To US President Joe Biden and those who would vote for him
On November 5th, 2024, I will not vote for Joe Biden. Nor will I be voting for any candidate that has in any way supported the Apartheid state of Israel. I know what this means, that I will most likely be left to vote for no one.
I already hear the chorus of liberals drowning me in the same words we have heard since Trump announced his run for presidency in June 2015. I know more than a year has yet to pass before the election. My mind is made. I cannot vote for Biden.
I write this, and share, because I have a clarity that I am sure will be attacked, a clarity grounded in my being human, my history and the history of my parents, grandparents, ancestors. I make record here so I may remember that when I face my creator, when I face my ancestors, when I face Palestinians, I know where I stood. And that is with my Palestinian kin and for the liberation of Palestine and her people and the liberations of all oppressed people in our world.
First, let it be clear that there is no debate, President Joe Biden and almost the entirety of the political establishment of the United States is complicit in genocide. There is no other way to define what the state of Israel is doing to Palestine, and has been doing since the first Nakba in 1948. We are, in literal real time, seeing Israel indiscriminately bomb 2.2 million people in what is in practice an open-air Apartheid Prison, Gaza, cutting off access to food, water, electricity, and medical supplies, from entry. The apartheid state of Israel has described Palestinians as animals, inhuman, barbaric, and used other dehumanizing language for decades, with the aid of thousands of Apartheid supporting journalists, writers, comedians, artists, and people with platforms that can relay a single message, sometimes as simple as “I Support Israel” or “Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism”, in a single second. The Apartheid State has bombed schools, residential buildings, hospitals, mosques, churches. They have used white phosphorous. There is a deep suffering enacted by an even deeper and devastating violence. People are not simply dying; they are being killed. Under Apartheid, there is no natural death, there is only murder, assassination, ethnic cleansing, genocide.
It is clear. This is a genocide in one of its most horrific manifestations. At the time of my writing this, more than 8,000 Palestinians have been murdered by the Apartheid State of Israel. On Friday, October 27th, the Apartheid State of Israel cut off virtually all communication from Gaza. A blackout. And continued bombing Palestinians. More bombs have been dropped on Gaza than during the most brutal attacks of World War 2, the Vietnam War, the bombing of North Korea, even, by count of tons, more than when we have used nuclear weapons and murdered thousands in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
I ask myself, and all of us, especially those of us who can vote - does your soul not break at the proposition that you should vote for a man, and an almost entire political establishment, that has funded and supported genocide?
I will be blunt. For some of us, the crisis unfolding is the genocide in Gaza and all Palestine, because that is one of the greatest crises of our humanity that we have seen in these past 500 years – ethnic cleaning, slavery, the mass murder via nuclear weapons controlled by the west.
For others, the crisis is one you cannot even recognize. The crisis is numbed to you, because how bereft must you be of your own humanity and being able to see the humanity of others that you must justify voting for a man and an establishment that is complicit in genocide. Has white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and all these interlocking beasts roared so long that you cannot see the blood dripping from the mouth and mistake screams for symphony? Are you so convinced that the hell we are living is more bearable because we find ourselves in the eighth circle and not its ninth? Are you to be the hollow echo of billions that stood by as the powerful committed genocide, enslaved continents, destroyed entire peoples, built the wheel of endless cycles of violence, or have you deluded yourself enough to think you would be the hero and not the passive spectator in history books, empty spaces between the ink of letters, or perhaps that is even too generous to suggest you are the paper we write on as a person in our world embroiled in death, because I am sure the trees have more moral clarity than you, who is still considering voting for Joe Biden.
Genocide has always been resisted. From the colonial era, to the transatlantic slave trade, the Haitian Revolution, our own Civil War, and the Holocaust, people of conscious, still able to hold onto their humanity, saw genocide and acted. Sometimes the acts feel insignificant, without consequence, unmoving, nothing in the face of horror. But to say that is to ignore 500 years’ worth of resistance and struggle, centuries of people choosing our humanity and doing what is right instead of justifying to do something that only can be described as complicity.
I am not voting because I cannot be complicit in genocide. My soul will not allow it. I am told, better to vote than to abstain, as my non-vote will only benefit the alternative, which is a more hellish level of hell, but hell nonetheless. I name you Judas, for it is your soul that is broken, not mine or the many millions of others who see the paradox laid bare of what it means to vote in this country. It is you who can say “I will vote for the man who is aiding the genocide of the Palestinian people”, not us. You have made that choice. You are justifying genocide. You must contend with the fact that when you die and meet your maker, they will read the names of those killed by the Apartheid State you supported, you voted for.
It is you who must confront this truth of what voting means in our United States actually means.
You will say, voting is our privilege, a right, hard fought, without acknowledging that the struggle to that right was violence, and thus agreeing that it is through violent struggle and unrelenting pressure we win our rights and justice. You will say, if you do not vote, you are voting for Trump, or worse! But how can voting be the most powerful tool in my civic arsenal and lose its potency if I deny it to any candidate? Or are you telling me that both candidates care so little of the reason why I am withholding my vote? Oh! But one side will never care – they are made up of racists, white supremacists, white people who are a lost cause! Is it not a ridiculous proposition, then, to participate in a system that a sizeable part of the people who can vote sees me and so many others, Black, Indigenous, Palestinian, Jewish, Queer and Trans people, as sub-human, who would see us dead, raped, tortured, made something else before accepted as human? You want me to vote next to men and women who are, among themselves, KKK members, Nazis, White Nationalists? Those white people are so beyond racist that they would commit genocide like our forefathers? Apologies, are we speaking about Trump, or Biden? I have lost myself in the differentiation of the two.
Forgive me if I have not tricked myself into thinking we live in a democracy. But I will not forgive you for lacking the conviction to hold Biden accountable. And the only mechanism we have for that, aside from a violent one, is voting. And here we reach the grand paradox of our so obviously white supremacist government – voting does not work, despite it being the only mechanism of accountability if a political candidate has broken promise, or in this case, aided in genocide. And before you delve into the tired calculus of “lesser of two evils”, I do not tolerate such arithmetic, because there is not calculation to be made in genocide. It is wrong. It is the greatest sin of our time. And I will not fall into a pit of debate that attempts to win my vote through your calculation of a hypothetical reality when in the one we are living genocide is taking place.
There is no forgiveness here possible. One is either complicit in the sin of genocide or not. And I, along so many others, refuse complicity. If even in reading this, you cannot confront your shattering humanity, then I have only one thing left to say to you.
We cannot trust you. If you cannot refuse any political candidate on the basis of genocide, then I do not wish to understand what will make you refuse. I do not want to think of what horror it will take for you then say “I will not vote for you”. If you can still vote for him despite this moment, you are lost.
In our past 500 years of white supremacist violence, justice has always been preceded by two refusals. The first is the refusal of white people to do what is right. The second is the refusal of the oppressed to accept anything but freedom. Lest we allow delusion to misremember every justice won has been wrought through a ballot and not the unrelenting struggle toward freedom that included violence in response to horror. Do I condone violence? I condone justice. And it is even the myth of our nation that we needed a revolution to be a free country where we are born with unalienable rights. But I invoke our founding as a nation not to admire it, but to remind you that at the very moment white slaveholders wrote the declaration of independence, many saw through its deception and still committed to resisting the lie that is our constitution, and have not yielded since.
I do not pray for violence. I pray for justice. And our ancestors have taught us, it will come, we will win, and we must do everything for it.
Free Palestine. Until we win.