White guilt and Biden’s support for the genocide in Gaza

President Biden is learning today a basic truth once enunciated by Alice O’Connor, the Russian-born American writer and philosopher better known by her pen name, Ayn Rand. The truth is: “We can avoid reality, but we cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.” 

Mainly relying on his own instincts, as well as the ostensibly misguided advice of his aides, Biden has chosen to ignore the Palestinian issue throughout his presidency, believing that it would simply go away. It has not. It has only gotten considerably worse, as can be witnessed from the tragic events of the past few months.

Owing to his incapacity to either listen or empathize, despite his reputation for doing so, Biden has squandered his credibility as a fair representative of all his American constituents, especially Democratic ones. Besides being an old-school Cold Warrior who still sees Israel as a strategic asset — with ample evidence to the contrary — he is also known as a staunch self-declared Zionist. What few people could have predicted, however, was that he would turn out to be such a tone-deaf and cold-hearted person who has made himself into a virtual mouthpiece for Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine, readily parroting lies and half-truths concocted by its master propagandist PM Netanyahu and the rest of his slippery coterie of prevaricators. 

Come to think of it, Biden’s seeming ambivalence towards the Palestinians and his shocking indifference to their staggering loss of life may very well be rooted in his unyielding fealty to the idealistic Zionist vision of an Israel that exists principally in the minds of old white politicians whose prejudices against the Palestinian people often border on outright racism. In large part, these politicians are made up of traditional Christian males who feel quite weighed down by an abiding sense of penitence towards Jews, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

In this rather complex human paradigm, the question to be asked is, where do the Palestinians fit in? Is occupying them for decades and subjugating them to all manner of indignities, both individually and collectively, the answer to this Christian angst towards Jews? Are white Americans and Europeans resolved to allay their abiding feelings of guilt by projecting them on a people that had nothing to do with the horrendous crimes committed against Jews in Europe? 

Even now, one wonders what gave a European power the right to bequeath the land of Palestine in the 1917 Balfour Declaration to a rich representative of Jews who did not live there as they were promised that coveted tract of land already inhabited for millennia by another people? And why has Britain, which exercised no actual control of Palestine at the time, escaped any rightful indignation over its immoral and treacherous act until now? 

As this seemingly intractable question remains unanswered, it should be noted that the entirely cynical move by Britain has yielded a twofold boon for Britain and Europe. At once, Europeans were able to rid themselves of their perceived Jewish problem, since most Europeans had no real sympathy for Jews persecuted in their midst, while also offering themselves as the real protectors and defenders of their victimized Jews in a far-flung land usurped with European complicity from a people who had done the Jews no wrong. As a consequence, Europe suddenly found itself relishing the advantages of embracing Zionism as a new canon for Jews in Palestine. Never mind the apparent contradiction that the Zionist creed was a European construct borne out of the need to protect Jews from the ravages of European communities who ostracized and abused them in the first place; and never mind the catastrophic impact visited on the indigenous population in Palestine by such a supremacist settler colonial ideology. 

Thus was the white man’s burden toward Jews cynically transferred to the hapless Palestinians whose pleas for justice continued to be utterly muffled in the same European capitals that placed them in this unenviable position in the first place. Then, decade after decade, Europe fiendishly observed silence as it watched the gradual but certain dismantlement of Palestine and the displacement of its indigenous population, followed by the subjugation of those Palestinians left behind to Israeli segregation, occupation, and malevolent apartheid. Meanwhile, all the U.S. and Europe could muster in response was meaningless coinages such as decry, deplore, and, when the fancy strikes, if any courage is finally found, the term “condemn.” This game of words by the U.S. and Europe, sprinkled with other canards like “peace process” and “two-state solution,” has long served as a wink and a nod to Israel to keep doing what it has done over the past seventy-five years of its colonialist settler history, while blithely savoring unconditional Western acquiescence and collusion along the way.

So now, as the U.S. and Europe continue taking Israel’s side during its unrelenting genocidal assault on Gaza, how does the Israeli government manage to sell its massacres and decades-long oppression of the Palestinians? 

By never failing to invoke the potent memory of White shame and remorse associated with the Holocaust, Israeli governments since 1967 have claimed that Israel, alone, is the rightful proprietor of the collective Jewish memory. Worth noting here is that many Holocaust scholars have excoriated Israel for its unabashed weaponization of this unique and painful Jewish experience by shamelessly linking it to the current Gaza events. 

Likewise, as a settler colonial project from its inception, Israel has boasted about being the sole standard-bearer for world Jewry, notwithstanding the fact that a growing number of Jews around the world, particularly in the U.S., have denounced Zionism as an ideology and have dissociated themselves entirely from the actions taken by the Israeli government. (It may be helpful to point out that before the Holocaust, most European Jews were not Zionists and that it was the U.S., not Palestine, that was their top destination if they wanted to emigrate.) This historical anti-Zionist phenomenon is not to be underestimated, as it has gained momentum over the years, mostly bolstered by a young cadre of Jews who have become immensely disenchanted with what they perceived as the highly manipulative and specious depiction of Israel as a just society, especially one touted as a safe haven for Jews. A nod must be made in this space to the recent documentary film Israelism, which offers a compelling rebuttal of Israel’s claim to be the sole representative of all Jews. 

More specifically, young Jews on American college campuses today have become painfully aware of the inescapable analogies between socioeconomic and political inequities afflicting U.S. ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, and the conditions to which the Palestinians are subjected under a Zionist segregationist state. In light of this increasingly challenging reality, many of these youth have found themselves feeling more affinity with the Palestinians struggling against Israeli occupation and apartheid than with their own traditional American Jewish communities who, for so long, have unquestioningly adopted the Zionist narrative served out to them by one Israeli government after the other.

Likewise, a significant selling point employed by Israeli propaganda has been that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and, hence, the Western world owes it its unwavering support and its guarantees of security. To be sure, much has been written refuting the very postulation that Israel is a democracy, specifically pointing out that Zionism, from the outset, was predicated upon the supremacy of one ethnoreligious group over all others. Such refutations have highlighted the veritable apartheid status that has long prevailed in the Occupied Territories, not only undermining Israel’s claim of being a democracy but also leading some to identify it as an ultranationalist state and recently referring to it as a settler colonialist theocracy. 

Not to be deterred by these confutations, Israel has continued to call on the West to guarantee its security and, even more bizarrely, has demanded that the victimized Palestinians should follow suit. This sort of dissonance actually raises some intriguing questions. For one, why would a country reportedly possessing a large nuclear arsenal and boasting one of the most sophisticated and best-equipped armies in the world need guarantees of its security from the indigenous population under its own oppressive military occupation? Furthermore, by demanding that the Palestinians, whom Israel has displaced and turned into perpetual refugees, must recognize its right to exist on their ancestral land, it is, in fact, requiring them to acknowledge its right to replace them and approve of its nullification of their national patrimony. That, in turn, would amount to a de facto admission by the lawful owners that their land was henceforth rightly usurped. 

On the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel, a brilliant Jewish American stated: “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2000 years of suffering and deserve all that will come to us… I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish State.”

Few in Israel apparently heeded these prophetic words by Albert Einstein, and fewer ever since.

As for Biden and the war on Gaza, today, all over the world, the outcry could be heard: how many more Palestinian deaths will the U.S. President condone before he orders his client state, Israel, to stop its ruthlessly unprecedented bombardment of Gaza? And how many more innocent lives in Gaza must be offered at the altar of Israel’s unfettered desire for vengeance before he joins the rest of the world in calling for a ceasefire? 

Apparently, all these impassioned pleas have fallen on deaf ears so far. Nonetheless, regardless of what transpires from this moment on, Biden’s political legacy will forever be inexorably linked to his shamefully complicit conduct during this universally condemned genocidal war.