Opinion columns are written by various individuals. Any views expressed here only reflect the views of the columnist.
Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of bodily harm and violence.
Shaban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student at Gaza’s al-Azhar University and displaced resident of central Gaza, was just days away from his 20th birthday.
Shaban had been displaced five times in the past year after his home was destroyed by an Israeli air strike. Al-Azhar University’s campus, where he began attending college last September, was destroyed by Israeli bombing just two months into his studies. In fact, all twelve of Gaza’s universities have been either somewhat damaged or completely destroyed.
Just over a week ago, he miraculously survived an attack on a mosque in Deir al-Balah, which killed more than 25 people and wounded nearly a hundred people. He was undergoing treatment for injuries to his head and irritants in his lungs that were sustained from that incident.
“I used to have big dreams, but the war has ruined them. It’s taken a toll on me, making me physically and mentally sick. I suffer from depression and hair loss because of the constant trauma we face. Time feels like its stopped in Gaza, and we’re stuck in a never-ending nightmare,” Shaban said in March, according to Al-Jazeera.
Shaban had been pleading for help for his family for months, recording videos that revealed the struggles of life under Israeli bombardment. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get the funds he needed to get his family, including him, his parents, and four siblings, two younger sisters and two younger brothers, out of Gaza.
People around the world watched in horror when Shaban’s final moments were captured on video this week. While sleeping and connected to an IV drip, he and his mother were burned alive after Israeli forces bombed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex in Deir al-Balah early on Monday.
Video and photos showed Shaban burning alive, screaming for help, with an intravenous drip still attached to his arm.
The tragedy garnered a rare rebuke from American officials. A spokesman for the U.S National Security Council said, “Israel has a responsibility to do more to avoid civilian casualties — and what happened here is horrifying, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields.”
If the roles were reversed, Israel would not accept it if Israeli civilians in Tel-Aviv were recklessly killed just because of their proximity to Camp Rabin, an IDF urban military base in a densely populated area. Palestinians are also not collateral damage and Israel’s actions over the last year amount to deliberate killing of Gazans.
When it comes to Israel policy, the pushback that the Biden administration has given to Israel on its deliberate killing and starvation of civilians amounts to little more than finger-wagging.
Despite early signs that Vice President Harris was skeptical of the President’s lockstep support for the war, serious difference in Israel policy between her and the President just hasn’t materialized. Since Biden dropped out in July, once optimistic Uncommitted movement activists have since had their demands ignored, been marginalized, and pushed out of speaking slots at the Democratic National Convention. Not one Palestinian American was given a speaking slot at the DNC!
The Harris campaign, instead of addressing the concerns of Arab Americans (Palestinian and Lebanese) and young voters by having a frank dialogue about Israel policy, seems content with courting and graciously taking endorsements from Republican neocons like Dick Cheney, an esteemed war criminal himself. An endorsement from Dick Cheney is nothing to be proud of.
Harris’s smarmy response to Pro-Palestinian protesters is also deplorable, quipping back at people protesting genocide that “I’m Speaking!”, a blatantly callous attempt to girl boss her way out of answering in-kind to the people she needs to win this election. She reiterates that her, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and President Biden are “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire.
The negotiations are undoubtedly difficult if not entirely dead now, endangered by Hamas’s view of Israel as engaging in bad faith negotiating, which is true.
How do you claim to be “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire while approving $20 billion in arms sales as recently as August knowing that Israel will use these armaments to conduct its offensive operations in the Gaza strip?
It’s clear, though, that accountability isn’t what the United States or even Vice President Harris herself is seeking. Harris and Netanyahu both agree that both our and the Israeli government stand opposed to the International Criminal Court’s probe and request for arrest warrants of top Israeli and Hamas officials.
This administration’s immoral and hypocrisy-laden foreign policy has delayed peace in the region, cost thousands of lives in Gaza and on the world-stage discredited our moral imperative and commitment to a “rules-based order” since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
At the same time, Donald Trump’s second administration would ensure Israel can lay siege to the entire region and that the U.S would support it. He is a neo-fascist authoritarian buffoon insistent on dismantling our democracy, has spread lies and induced a moral panic about immigrants, and would appoint more zealots to federal courts determined to overturn other social policy we have taken for granted, like gay marriage and voting rights.
I want to see Kamala Harris do the right thing, but at this current juncture, her campaign is trucking along it’s triangulating path. Whether that path leads to ruin or reward remains the question. It once again rests on the voters of this country to bail us out of a second Trump administration.
At the same time, the demand that Palestinian Americans fall in line behind a nominee content with their homeland’s destruction is one that I disagree with. If we allow our politicians to convince us into blind support based on fear, we stand for nothing. So yes, please vote, but always demand more.
Rest-in-peace to Shaban al-Dalou and his family.
FREE PALESTINE. CEASEFIRE NOW.
