Last week, aerial photos from Los Angeles with blocks of homes reduced to ash hit social media timelines, leading people to understandably draw comparisons to Gaza. Destruction of entire neighborhoods is always heartbreaking. Home, where most of us spend a great deal of our time, shapes who we are. The memories and love a home can hold are much larger than whatever the square footage may be. Behind all the devastation are all the people in power that make all of this tragedy and grief possible in the first place.
Joe Biden’s term as president ended on Monday, and the world doesn’t have to guess what his legacy will be. The crimes he is responsible for are written into history with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, each one coming from a neighborhood his administration helped turn to ash. The drone images from Gaza and Los Angeles share the same hues of grey and heartache, and originate from the same flavors of greed and contempt for human dignity. And now, all of a sudden we have a ceasefire, with no thanks to Biden. When I think of Joe Biden, I will think of every child I’ve seen dismembered and every home I’ve seen destroyed while I scrolled through social media for the last fifteen months. And I will remember that none of it needed to happen, he greenlighted and funded the genocide of the Palestinian people. He, and powerful people like him, let insurance companies back out of insuring homes and fueled the climate crisis for decades to come.
Another clear demonstration of his inaction occurred last week, when he suddenly removed Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, a demand we’ve been making to his administration for four years. The designation, along with the US embargo, has caused levels of deprivation the country hasn’t seen since the Soviet collapse. People in Cuba were starving because of Joe Biden’s decision to keep them on the SSOT list, and he only removed them on his way out the door.
A small part of accountability for Biden and his partners in genocide like Antony Blinken, Kamala Harris, Lloyd Austin, Matt Miller, and others will be remembering the people that were killed in Gaza with their weapons shipments or because of their lies. Like George W. Bush, the man responsible for the death of a million Iraqis and the country’s destruction, who took up painting in his old age to make people forget what he had done in their name – Biden has time to change what people may think of him. We owe it to the Palestinian people to not develop amnesia while bombs could still rain over their heads. Biden could have ended the genocide at any moment, and he chose not to. And because of that, tens of thousands of children are dead, the only reason being that they were born in the largest open air prison in the world.
It’s hard to speak of legacies when the dust from the bombs dropped on Iraq hasn’t even settled. Babies are still being born in Fallujah with life-threatening deformities and diseases. For over a year, Israel continued to drop US-made bombs and, on multiple occasions, chemical weapons on the people of Gaza. From the environmental impact of the nonstop bombardment to the public health outcomes of living without proper shelter for so long, the extent of Biden’s crimes in Gaza won’t be understood entirely for decades.
It’s also hard to speak of legacies when next week a new President who has promised to stay the course of genocide takes office. In reality, the genocide of Palestinians will be several US president’s legacies – even before Biden.
Hellbound and Down 