Dear President Biden,
Rumor has it that you’re considering blanket pardons for certain persons whom you have reason to believe the incoming, self-proclaimed vindictive Donald Trump administration may prosecute for alleged crimes, when they in fact did nothing other than carry out the duties of their government positions. Your inclination to save these people from the burden of potential future politically motivated prosecution is admirable. But there are a far greater number of innocent people that you might be able to spare from fates far worse than the aggravation and expense of defending themselves from political and legal retribution — the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza.
Some people—potential recipients included—think preemptive pardons would be a bad idea, because it might be seen to imply guilt in cases where the people in question are in fact innocent of any crime. Whether they are correct in that assessment we don’t know, but there would be no such potential downside in “pardoning” Gazans, the vast majority of whom are not only not guilty of any crime but are the victims of one—a war crime that is massive and ongoing.
As you’ve no doubt heard, Amnesty International has recently concluded that in its ongoing Gaza assault, Israel is committing “prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.”
I do understand that you might consider using the word “genocide” in connection with Israel to be simply beyond the pale—even if both the U.S. and Israel have ratified the Genocide Convention that defined it—in that it was the extermination campaign waged against the Jewish people that caused the crime to be defined in the first place—and is generally cited as the justification for the creation of Israel.
However, you also probably know that although he did not use the word “genocide,” Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defense minister during the 2014 Gaza War, has declared “on behalf of commanders who serve in northern Gaza,” that “War crimes are being committed here.” And we know that the Administration is quite aware of the “conquering, annexing, ethnic cleansing” Yaalon cites as Israeli policy ever since the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre. After all, on October 13, 2024, your Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed a letter to the Israeli Ministers of Defense and Strategic Affairs calling for improved humanitarian conditions in regard to increasing access to food aid, ending forced evacuation, and opening border crossings in Gaza. They even went so far as to suggest that should the Israelis not improve conditions within 30 days your Administration might enforce U.S. laws prohibiting transmission of weapons to nations blocking humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, however, Israel didn’t—and you didn’t.
I don’t expect you to have the statistics at your finger tips—and numbers in war will seldom be exact—but the German online data gathering platform Statista puts the number of Israelis killed in the initial Hamas onslaught at 1,200 and records 380 additional Israeli military deaths since that time. During the same period it counts 44,502 Gazan deaths resulting from the Israeli military response. That’s a 28–1 death ratio. This in addition to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimate of more than 62,000 additional deaths from starvation as of October 7, 2024, as well as something in excess of 5,000 more due to the destruction of medical facilities.
We realize that you can’t actually issue a “pardon” to the people of Gaza, in that you can’t simply order the slaughter and starvation to cease. But—given that the Watson Institute also calculated that America’s military contribution to Israel’s Gaza campaign cost “at least $22.76 billion and counting” up to that point—you could obviously make a big difference by cutting the cash flow. And, as the Blinken/Austin letter indicated, you would clearly have the force of American law on your side. Perhaps then Israel—and the world—might no longer think that it could continue to act with impunity in regard to Palestinians; that there might be consequences.
If nothing else, perhaps you will consider the children involved. I suspect you’ve heard that as far back as November 6, 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” You may not, however, have heard the rather harsher way some Israeli fans put it a year later, following a recent soccer match in Amsterdam. As NBC News reported it, they actually sang the words: “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.”
Were you to issue that metaphorical pardon—whose impact would be far from metaphorical—we might certainly ask if Donald Trump couldn’t just immediately reinstate it. Yes he could, and probably would. But if his re-ascendancy to the White House should require making the case for resuming the shipment of 2000-pound American bombs for Israel to drop on the already devastated enclave—rather than simply involving a seamless continuity of policy—well, I think even you might have trouble buying that argument.
Mr. President, I do not claim to be of your political stripe; I was a Bernie Sanders supporter. Yet your administration has exceeded my expectations in many ways. For one, I didn’t really ever expect to see a U.S. president on a labor picket line—unless Bernie got elected. (And I’ll never forget you for telling Donald Trump to “shut up” during your 2020 debate.) A significant factor in this, it seems, was that, unlike Hillary Clinton, you took him and us—his supporters—seriously, even going so far as to establish joint Biden/Sanders-campaign issues committees before your nominating convention. I think that to a degree Sanders steered your administration toward the better angels of our nature at its outset. You should let him do it again on your way out. His motion to cut off military support for Israel’s barbarism failed badly in the Senate, but you could make it happen.
Lyndon Johnson presided over the introduction of a slew of programs collectively known as the “Great Society” which changed life for the better for a lot of Americans. But what is he most remembered for? His pursuit of the Vietnam War. Imagine how differently he’d be regarded had he the courage to end that disaster before he left office. You face a similar choice. Will the programs you championed be submerged in the memory of a president who served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s enabler? Or will you be remembered as the one who finally had the nerve to say, “Enough is enough!”
Sincerely,
Tom Gallagher
Oakland, California
