.
The continuing horror of destruction of lives of Palestinians is an example elevating nationalism, corporatism, and clericalism while ignoring actual living. The calculus of nationalisms, corportisms, and clericalisms is, always and everywhere, an elitist view, an exceptionalist view, a remorseless and unrealistic substitute vision of personal impersonal power and security. Hundreds of years of carving us of the planet and its peoples into political realms devised for exploitation has put the Palestinians and most of the rest of us in this position.
Living is not zero-sum. What a cruel joke thinking in zero-sum terms makes of living. Living is not competative, it is learning lessons from chosen actions that provide experience of just how basically reciprocal are our actual relationships with each other and with the living world from which we are born and in which living must be done.
This is an opportunity to look ahead but to focus thought and effort on this terrible present foreign policy choice that America, as a national government and self-determination nation among nations, is making. We know from experience that winning a durable peace (though humanly imperfect) is just as costly in lives and in other senses as limiting effort to destructive battle by battle conflict for some never-achievable superior and dominating change in 'balance of power'. We also know from experience that achieving durable peace is incremental, involves making very clear that mutual benefit and mutual security are just two aspects of the same set of cooperative inclusive efforts that respect and improve fulfillment of common present needs and that contribute to a cooperative outlook on the future.
The American experience is but one collective experience. Working toward durable cooperation and ending and preventing hostility requires participating in a dialogue with more people than before and with newly formed novel expectations about agreement on what to cooperatively achieve. What will change are substance and face of 'durable peace', of deciding to work collectively internationally to decide on the steps to take toward the ending of hostilities and toward living the durable peace-making tasks that all ordinary people do do together. The guiding visions and substantive agreements will not look entirely like past ones; a different and novel present and a believable and achievable better future will give it form and will be the basis for successful implementation.
What can be described as consequences of, for example, WWII, include changes in mutual understanding among people which, in the case of the people of Germany, much of Europe, and of Japan, are lessons to be learned from; so too are the lessons of N and S Korea, where reconciliation efforts of the peoples involved were blocked, frustrated by pursuit of a divided-world set of competing national ideological and corporate visions.
As I said below, Americans must make voting in November an imperative. The irons we have in the fire that represent our common interests in democratic rule of law civil society conduct and governance are irons we must keep hot. This means cooperative, acting in good faith, cooperating by means and for ends that we can actually achieve together and must do continuously and in person.
What are Kamala Harris’s options? Here in Michigan our Arab neighbors represented
Biden’s win. Currently Michigan is not in full support of DNC foreign policy. The truth of Empire and centuries of violence are in plain sight. Dearborn Michigan families have first hand stories indicting U.S. war crimes led by this administration.
Thank you for this. I don’t want to be a single issue voter. I know that voting Harris/Walz would change a lot of things internally for the US, compared to what we know Trump and his morons will.
What is happening in Palestine is absolutely horrific and I hesitate as well, with Harris because the foreign policy of the US for over 40 years has been awful. I want to hope. I want to believe Harris will do better than Biden. Just struggling with the duality of so many issues and so many feelings related to the current administration.
Thank you, Qasim, for taking the necessary, humanitarian stance.
The responsibility which Pres Biden has is clear. What VP Harris might accomplish would be to take an ethical position within the context of the UN and international norms on human rights and on conduct of war. That public position would, most likely, not affect near term events. The Palestinians would continue to be the target of horrific violence by the Israeli government.
So, this terrible situation that the Palestinians are in must still be ended. As I mentioned elsewhere, many of us have been attempting to present solutions as least as far ago as 1967 when, as we can read in MERIP archival articles, "the 1967 Arab-Israeli war ... culminated in the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, among other transformations of regional politics...."
Taking an ethical opinion is an imperative. Imperative to Palestinians and people everywhere is determining a path to durable peace, to Palestinian self-determination, to a reconstituting of regional relationships that support cooperation. A cease-fire, an immediate unhindered international aid effort, and an immediate international team to conduct a safe gathering of and return of hostages
are the least that the US should partnering with other nations to achieve.
An obstacle for decades has been a willingness on the part of most Americans to not hold accountable politicians who made a partisan issue for political gain out of the conflict and the human rights abuses and human suffering. Much of the American media joined the politicians, while lives among many peoples (Palestinians, Israelis, Lebanese,....) were being lost or ruined. It is these latter peoples throughout the region who most Americans failed to respect and failed to work to protect and support.
Thank you for your work in human rights and for your advocating ending this horror in Gaza.
Perhaps someone should compile all the pictures of bloody, broken, dismembered and dead children and show them to President Biden publicly and ask for his thoughts. On. The. Spot. I just do not understand how someone who is such a good, compassionate and empathetic person like Joe Biden can continue to support and fund this horrific genocide!
I'm truly flabbergasted by him. He alleged to have seen the '40 beheaded babies' photo (he didn't) yet has continued to ignore the photos of literally tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed. Why?
I believe Harris will do an arms embargo after she is voted in. But to promise this before the election would backfire from negative news coverage and the Republicans would be relentless in their attacks. Believe in her commitment to end the war and vote for her. Not voting will only help Trump win.
She should make an offensive arms embargo part of her platform now. Blame Netanyahu for being the war criminal he is. People will appreciate the honesty and commitment to peace and justice.
I believe this is exactly why the increase IDF attacks against the "safe havens" where innocent Palestinians have been moved to, is a direct correlation to Netanyahu's increased fear over Harris being the next president. He already knows what is coming with her presidency and he is doing as much damage and killing as he can while he can. He is a raging vindictive sadist. If she increases her rhetoric for the arms embargo, his killing will also increase. I feel in my core, Biden will never enforce an arms embargo on Netanyahu during his presidency. He will leave this for Harris to do, but she won't be able to until she can. (January 6 cannot come soon enough.) Meanwhile lets not take a chance on sabotaging her campaign like AIPAC just did to Cory Bush.
Please consider and realize how many more entirely innocent Palestinians, aid workers and journalists will be massacred by Israel while you're waiting for Harris to take office.
yes I thought about that too, But she is not the president and so she can only influence the president with her opinion, which so far has not changed Biden’s course. Until Harris becomes president it is a fact that it is only Biden who can stop sending armaments to Israel. Do you really think that if she promises an arms embargo while she is running her campaign it would deter Netanyahu from his path of death and destruction? I do not. But it could certainly derail her campaign…there are too many Christian Nationalists and Israeli Zionists and groups like AIPAC, whose pockets are deep and who have already influenced this campaign way too much, as evidenced by it being a close race. A racist criminal oligarch like Trump should not even be eligible to run, and yet here he is in a very real, very threatening position to become the next POTUS.
Somebody else suggested the same thing -- that it's not her call -- but another person said that Biden would be motivated to advance any agenda she has. Either of those people could be wrong. But I still say the futzing around continues on a daily basis to get innocent people killed. I don't have a clear image of what Dems don't care about that, unless, as you say, they're worried that taking an alternate stance will cause them not to get elected. Then, they have an ethical dilemma.
And I will still say that the voters are dumb enough to fall for anything. (I know Donnie never got the support of the majority of the voters, but how did he get support from any of them? And in '15 and '16, he left us with the impression that he was an idiot, an inveterate liar, and concerned only about himself. Once he proved it beyond any doubt by '20, he got more votes than he did in '16. We're dimwits.) I think it would move them to have a decent, forceful person tell them we've been making a horrible mistake, and we're going to stop making it. NOW!
Is this what Jewish Voters like ??? Genocide by Hitler was wrong & so is this ???
festering lame duck genocidal zionazi jew butcher biden
Again, thank you, Qasim, for unequivocally choosing humanitarian perspective and solutions.
This campaign is an appropriate, perhaps somewhat singular, moment to present to all Americans the problems US policy in the Middle East have led to. The horrible events in Gaza provide just one episode in the decades of remorselessly geopolitical, anti-humanitarian US official choices and actions.
The US bilateral agreement commitments for military aid could, if the commitments came with explicit mutual binding agreement to adhere to UN and other international norms, have been guided by the 'for defensive purposes' qualifier. Official or knowing violations could be responded to with confidence that humanitarian and international legal interests had primary status.
Such a commitment is realistic and has powerful international relations implications. How many Israeli government acts of aggression and violation of protections legally possessed by Palestinians (and others) may have been avoided ? What would the political and humanitarian realities be today if it had been?
Today, whether it be me, or you, or a candidate for US public office, any American should be asking about violations of international norms by the Israeli government, and we should be persuading the Congress to review all military aid agreements with the government of Israel.
I stand by my suggestion in my previous comment herein: Taking an ethical opinion is an imperative. Imperative to Palestinians and people everywhere is determining a path to durable peace, to Palestinian self-determination, to a reconstituting of regional relationships that support cooperation. A cease-fire, an immediate unhindered international aid effort, and an immediate international team to conduct a safe gathering of and return of hostages are the least that the US should partnering with other nations to achieve.
And citing another MERIP report, "Gaza Is a Crime Scene", Lisa Hajjar, In: MERIP 309 (Winter 2023):
" Since the start of Israel’s current bombing campaign on October 7, the Gaza Strip has become an enclave of death, displacement and destruction. An estimated 33,000 people have been killed, including 12,660 children and 7,000 missing and presumed dead beneath the rubble. More than 65,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many with lost limbs and other permanent disabilities. The IDF has targeted doctors, humanitarian workers, artists, scientists and professors, along with their families. Entire family lines have been obliterated. More journalists have been killed in three-and-a half months—an estimated 125 so far—than during any other war, irrespective of length.
The scope, scale and speed of Israel’s bombing campaign constitutes the most intense assault anywhere since World War II. There is no reciprocal high-intensity violence because Gaza has no army. ... Almost 85 percent of the population—1,955,000 people—has been displaced. Over a quarter million homes have been totally or partially destroyed ...[along with] massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure in residential areas. The destruction includes schools (326), hospitals and clinics (208), mosques (247), churches (3), heritage sites (199), factories (1,690), libraries, archives and cultural centers. All of Gaza’s universities have been leveled.[2] Even the dead are not safe. Military bulldozers have destroyed cemeteries and soldiers have desecrated graves.
At the start of this war, Israel exploited its capacity to exercise necropolitical control over aid-dependent Palestinians by cutting off Gaza’s access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity and telecommunications. Three months in, the food system, like the healthcare system and the infrastructure for clean water and sanitation, has completely collapsed. Man-made famine conditions have reached the catastrophic phase. Four out of every five starving people in the world are Palestinians in Gaza."
This is monstrous.
" 'Israel exploited its capacity...' ", while the US continues to provide materiel that enables exploitation. So, that is materiel clearly that must be with-held.
In their campaign, VP Harris and Gov Walz should be entirely candid about the changes in policy that are in fact needed. Any nation's defense is a humanitarian defense, a humanitarian need, and can he successfully carried on as a humanitarian effort and will attract international partners' support. That kind of defense is also a basic human community mutual security action.
The decades of unnecessary human tragedy that has been forced on the Palestinian people (as well as other peoples of the Middle East) by the policies of the governments of Israel and of the US (others, too) must be ended. The governments of US and Israel must be made to live with and fully support the UN and its member peoples.
Starting now, the Harris and Walz team should make explicit that the US, under their Administration will not wait, but will promptly act to end US deliberate denial of its violations, and that under their US Administration real and significant changes will constitutionally and in conformity with international law and norm be made.
Americans might forget the resolve that was demonstrated by Americans in constituting and effecting the US Constitution. We now need to show that resolve in living up to the humanitarian potentials of that Constitution and to show that, by means of it, Americans resolve to be participants in an international legal revolution in humanitarian norms activism by governments.
Already, the Ukraine is making international cooperation and action work toward this in its Ten Points Peace Formula.
Durable social relations require voluntary commitment and adherence to mutually constituted expectations, rules, procedures, and mechanisms to manage disputes toward reconciliation.
This is not straightforward policy thought nor process to make fundamental change. American conservatives and others have resisted it for decades, have exerted pressures on the UN, other nations, and in most international institutions to resist it.
That this change is necessary confronts us all. My recommendation is to carefully read and listen to authors, e.g., Philippe Sands, whose work in this area is extensive and novel. For example (a recent example): " Tales from the Legal Front Line: Philippe Sands in conversation with Monica Hakimi",
The Italian Academy - Columbia University [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpfdoCvdQDs ]
Yep, my brain hurts, my heart hurts, my inner child is dead, and I completely hate the fact that we don't have a say in where our tax dollars go, or what our congressman decide is best for us when really they just vote for whatever is best for them and their buddies in ALEC and all the bastards on that damn forbs list
Joe Biden needs to stop arming them, period. He will be threatened by the Republicans who will use this issue to attempt to win the presidency. News reports have been curtailed and sanitized. The Main stream media has sanitized it. Unfortunately, this will be used against VP Harris if Biden stops arming Israel. The assholes in the House will see to that. Personally, I do not like where the nation is on this. Most people don’t remember facts from a year ago, much less almost 60 years ago. Take away the weapons is my solution. We also need to get the AIPAC and all other PACs out of politics. Rich people have no business dictating foreign policy. Does anyone know how long Israel could go without US Weapons? Would some other nation supply them?
Netanyahu and his ultra Orthodox Cabinet members have made no secret of their determination to erase Palestinians from the historical Greater Israel. They have not only encouraged illegal settlement they have armed the settlers and totally failed to curb Settler violence against the legal occupants of Gaza and the West Bank.
It is useless to parse the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and questions of who, when or how the current holocaust erupted- a term that is NOT exclusive to any one set of victims. It applies to the Smallpox epidemics that destroyed the indigenous populations of the New World, especially as there is clear and convincing evidence of deliberate Colonial dissemination of smallpox infectious materials. Holocausts and genocide have been a human chosen weapon of mass destruction throughout human history. An end to it is no longer imaginable.
Get bisen out..require kamala to pull the plug on netanyahu
From my experience, one of the responsibilities of citizens in America which most Americans are discouraged from learning to choose is the responsibility for constituting the character and intent of American foreign policy in general.
Prof Timothy Snyder effectively has been helping instruct us in this very practical learning experience; I recommend Prof Snyder's many publications, public addresses and interviews, and the articles he publishes on his substack, Thinking about... .
Without a basic and shared understanding of who we are as people among people in the world, and without a humanist and mutualist core set of views about people in general, then what guides our national effort when choosing to participate in international cooperative programs looks like the 'national development' schemes and histories that marginalize basic mutual need and mutual interest activities of living and that depend on mutual cooperation that involves voluntary personal choice and, in place of these, force entire communities to change how they live and what they work for together to anomic, ideologically-motivated ends (comparative national power, corporate institutional welfare, elite group power-interest expansion,...) from which individual conscience, social inclination, and inter-generational and shared interest-outcomes are effectively removed.
The continuing horror of destruction of lives of Palestinians is an example elevating nationalism, corporatism, and clericalism while ignoring actual living. The calculus of nationalisms, corportisms, and clericalisms is, always and everywhere, an elitist view, an exceptionalist view, a remorseless and unrealistic substitute vision of personal impersonal power and security. Hundreds of years of carving us of the planet and its peoples into political realms devised for exploitation has put the Palestinians and most of the rest of us in this position.
Living is not zero-sum. What a cruel joke thinking in zero-sum terms makes of living. Living is not competative, it is learning lessons from chosen actions that provide experience of just how basically reciprocal are our actual relationships with each other and with the living world from which we are born and in which living must be done.
This is an opportunity to look ahead but to focus thought and effort on this terrible present foreign policy choice that America, as a national government and self-determination nation among nations, is making. We know from experience that winning a durable peace (though humanly imperfect) is just as costly in lives and in other senses as limiting effort to destructive battle by battle conflict for some never-achievable superior and dominating change in 'balance of power'. We also know from experience that achieving durable peace is incremental, involves making very clear that mutual benefit and mutual security are just two aspects of the same set of cooperative inclusive efforts that respect and improve fulfillment of common present needs and that contribute to a cooperative outlook on the future.
The American experience is but one collective experience. Working toward durable cooperation and ending and preventing hostility requires participating in a dialogue with more people than before and with newly formed novel expectations about agreement on what to cooperatively achieve. What will change are substance and face of 'durable peace', of deciding to work collectively internationally to decide on the steps to take toward the ending of hostilities and toward living the durable peace-making tasks that all ordinary people do do together. The guiding visions and substantive agreements will not look entirely like past ones; a different and novel present and a believable and achievable better future will give it form and will be the basis for successful implementation.
What can be described as consequences of, for example, WWII, include changes in mutual understanding among people which, in the case of the people of Germany, much of Europe, and of Japan, are lessons to be learned from; so too are the lessons of N and S Korea, where reconciliation efforts of the peoples involved were blocked, frustrated by pursuit of a divided-world set of competing national ideological and corporate visions.
As I said below, Americans must make voting in November an imperative. The irons we have in the fire that represent our common interests in democratic rule of law civil society conduct and governance are irons we must keep hot. This means cooperative, acting in good faith, cooperating by means and for ends that we can actually achieve together and must do continuously and in person.
What are Kamala Harris’s options? Here in Michigan our Arab neighbors represented
Biden’s win. Currently Michigan is not in full support of DNC foreign policy. The truth of Empire and centuries of violence are in plain sight. Dearborn Michigan families have first hand stories indicting U.S. war crimes led by this administration.
Is there a way to a greater good?
Thank you for this. I don’t want to be a single issue voter. I know that voting Harris/Walz would change a lot of things internally for the US, compared to what we know Trump and his morons will.
What is happening in Palestine is absolutely horrific and I hesitate as well, with Harris because the foreign policy of the US for over 40 years has been awful. I want to hope. I want to believe Harris will do better than Biden. Just struggling with the duality of so many issues and so many feelings related to the current administration.
Thank you for your empathy and commitment to justice. This is why we need to keep the pressure on. We need action.
Thank you, Qasim, for taking the necessary, humanitarian stance.
The responsibility which Pres Biden has is clear. What VP Harris might accomplish would be to take an ethical position within the context of the UN and international norms on human rights and on conduct of war. That public position would, most likely, not affect near term events. The Palestinians would continue to be the target of horrific violence by the Israeli government.
So, this terrible situation that the Palestinians are in must still be ended. As I mentioned elsewhere, many of us have been attempting to present solutions as least as far ago as 1967 when, as we can read in MERIP archival articles, "the 1967 Arab-Israeli war ... culminated in the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, among other transformations of regional politics...."
Taking an ethical opinion is an imperative. Imperative to Palestinians and people everywhere is determining a path to durable peace, to Palestinian self-determination, to a reconstituting of regional relationships that support cooperation. A cease-fire, an immediate unhindered international aid effort, and an immediate international team to conduct a safe gathering of and return of hostages
are the least that the US should partnering with other nations to achieve.
An obstacle for decades has been a willingness on the part of most Americans to not hold accountable politicians who made a partisan issue for political gain out of the conflict and the human rights abuses and human suffering. Much of the American media joined the politicians, while lives among many peoples (Palestinians, Israelis, Lebanese,....) were being lost or ruined. It is these latter peoples throughout the region who most Americans failed to respect and failed to work to protect and support.
Thank you for your work in human rights and for your advocating ending this horror in Gaza.
Perhaps someone should compile all the pictures of bloody, broken, dismembered and dead children and show them to President Biden publicly and ask for his thoughts. On. The. Spot. I just do not understand how someone who is such a good, compassionate and empathetic person like Joe Biden can continue to support and fund this horrific genocide!
I'm truly flabbergasted by him. He alleged to have seen the '40 beheaded babies' photo (he didn't) yet has continued to ignore the photos of literally tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed. Why?
The good thing about being 82 and waning is that Biden won't have to think about his legacy for very long.
I believe Harris will do an arms embargo after she is voted in. But to promise this before the election would backfire from negative news coverage and the Republicans would be relentless in their attacks. Believe in her commitment to end the war and vote for her. Not voting will only help Trump win.
She should make an offensive arms embargo part of her platform now. Blame Netanyahu for being the war criminal he is. People will appreciate the honesty and commitment to peace and justice.
I believe this is exactly why the increase IDF attacks against the "safe havens" where innocent Palestinians have been moved to, is a direct correlation to Netanyahu's increased fear over Harris being the next president. He already knows what is coming with her presidency and he is doing as much damage and killing as he can while he can. He is a raging vindictive sadist. If she increases her rhetoric for the arms embargo, his killing will also increase. I feel in my core, Biden will never enforce an arms embargo on Netanyahu during his presidency. He will leave this for Harris to do, but she won't be able to until she can. (January 6 cannot come soon enough.) Meanwhile lets not take a chance on sabotaging her campaign like AIPAC just did to Cory Bush.
Please consider and realize how many more entirely innocent Palestinians, aid workers and journalists will be massacred by Israel while you're waiting for Harris to take office.
yes I thought about that too, But she is not the president and so she can only influence the president with her opinion, which so far has not changed Biden’s course. Until Harris becomes president it is a fact that it is only Biden who can stop sending armaments to Israel. Do you really think that if she promises an arms embargo while she is running her campaign it would deter Netanyahu from his path of death and destruction? I do not. But it could certainly derail her campaign…there are too many Christian Nationalists and Israeli Zionists and groups like AIPAC, whose pockets are deep and who have already influenced this campaign way too much, as evidenced by it being a close race. A racist criminal oligarch like Trump should not even be eligible to run, and yet here he is in a very real, very threatening position to become the next POTUS.
Somebody else suggested the same thing -- that it's not her call -- but another person said that Biden would be motivated to advance any agenda she has. Either of those people could be wrong. But I still say the futzing around continues on a daily basis to get innocent people killed. I don't have a clear image of what Dems don't care about that, unless, as you say, they're worried that taking an alternate stance will cause them not to get elected. Then, they have an ethical dilemma.
And I will still say that the voters are dumb enough to fall for anything. (I know Donnie never got the support of the majority of the voters, but how did he get support from any of them? And in '15 and '16, he left us with the impression that he was an idiot, an inveterate liar, and concerned only about himself. Once he proved it beyond any doubt by '20, he got more votes than he did in '16. We're dimwits.) I think it would move them to have a decent, forceful person tell them we've been making a horrible mistake, and we're going to stop making it. NOW!
you do know her husband is Jewish? that he has made very large contributions to the JDF?
That is the idea …Netanyahu needs money to pay India for Indian Military supplies to the Zionists !