Undebatable: What Harris and Trump Could Not Say About Israel and Gaza

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.

The banner headline across the top of The New York Times home page—“Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate”—was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for former President Donald Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.

In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain... President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”

Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices

Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out.”

“End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government—the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments—to stop sending weapons to Israel.

Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cutoff of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal—it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.

What Kamala Harris and Donald Trump said about Israel and Gaza in their debate was predictable. Even more certain was what they absolutely would not say—with silences speaking loudest of all. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth,” Aldous Huxley wrote, describing “the greatest triumphs of propaganda.”

By coincidence, the debate happened on the same date as publication of a new afterword about the Gaza war in the paperback edition of my book War Made Invisible. To fill in for the debate’s abysmal silences, here are a few quotes from the afterword about the ongoing carnage:

“After the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7, the U.S. government quickly stepped up military aid to Israel as it implemented atrocities on a much larger scale. In truth, as time went on, the entire Israeli war in Gaza amounted to one gigantic atrocity with uncountable aspects.”

As with the steady massacres with bombs and bullets in Gaza since early October, “the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem.”

“In the war zone, eyewitness reporting and photojournalism were severely hindered if not thwarted by the Israeli military, which has a long record of killing journalists.”

“Although the credibility of Israel’s government tumbled as the Gaza war dragged on, the brawny arms of the Israel lobby—and the overall atmospheric pressure of media and politics—pushed legislators to approve new military aid... Official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.”

The United Statespersisted in “violating not only the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy but also numerous other legal requirements including the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Leahy Law, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and several treaties. For U.S. power politics, the inconvenient precepts in those measures were as insignificant and invisible as the Palestinian people being slaughtered.”

“What was sinister about proclaiming ‘Israel’s 9/11’ was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self- protection, and, of course, the ‘war on terror.’ It was a playbook that the Israeli government adapted and implemented with vengeance.”

Israel’s war on 2.2 million people in Gaza has been “a supercharged escalation of what Israel had been doing for 75 years, treating human beings as suitable for removal and even destruction.” As Israel’s war on Gaza has persisted, “the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the ‘war on terror’ from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events.”

That and so much more—left unsaid from the debate stage, dodged in U.S. mass media, and evaded from the podiums of power in Washington—indict not only the Israeli government but also the U.S. government as an accomplice to mass murder that has escalated into genocide.

Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state.