While people in the United States were casting votes on November 5th, the US-armed, genocidal Israeli Occupation Force was carrying out another day of their criminal war against the people of Gaza. They killed at least 61 people, including five children in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighborhood, and five children in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. Israeli bombs fell on the last operating hospital in the northern part of Gaza. 

For more than a year now, the destruction of medical facilities, the extermination of entire families, and the slaughter of children has been the reality for people in Gaza, all of that death and destruction facilitated by the United States, and by the Biden-Harris adminstration. 

Killer Kamala Harris, the standard bearer of that administration, suffered a humiliating electoral defeat to Donald Trump yesterday. Regardless of their electoral fortunes, history will record that Genocide Joe and Killer Kamala were full and active participants in Israel’s modern-day holocaust. The tragedy of the election is that Killer Kamala and Genocide Joe will only end up being embarrassed, and not face the Nuremberg style prosecution that they so richly deserve. 

We have no pretense that Donald Trump will represent anything other than a different flavor of US imperialism, a new head on the same beast. While Trump occasionally claims to be an opponent of certain US wars, under his first administration, US drone strikes reigned down, white phosphorus was dropped on Syria, US-made bombs supplied the Saudi destruction of Yemen, and economic sanctions strangled Venezuela and Nicaragua. Trump wrote the same blank check to Israel that all US presidents have for decades. 

The naked reality of this election is that there was no electoral means to oppose the genocide or to stand against US imperialism. What binds all of the standard bearers of both parties together is a shared commitment to keeping US imperialism as the top-dog empire in the world, no matter what the cost in human lives, no matter how many genocides they commit, or countries they destroy. There are certainly stark differences in how the candidates want to maintain that position, but no disagreement about maintaining it, from Trump’s “America First” nationalism, to Harris’s bloodthirsty plans for the “most lethal military.”  Commitment to US imperialism explains the bi-partisan commitment to Israel’s genocide, terrorist occupation of Palestine, and expansion of the war into Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Neither candidate was going to challenge the genocide, or cut off the spigot of funds and weapons, because both agree that Israel’s murderous occupation is integral to maintaining US domination of the whole world: to disciplining the nations and peoples that step out of line of the US-dominated order, to ensuring the smooth flow of commodities, and to prop up their proxies in the middle east and North Africa. 

In the face of the ugly choice, there were tens of thousands who heeded the call, “No Votes for Genocide”, and chose not to participate in the Presidential circus, including the thousands that Behind Enemy Lines organized to sign the Palestine Vote Pledge. That widespread refusal to support either candidate of genocide demonstrates the potential for mass opposition to the Gaza genocide. That potential can and must be organized as a material force outside of politics as usual. 

That is the most urgent task before us today: to go to the people, and to bring them into struggle against US imperialism and the Gaza genocide, outside of politics as usual. The same political forces that have worked overtime in the last year to keep the Palestine protest movement confined in routinized protest and tied to the Democratic party will attempt to seize this moment to line their pocketbooks and hustle their dead-end schemes. Widespread disillusionment with electoral politics and politicians presents new opportunities, if there are people bold enough to seize them.  

Between now and Trump’s inauguration, there is an assignment: to unite all the people who can be united in mass resistance outside of the confines of electoral political and the tactics and strategies that are acceptable to rulers. To launch a new wave of bold and creative resistance that identifies clearly with the people of Palestine and the people of the world, and not US imperialism, and actually aims to disrupt and shut down the US-Israel war machine. To stop acquiescing to new waves of repression, stand with everyone who has come under attack for opposition to the genocide, and defend courageous resistance. 

The empire is the enemy. From the belly of the beast, we choose to resist it!