America Deserves My Vote, But You, President Biden, Do Not
Dear President Biden,
I am writing to you as an American by choice. I have lived in the United States for almost 52 years, most of them in Virginia, the mother of all states. Decades ago I embraced America as my final home and last refuge. In 2020 I voted for you grudgingly, aware of your exaggerations, the Anita Hill debacle, and your penchant for words without borders; but I voted enthusiastically against Donald Trump hoping to prevent America’s self-immolation. Your support for Israel’s war on Gaza has placed me as a voter and a citizen in a moral and political dilemma that alienated me the furthest from you.
Mr. President,
For three years you have treated the Palestinians with benign neglect. Sure, you reversed your predecessor’s brazen hostility towards the Palestinians, their rights and aspirations, and restored U.S. economic and humanitarian aid. You even revived the mantra of the “two-state solution” and played a new riff that Israelis and Palestinians deserve “equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity” that left a soothing reverb. You managed to elevate lofty words, appeals and promises in your minds, particularly during times of tension and bloodshed to the domain of hard praxis. But in reality, you have not done anything to avert the headlong rush of Israelis and Palestinians on the road to perdition.
If anything, you pursued a detour around Palestine to strike a history-making deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, since the Palestinians have been pacified by occupation and marginalization in a new Middle East that looked deceptively “quieter than it has been for decades” as your National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan proclaimed on the eve of destruction.
On your way to the White House you vowed to put human rights at “the center of our foreign policy.” You used words like “autocrat,” “dictator,” “pariah” and “extremist” to describe those hard men leading Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. But since these words were never binding on you, and as fleeting as a dinner conversation and were never stamped with solemnity, you later embraced these men literally and figuratively with your customary levity and conviviality.
While I expected you after Hamas’ horrors on October 7 to provide Israel with unqualified political and material support, I recoiled nonetheless when you adopted Israel’s war as yours, and the flippant tone with which you dealt with the epic suffering of Palestinian civilians, as if the blood of a Palestinian pauper had less value than the blood of an Israeli concertgoer—as if in your mind there is a hierarchy of pain, an aristocracy of blood, the Palestinians are excluded from them. You questioned glibly the veracity of their casualties, while ignoring the wasteland Israeli tanks left in their wake, and you did not see the trail of tears Palestinians had to endure amid the pyramids of rubble that once were the crowded hamlets, cities and refugee camps of their previous lives, on their forced southern march to no particular place.
On November 9 you were asked “What are the chances of a Gaza ceasefire?” You answered as if you were discussing improvement in the weather “None. No possibility.” It took you more than 40 days to see the humanity of the Palestinians when you said, "I, too, am heartbroken by images out of Gaza and deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children." But you talk about the suffering as if it is caused by an inexplicable force, not the action of men you know and you embraced, who unleashed American made weapons in a war you still refuse to stop. What you really want is only to mitigate Palestinian agony to blunt the domestic and international outcry, now that your polls show the alienation of some of your already reluctant supporters, but not reverse the policies that caused the death and suffering.
Why did you visit Israel and embrace Netanyahu? Surely you should have known that everyone in the Middle East and beyond understood that you were embracing also his war aims. How many times you have to keep repeating the story of your first encounter with the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Israel, when you quoted her telling you, “We Israelis have a secret weapon. We have nowhere else to go.” I am not sure you know that Ms. Meir, who came to Palestine in 1921 from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had the temerity in 1969 to say, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.” Some of her political grandchildren keep canceling the Palestinians literally and figuratively, as Israel’s fundamentalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last March in Paris, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”
As you should know, sir, your support for the war has angered a growing number of your constituents, some of whom are threatening to boycott next year’s election; young Democrats, African-Americans, Muslims and Arab-Americans. My formative years in Lebanon shaped my views of how Palestinians were denied justice and how Palestine was dismantled. You have already lost members of my family and some of my friends who are very aware of the danger Donald Trump and his cult pose to the essence of the American Republic.
I cannot and will not defend you with a clear conscience, and a vote for you is close to an abandonment of one’s integrity. And yet, I cannot as a rational citizen and a passionate patriot, allow the barbarians to breach what was left of the ramparts of American democracy; and because you put me in this impossible position, I will never forgive you. I could see myself next November 5, slouching with a heavy heart and a bowed head, going to my precinct to cast my vote against Donald Trump and for American democracy and by extension and very reluctantly for you.
America deserves my vote, but you, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., do not.
Hisham Melhem is a columnist and the Washington correspondent for Radio Monte Carlo in Paris, France.
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