Opinion | Farrukh Abadi
As a sign of the increasingly reactionary nature of the US state, the Biden-Harris administration has once again vetoed a UN Security Council resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza, on November 20. Compared to previous presidents, the Biden-Harris administration proves that it cannot operate any other way than to continue on this same reactionary trend that Trump, too, will continue.
During former President Obama’s last few months in office, his administration abstained from giving support to Israeli settlements during a UN Security Council vote. Before him, several Republican presidents have also restricted Israel’s actions by threat of rescinding weapons and money, including Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Of course, these were not by any means progressive decisions that had the interests of the masses in mind—rather, they were aimed at reeling in the genocide to preserve Israel from overextending itself and countering the trend of its isolation. The fact that today the Democrats are unwilling to do this shows the extent of this reactionization—that faced with the most naked genocide and amid a presidential election cycle, imperialists do not have the leeway to slow down its course to win a few extra votes and quell the mass movement. And this is coming from a party that campaigned on being the lesser of two evils!
The situation is not much different in Congress. A lot of attention was attracted by the “left”-wing of the Democrats—the apologists of Israel—trying to pass a measure to stop the sale of arms to Israel. This was led by social-democrat Bernie Sanders, who dutifully carried out his role of sanitizing Harris’s campaign over the past few months only to attack it after losing. Now, his attempts to pass the bill provided window dressing again for the Democrats, with the hopes of sparking the embers of electoral cretinism. The Biden-Harris administration has spent at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel over the past year alone, and roughly $5 billion on its own escalated operations in the region.
The argument that Trump will be worse than the current administration in relation to Israel is only correct in one regard: that every administration is worse than the previous one. This is because imperialism is in decay, and this is what is at the heart of this genocide: the tendency of imperialism toward absolute domination, and as a result, the tendency of the masses to struggle, and in our current era, toward armed struggle in particular. What else could Trump do that the Biden-Harris administration has not? The times that the Democrats called on Israel to scale back its attacks—particularly on Iran—were not out of any sort of benevolence, but for the preservation of Israel. Israel is teetering on the edge of its existence, and anything worse that the US could do—whether it be authorizing stronger Israeli attacks or direct intervention—will serve to tip the scales further in favor of the resistance forces. Let the powerful punches delivered by the resistance in Lebanon and continuing to be delivered in Gaza serve as an example and provide a glimpse at the just rewards of the adventurism of the Israeli fascists.
