The orphaned girl had hoped Joe Biden would have a change of heart when she begged him in a letter to stop Israeli forces from invading Rafah, the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city where over a million Palestinians have fled since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack cruelly marked them as prey.
She planned to correspond with Jill Biden next, in case her husband needed more convincing.
A second note, if the 8-year-old girl wrote one, never made its way to the White House. Had a follow-up message been delivered, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Rafah was invaded in the spring, weeks after Thaer Ahmad made national headlines for walking out on President Biden after handing him the girl’s letter and warning of the carnage that would follow if Israel crossed the “red line” that had been set.
The emergency room physician doesn’t know if the girl survived. The last heard he from her was in June. By then, the Rafah offensive was in full force and the Biden administration issued hollow warnings while continuing to arm Israel and look the other way as its ally kept killing civilians to avenge Hamas’ deadly rampage.
“I just wished he (Joe Biden) would have listened,” Ahmad, of Oak Lawn, said on Wednesday, hours after it was announced Israel and Hamas reached a three-phase ceasefire deal that includes the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
“His failures will follow him around forever.”
On the same day I talked to Ahmad, ProPublica released a damning story that detailed evidence of the Biden administration’s acquiescence to Israel during the last 15 months.
“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School was quoted as saying. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”
Biden will go down in history as “a genocidal president,” Rabbi Brant Rosen, of the Tzedek Chicago congregation told me.
Any respite to the Palestinians’ “nightmare” is worth celebrating, Rosen said. Still, he can’t help but feel cynical that all it took was President-elect Donald Trump’s emissary to secure a reportedly similar agreement Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected several months ago.
Biden didn’t press hard enough on his own and thousands of Palestinians lost their lives as a result. But it wasn’t “altruism” that motivated Trump, Rosen said.
“Trump is transactional. He will give (Netanyahu) something in return,” Rosen worries.
Impact on the 2024 election
There is no question the right-wing Trump was elected to a second term because too many Americans of all races can’t wean themselves off white supremacy or bear the thought of a woman in the Oval Office.
Some voters who blamed the Democratic leadership for exorbitant grocery costs might have been more frustrated with the price of eggs than the country’s foreign policy.
But that doesn’t mean Kamala Harris’ refusal to break with Biden on Gaza didn’t have a significant impact on the presidential elections.
Among the voters who supported Biden in 2020 but did not cast their ballots for Harris in November, 29% cited “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” as their motivating factor, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project and YouGov.
No other issue — neither the economy nor immigration — was listed as a higher concern by the majority of the respondents.
Ahmad, who recently joined the board of Palestinian American Medical Association, said his tight-knit community won’t let the injustices slide, vowing to keep the pressure on elected leaders who refuse to hold Israel accountable.
He’s been trying to process the news of the ceasefire, which brings him some sense of relief, and sadness.
Often, Ahmad thinks about the patients he treated when he was in Gaza on a medical mission last year. Many didn’t make it.
Ahmad, the father of two girls, ages 1 and 3, had to break it to a family that there was nothing he could do to save their three young daughters when they rushed to Nasser Hospital after their home was bombed.
Another child Ahmad met, 15-year-old Muhammad Al-Laham, died because of inadequate dialysis treatments — a result of Gaza’s collapsed healthcare system caused by a blockade on medical supplies and Israeli attacks on hospitals and healthcare workers.
Ahmad is eager to return to the region to help rebuild and let the people know their pain never left his mind.
The harrowing images of the death and destruction have shown the world a fraction of how bad it has been.
“When we peel back every single layer, we will know how bad it really was,” Ahmad said.
Maybe then, the politicians and pundits who condescendingly rolled their eyes and try to muzzle pro-Palestinian protesters can finally admit Israel was doing more than defending itself.
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and member of the Sun-Times Editorial Board.
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