Black women should not be face of US’s ugly Gaza policy
For Black women, the liminal space in which Black History Month becomes Women’s History Month feels like the time to reflect on our progress — and how far we have to go.
The Biden administration has deployed Black women as both velvet gloves and iron fists in respect to Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, in which more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. They are both enforcing U.S. complicity in this atrocity and attempting to soften its appearance.
On Sunday, Vice President Harris was in Selma, Ala., marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1965 march to protest the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson and to demand the right to vote. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, white officers attacked the marchers and severely beat a number of them.
The bridge, the violence and the Black sacrifice they represent lent an air of moral authority as Harris delivered the latest administration message on the plight of the Palestinians. “As I have said many times,” she declared, “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.” Harris rightly acknowledged that “we have seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed, women giving birth to malnourished babies with little or no medical care and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.” She called for an immediate cease-fire at least through the coming month of Ramadan, for hostages to be released and for Israel to allow humanitarian aid to surge into Gaza.
But what she did not say was every bit as important. Harris did not criticize Israel for its deliberate blockade and assault. She did not call for questioning the transfer of weapons to Israel. Instead, she referred to what has befallen Gaza’s Palestinians as some nameless “catastrophe,” as if a bomb- and bullet-saturated hurricane blew in from the Mediterranean Sea. And what is needed is a permanent cease-fire and an end to Israel’s brutal occupation.
The death and deprivation in Gaza is caused by the actions of specific people acting through systems of power. Black people have known this for centuries, forced to survive and resist a machine that was scared of, and actively suppressed, their economic, social and political autonomy. Beatdowns, lynchings and massacres of Black people were systematic and deliberate weapons of white supremacy, not inexplicable storms of random “chaos.”
Harris’ speech was limpness masquerading as strength. The so-called “humanitarian airdrops” that she promoted have been roundly criticized as an ineffective and pathetically insufficient. What’s more, they are signs of U.S. weakness, underscoring the fact that President Biden’s team won’t leverage weapons transfers to force Israel’s cooperation. Or if she was not the face of Biden’s weakness, then she was the face of continued U.S. cruelty toward Palestinians — with a spoonful of #BlackGirlMagic to make the poison go down a little easier.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unlikely to be moved by Harris’ velvety civil rights costuming, which feels aimed less at persuading him than at calming the pro-Gaza, anti-ethnic cleansing base of the Democratic Party. After all, the administration has relied on another Black woman to send a very different message to Netanyahu — an iron fist to hammer down the growing calls for an end to the mass killing.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield has voted not once, but twice to block calls for an Israeli cease-fire. For many Black observers, the optics of these votes recalled memories of the first Black secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, using his prestige before the United Nations to argue in favor of an invasion of Iraq. In the eyes of the world, Greenfield, like Powell, is a Black face providing cover for America’s direct and indirect brutality in the Arab world.
Compare them with Black women who embody the spirit of the original Selma marchers — including a willingness to be attacked for doing the right thing.
In October, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., was among the first American leaders to call for a cease-fire and humanitarian relief. Imagine how much suffering and death could have been avoided if she had been listened to as she placed the responsibility squarely on Israel. “Let me be clear,” she wrote, “the collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza is a war crime. … My commitment to ending violence, brutality, and oppression is not conditional. It’s universal.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., has also been outspoken about the brutality against Palestinians and introduced a resolution to block weapons sales to Israel. The pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee has pledged to spend millions of dollars to try to unseat these Black women from office.
#RepresentationMatters only goes so far. Ultimately, it matters little who walks the corridors of power if the decisions made there don’t change. The vice president’s invocation of Black America’s bloody struggle against racial apartheid, while she is a face of an administration enforcing oppression abroad, feels so dark. Especially when we know that, at the end of the day, it is the white men of the administration calling the shots.
Can we really celebrate Black women in power who can’t use said power to prevent death and starvation inflicted on a stateless people? I — like an increasing number of voters — don’t think so.