It's been a minute. Nowhere near as long as the long hiatus - but certainly not a short break. I guess the urge to scream about the atrocities has died down after seeing how utterly ineffectual it is. Anyways, let's get to it.
About a year ago, when the discussion was about how everyone had to support the racist fucking monsters funding a literal fucking genocide - I asked how Trump could be worse on Gaza. Biden had literally given Netanyahu everything that Bibi wanted. Despite the performative wringing of hands and threats of withholding arms, here's the sum total of what the Biden Administration actually did to curb the killing:
- They delayed one shipment of weapons - which did not actually impede the flow of weapons from the US to Israel.
- They imposed sanctions on a handful of Israeli settler terrorists that had been attacking the West Bank - and then immediately paused any impact of those sanctions "for humanitarian reasons".
- They identified one single IDF unit that was not eligible to receive US military aid due to their propensity to commit gross human rights violations - and then, based on literally nothing - said that the unit had reformed enough to reverse the original decision.
- They did not veto one Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza - which they then immediately discredited by calling it "non-binding".
Three actual actions, which were all immediately undermined so much as to render them completely ineffective. Effectively, Biden's Administration did absolutely nothing to slow down the genocide. Absolutely nothing.
So with Biden 100% fully supporting anything that Israel chose to do - and only reserving the right to act upset about it - the question was "how could Trump be any worse?"
Well, it's been long enough that we can check. We can look at how things are going and see if it is worse. Let's start with the kill count. Under Joe, 47 thousand Palestinians in Gaza were confirmed killed by Israel. This took 472 days - so a murder rate of just under 100 per day, slightly over if you subtract the one week long ceasefire. And under Trump? Today's kill count is 61,600 or 14,600 higher. And he's had control for 202 days - but there was a 6 week long ceasefire in there, so 160 days of killing. That works out to 91 Gazans killed per day - certainly within the range of uncertainty for these numbers. So essentially - the IDF daily murder rate is pretty much the same as it was under Joe. AND Trump did manage to secure five more weeks of ceasefire than Biden did. IOW - the original assessment, that what the US president wants is irrelevant to how much the IDF slaughters Arabs - basically proven at this point. The IDF's natural murder rate is about a hundred Gazans per day. And this was normalized under a Democratic president.
That said - Trump has brought his own flavour of suffering to the Gaza Strip - the mass starvation is clearly worse with him in charge. Not to say that Biden did not allow and provide dioplomatic cover for the intentional affliction of starvation on a people. Biden absolutely did do this. Recall that the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant specifically for starving the people of Gaza were for actions between October 8, 2023 and May 20, 2024. But the situation is much worse under Trump. Now this is also due to the fact that this is how starvation works - that the longer you go on a severely calorie deficient diet, the closer you get to dying. That people don't starve to death overnight - and it takes time to starve an entire population. Or possibly it is due to the continued descent of Israel into genocidal mania - that a year ago, they might have been more opposed to intentionally starving children to death.
Still, regardless of the reasons - the use of mass starvation has been much worse under Trump - and as Truman noted, the buck has to stop somewhere. Under Biden, there was an intentional mass starvation campaign very early on targeting Northern Gaza - which was only lifted months into it by the delivery of way too little aid into the targeted area. That of course resulted in the Flour Massacre which set off a full month of the IDF mass killing aid seekers. So horrific and inhumane that I thought this was the worst they could do - but I underestimated the cruelty of the human spirit. Under Trump, Southern Gaza was subjected to starvation after the ceasefire. Two months of starvation with zero aid being allowed in, only to be lifted by the operations of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - a group that has been mowing down aid seekers since the end of May. It's been longer that they've been using aid distribution as bait for killing fields and way more people have starved to death in Gaza this year than previously. And the starvation continues. And the murder of around a hundred Palestinians continues on its daily pace. Because this is the New Normal. Genocide is happening but we are unable or unwilling to do sweet fuck all about it. So it's now just been accepted as part of what happens daily. The sun rises, the IDF kills a hundred people, 2 million people have starvation forced upon them. The usual daily routine.
Only - there is one more normalized aspect of all of this. And that is that it is constantly getting worse. Israel keeps brainstorming new atrocities to try out - to shock our conscience so badly that we normalize this new thing. The reports of children being used for target practice or of the IDF forcing Gazans to act as human shields before murdering them - did not prompt any real action to curb their crimes, so they reach for the next depraved thing they can add to the arsenal of atrocities. A new push to conquer Gaza City is starting now - a year and a half after they claimed full control over the area. This is going to bring fresh new horrors for us to be shocked at, before accepting as just part of the new normal.
