Democratic Party insiders are more upset about Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance against serial liar and Syria colonizer Donald Trump than they are with the sitting president’s substantial military backing for Israeli war crimes and genocide in the pulverized Gaza Strip.

Suddenly, there is talk of party insiders finding a replacement for Biden, a process that would surely be a contentious spectacle and rife with corruption if Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s Gaza genocide deputy, does not take the reins.

Other Democratic presidential candidates named by The New York Times are California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

CNN on Wednesday highlighted Pritzker and Newsom as candidates.

Late last month, Newsom excoriated protesters of a real estate event for stolen Palestinian land taking place at a California synagogue. Avoiding the land theft facts of the case, he blamed “anti-Semitic hatred” and disregarded that police, as at UCLA weeks earlier, again stood aside (until their own space was encroached upon) while just feet away pro-Palestinian protesters were physically attacked and harassed.

Debate debacle

As for Palestinian rights during the debate, the candidates and moderators were a wreck.

CNN anchor and debate moderator Dana Bash said, “In October, Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than a thousand people and taking hundreds of hostages. Among those held and thought to still be alive are five Americans. Israel’s response has killed thousands of Palestinians and created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

The framing was unsurprising – for Bash, the conflict started on 7 October and not with decades of dispossession, occupation, apartheid and routine Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Bash, unlike in previous statements, however, did not overstate the number of Israelis or Israeli civilians killed that day. She did downplay the number of Palestinians killed and made sure to indicate Israel was the responding aggrieved party and not Palestinians after more than 75 years of oppression, land theft and death at the hands of an apartheid army.

Former President Donald Trump used the word “Palestinian” as a slur against Biden during the debate – to which, as with so much else that night, Genocide Joe offered no specific rejoinder.

Urging Israel to “finish the job” – genocide much? – Trump said of Biden: “He doesn’t want to do it. He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”

Trump was right back at it the next day on the campaign trail, saying Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is Jewish but acts like a Palestinian. There was no mainstream media hue and cry responding to the intended use of “Palestinian” as racist disparagement.

According to Trump, Schumer has “become a Palestinian. He’s a Palestinian now. Congratulations. He was very loyal to Israel and to Jewish people. He’s Jewish. But he’s become a Palestinian because they have a couple of more votes or something. Nobody’s quite figured it out.”

Trump dispensed with the question with four words: “I’d have to see.”

Trump take two?

This raises the question of what could be expected with a Trump presidency, increasingly possible with Biden faltering, grassroots dissent over Gaza staying strong, and Democratic Party leadership in disarray after repeatedly lying to the public.

We know Biden has armed Israel for war crimes and a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

But Trump, in the debate, also encouraged more of the same.

He criticized Biden, arguing the current president said, “the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas.” Then, Trump added, “Actually, Israel is the one. And you should [let] them go and let them finish the job.”

The candidates of the two major parties offer voters more horrors for Gaza with the exception that after months of carnage Biden paused delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

What can we expect from the two leading candidates for the West Bank?

Biden has largely stood aside, or offered only symbolic action with sanctions on a few settlers, even as Israel has made enormous land grabs on his watch.

The Washington Post on Wednesday asserted, “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades.”

Biden’s limited sanctions have been a clear failure.

Theodore Schleifer in The New York Times reported on 25 June that Miriam Adelson, whose pro-Israel husband, the late Sheldon Adelson, was a major Republican donor, has a “$100 million plan to elect Trump.”

Elizabeth Weil in New York Magazine maintained that Adelson’s top priority for a Trump presidency would be “Israel annexing the West Bank and the US recognizing its sovereignty there.”

The Times’ article does note that Adelson’s “spokesman Andy Abboud denied a recent report that Dr. Adelson was urging Mr. Trump to publicly support an annexation of the West Bank by the Israeli government in exchange for her backing.”

One can be confident, however, that West Bank annexation will be pushed with Trump should he win in November. Such notions were, after all, very much in play in 2020.

Schleifer writes of Adelson: “Her Israeli nationalism has tethered her to Mr. Trump, especially since Oct. 7. She has argued that people who criticize Israel or offer only qualified support are ‘dead to us.’”

In Adelson’s Israel Hayom op-ed from November, she called to “disavow and shame” such people – labeling equal rights advocates not just “critics” but “enemies” – and to “deny them employment and public office, and defund their colleges and political parties.”

Evidently, she wants to help Trump return to the White House in order not just to annex “Judea and Samaria,” but to shut down American colleges and political parties that oppose Israeli apartheid and war crimes.

Trump may thrill to the task.

Earlier this year he said that watching New York police officers clear Columbia University of pro-Palestinian protesters was “a beautiful thing to watch.” As it turned out, a police officer fired a gunshot, reportedly by accident, that could have killed or injured a student.

Adelson’s own words are a strong indicator of what could transpire with a second Trump term.

Weil writes: Miriam Adelson “spent $25 million on the creation of the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School of Medicine at Ariel University in the West Bank. Sheldon referred to the school as a ‘Zionist wall.’ Miriam described it as a gift ‘to strengthen the settlers in Judea and Samaria.’ Building a medical school in the West Bank is aggressive. So is using the biblical place names Judea and Samaria. Those names are meant to imply God gave the West Bank to the Jews – that the land belongs to the state of Israel.”

The Israeli extreme right is moving little by little under Biden to get its way both in Gaza and the West Bank.

With Trump, it could come all at once.

It’s unclear, however, whether the piecemeal approach or all at once is more likely to succeed. Europe and the US are acquiescing to Israel’s illegal West Bank land acquisition bit by bit at present. Whether Europe and the United Nations find a spine following an annexation and even more clear-cut apartheid remains to be seen.

Both approaches – Biden’s slow cooking or Trump’s fast cooking the West Bank – promise an eventual third intifada.

It remains possible that Republican-supported annexation leads not just to an earlier and unavoidable discussion of apartheid but to a more immediate fight for equal rights – if much deeper ethnic cleansing by Israel doesn’t come first.

More dangerous days are ahead as Israeli settlers shape an apartheid reality that Democrats quietly abet and Republicans outright support.

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