Despite the continual lip service paid to Palestinians, the Biden administration, and the U.S. government in general, does not now and never has supported the Palestinian people. Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine has had unwavering support by the United States. For decades, the U.S. has been the primary support for Israel’s massive military build up, providing more than $3 billion per year.
And in the same breath, the Biden administration claims that because it has approved a minimal amount of humanitarian aid trucks to Gaza, it is “committed to Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination.” What lies!
So far only 20 trucks of humanitarian aid have been let in to southern Gaza through Egypt. Before October 7, Gaza would normally receive 455 aid trucks per day. The Biden administration has sent crumbs into a slaughter, amidst a constant bombardment, and wants to pretend that this counts as supporting the Palestinians. This amount of aid is nothing.
At the same time, the U.S. is preparing to send an additional $17 billion in military aid to Israel. In other words, out of one side of his mouth, Biden says he wants to support the Palestinian people. But out of the other side of his mouth, he promises the U.S. will supply Israel with the very weapons it needs to continue its genocidal attack. You can’t have it both ways. There would be no need for humanitarian aid if Israel didn’t have the weapons to carry out its massacre. This is clearly more than support. This is the U.S. government actively participating in this slaughter.
And the Israeli state has been very clear about its complete dependence on military support from the U.S. government. Last week, the Israeli Defense Minister bluntly told a group of lawmakers why the Israeli military decided to allow a trickle of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. Here’s what he said:
“The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”
The humanitarian aid is a distraction just so the Biden administration can pretend to be offering some minimal support to Palestinians, like a gangster ordering a hit on a family and then offering some money for the funeral. That is not support. The U.S. is complicit in the slaughter of the Palestinians, and we cannot fall for their pathetic lies.
And at the same time, the Biden administration has tried to pretend that Israel and Ukraine represent the same side in similar conflicts. It doesn’t take much to see how this is completely backwards. Yes, the Ukrainians have a right to do everything in their power to defend themselves against Russia’s imperialist invasion and attempt at annexation of Ukrainian territory. Compared to this situation, Israel is most similar to Russia, and Palestinians similar to Ukrainians — not the other way around.
Like Russia, Israel is a massive military power, with nuclear weapons, annexing the land of Palestinians. For decades, Israel has been carrying out a colonial occupation, and annexation of Palestinian land, and a genocidal erasure of the Palestinian people. In Palestine, the U.S. supports the occupier, the aggressor, the colonizer, the brutal Israeli regime and its genocide of Palestinians, providing the very weaponry to make all of this possible. And at the same time, unlike the Ukrainians, the U.S. denies that Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against Israel’s genocidal war.
The U.S. government has the blood of thousands of Palestinians on its hands, and Biden and U.S. politicians are hypocrites of the highest order. In this country, we must call out their lies, and do everything we can to oppose this massacre of Palestinians.
