I am writing because it feels like it is all I have in this moment of despair.
We are days from the election. The president of the United States of America will be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Both have already held the power of the White House. Kamala is the Vice President. Donald Trump left office on January 6th, where he attempted to overthrow the results of the election in 2020.
I am not voting for Kamala Harris. Nor am I voting for Donald Trump. I am asking you, my friend, to not vote for them either. I know most if not all of you would not vote for Trump but I also know you are debating if you will be voting for Kamala Harris, and some of you may have already voted for her.
I will be direct. It is with rage, fury, anger, despair, and also a deep love, that I say, if you vote for Kamala Harris, I cannot trust you. You are wrong. And I mourn for you for what has happened across the years of your life that has broken your soul so that you could vote for her. I will not abandon you. I cannot. We only have each other, it is perhaps the last thing that remains in these dark days. But I cannot look upon you and say I will not judge you, I cannot say I will not invoke shame for your choice, I cannot promise that that the threads of kinship will endure. But I will not abandon you. I refuse. So what remains is honesty.
Palestine. Gaza. The West Bank. For more than 75 years, the Palestinian people have suffered from a white supremacist apartheid state. And on October 7th, a genocide of the people of Gaza began. Israel, and its citizens, are committing genocide. Those paying for the bombs are implicated. We, the citizenry of the United States, those who pay taxes, are complicit in genocide. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have since that day invoked Israel’s right to defend itself, which means, they believe the genocide they are currently committing is justified. Since that day, many chose to act. Protests have engulfed our nation. Students have occupied their campuses. US Soldiers have committed suicide by self immolation. In the midst of an election, we have demanded of Biden and Harris that if they want our vote, they must stop the genocide. They cannot even name it for what it is. We have played by the rules of our supposed democracy. And still, here we are. The genocide rages on, with both candidates for president showing no sign of stopping it. You know this. You are alive. And you are witness. I repeat it perhaps because it will be one more time that will provoke the moral crisis that can only lead to one place.
There are images, almost daily, of the horror. Murdered children in plastic bags carried by their parents. Palestinians on death marches. Death upon death. Tens of thousands murdered by bombs we paid for, more bombs dropped than the second world war. Gaza has been reduced to ruins. We attack hospitals, schools, everything. I say we because I must implicate all of us, those who are citizens of the United States. For the first time in our human history, we are seeing a people who are living their own genocide broadcasting it to the world.
All action to stop the genocide has failed. We have failed.
I return to what remains in these day and the moral crisis that is genocide. I cannot vote for any political candidate that would pay for or support a genocide. It is a redline I, and many, will not cross. Why? It is self evident, it is because my soul does not allow it. I cannot bear witness and then go forth into the ballot box and use my vote to legitimize this genocide. There is no debate, no hypothetical scenario, I only invoke what is happening at this very moment, the second I am writing this and the second you are reading it. I am invoking genocide. That is the ultimate violence, the ultimate destruction. Nothing else matters now. And if you must invoke a future that may be worse to justify your vote- consider, if we are in the ninth circle of hell, because that is what genocide is, if you do not burn as do the Palestinians, perhaps it is because you are at the devil’s table, or worse, you are holding the inferno and using it.
There is an electoral logic at play here. The first is that if we live in a democracy, my vote is both a tool for the future I want, and a tool of accountability for the present. No candidate has earned my vote for a future I want, as both Trump and Harris have legitimized an apartheid state and its “right” to commit genocide. Thus, I must deploy my vote as a tool of accountability. Many of us have in these past 12 months have, as voters, threatened Biden and Harris with denying them our vote, and only giving it if they stop Israel from continuing its genocide and end the apartheid state. This threat of accountability has not worked, but has in turn given us only fear. If not us, then them. If not my administration committing genocide, then it will be their administration committing genocide. That is what Biden and Harris have given us. Only fear.
But I do not implore you make the choice of not voting for Harris by invoking our “democracy”. We do not live in one. Millions who are incarcerated cannot vote. Millions more cannot because they are undocumented. And what of the undemocratic electoral college? What of voter suppression? What of January 6th? What of the millions who are not interested in democracy but instead seek to drink the blood of our original sin and make of this world a white supremacist eden? You know this. You are alive. You are witness. As I have said, following the logic of a democracy, I have used my vote as the logic applies. I must deny Harris my vote. But if we do not live in a true democracy, the what does it matter? So much as the contradiction would resolve itself, come Tuesday, it is what we have.
We have been here before. Our foundation is genocide and slavery. What is the vote to a Palestinian? What is the vote to the enslaved? Return to the era of our nation when we fought the revolutionary war and until the civil war began. What brought us freedom? Was it democracy? Was it the white men that voted for a lesser evil that did not agree with slavery but compromised with the enslavers? Was it the proposal of Lincoln to end slavery over the course of a hundred years? Imagine! Slavery ending formally, slowly, in the 1950’s! Was it the great emancipator who also killed 38 members of the Dakota Tribe, the largest mass execution in our US history? What happens beyond democracy? And before it? It was abolitionists who gave us freedom. Harriet Tubman. Frederick Douglas. John Brown. The Haitian Revolution. And the thousands who we do not remember who killed their enslavers, who broke the law, who then fought with the union army to defeat the enslavers. I do not invoke our history to ask you to draw the sword. I invoke it for you to understand we have been here before, and we will be again. That when you look back, you know the heroes of that time. It was not those who remained silent. It was not those who voted for Lincoln. It was not even Lincoln himself. It was not democracy that ended slavery. It was the choices people made when the beast did not yield, for the beast does not care for democracy. And the beast is before us again. And it is not yielding. It has sharpened its teeth. The beast is again committing genocide. It has dragged us to the abyss.
I now invoke my grandparents. During the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships, my grandfather smuggled people across the mountains fleeing Pinochet, and my grandmother sheltered them, nursed them back to health and hid them in her home. My grandparents were not part of any guerrilla or political organization. They simply chose to do this when they found these men near death in the Andes. My grandparents made a choice. They knew that if they were caught, they would be disappeared and killed, and maybe their children too, among them my mother. And still, they chose to do this. In the face of dictatorship, in the face of their own genocide, they chose to do what they could because it was right.
I said that if you vote for Kamala, I cannot trust you. If you cannot do this one thing, deny the current Vice President paying for a genocide your vote, why then should I trust you like I trusted my grandparents? The days ahead will become only more violent, more fascist, and that is regardless of who wins. But if in this moment, when the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, dead Palestinians will not cause a moral crisis in you to deny Harris your vote, then why should I have faith you will protect me, you will protect your neighbor, your mother, father, sibling, how can I trust that you will protect your child, if your soul does not shatter at voting for genocide? For as my grandparents lived and did what they did, countless others did something else, they would have handed over those fleeing in to the military. They would have been the one’s holding the ninth circle’s flaming sword. Just as those who betrayed the Jews hiding from the Nazis in world war II. Just as those who signed up to be soldiers in El Salvador that tortured my father. Just as those who work for the Biden administration that deny what the world has accepted as truth - that Israel commits genocide. Just like the guilty white men and women who did not nothing during every past genocide, I cannot trust you.
Come election day, if and when you enter that booth, and if you intend to vote for Harris, may the images of dead Palestinians consume you. May the fires that burn Palestinians alive make your skin imagine that hell. May the voices of the suffering dead ring without end. But may the living be enough reason for a different choice when you cast your vote. Because it if for the living we remain. And it is for the living we must keep fighting. You are alive. Your neighbor is alive. Your child is alive. I am alive. Palestine still lives. And they are fighting to live. They are fighting for a freedom that will also liberate us. I do hope your hand trembles, that you begin to cry, that you feel ashamed, that you are driven mad even, that despair takes you to the brink, that if you vote for Harris, you are consumed by this choice for the rest of your days. But I do not hope this to abandon you, I hope this crisis leads you to only one place.
That place is the place my grandparents have been, the place my father has been, the place the abolitionists have been, the place the IRA was, the place the Algerian resistance was, the place the civil rights movement was, the place the union soldier was, the place the South African freedom fighters were, the place San Oscar Romero stood when he gave his sermons, the place where Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, John Brown found themselves in at the brink of civil war, the place the students were when they occupied Hind’s Hall and City College in the face of the NYPD and their guns,, where Fred Hampton and Malcolm X and Fanon found themselves, where Aaron Bushnell was when he set himself aflame, the place Miep Gies was, where every Palestinian find themselves now. You know this place. Now you must have the courage to find it, embrace it, and let it guide you beyond this crisis.
It will never be too late to atone for our sins, our complicity, our refusal do what is right. I will not abandon you even after you choose to vote for Harris, if that is the choice you make. We will not abandon you. We will also not comfort you, or lift the shame you will carry into the days ahead of us, but we will welcome you when you make a different choice. Do no abandon Palestine. Do not abandon your own humanity. Do not let your soul shatter. Do not let it feed the beast. But if it does, it can be repaired. Find the place so many have found before. Find it. No matter how long it takes. What is ahead of us demands it. It demands we find the courage to do what we must when the moment arrives. And we are at one of those moments. The crossroad is before you. Do not vote for Harris. Do not legitimize the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Courage, my friend. Courage. You are not alone.
I love you.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.