Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Democratic National Committee is sitting on a report that demonstrated that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris lost significant support because of Joe Biden’s perceived “blank check” to the Netanyahu government to pursue its total war on little Gaza. This, according to Holly Otterbein at Axios.
The analysis is certainly correct. Democrats win when the youth and progressives join their wider coalition. The youth didn’t come out to vote in 2004, and John Kerry lost. The youth came out big time in 2008 and Barack Obama won. In fact, the youth delivered key states like Pennsylvania for him, without which he would have lost.
In spring 2024 I wrote an impassioned column predicting that Biden would turn the country over to Trump and imperil American democracy by alienating the young people this way. It wasn’t just that Biden refused to tell Netanyahu to cut it out, something he had done before. It was that he was joined at the hip with the extremist Kahanist cabinet. Gaza was Biden’s genocide as much as it was Netanyahu’s. Biden was resupplying the Israeli military in real time.
Aside perhaps from some form of dementia, I cannot explain Biden’s blindness on this issue or his inability to see that he would lose the 2024 election to Trump if he went on like that.
We don’t know what Biden was thinking. He got the daily situation reports on Gaza. Young staffers showed him the pictures of the dead, but he is said to have remained unmoved.
We do know that Biden was gaslighted by the Israelis into doubting the Gaza Ministry of Health statistics on deaths in Gaza. He said publicly, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,”
In mid-February this year, The Lancet published an article by public health specialists, with Prof Michael Spagat, MD, in the Department of Economics at the UK’s Royal Holloway University, as the lead author. The team did not depend on the Ministry of Health figures. They used public health statistical methods, interviewing a weighted same of 2,000 households that comprised nearly 10,000 individuals.
If you were living in a war zone, and an enemy drone killed your uncle, you wouldn’t ever forget it. So if someone later came and asked you, did you lose anybody in the war, you would say that your uncle had been killed. So the researchers asked those nearly 10,000 people about lost loved ones and friends for the period Oct 7, 2023, to Jan 5, 2025. This was ten months before the so-called ceasefire in October 2025. They then projected the results for the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
So the professionals at the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is not in fact “Hamas-run” as the Israeli propagandists made all the newspapers say, had estimated that by January 2025 the Israelis had violently killed 49,090 Palestinians in Gaza. They arrived at this number by collating reports from hospitals and morgues. Since the Israeli military was steadily destroying hospitals and other health institutions, these figures got less reliable, since people started just dying out where they were sleeping rough and got a quick burial.
Spagat’s team found that if you did the interviews with representative portions of the population and projected the fatalities to the whole population, you arrived at 75,200 violent deaths.
So the Ministry of Health’s statistics were too low, by about a third.
In the Lancet article, the team estimated that about 8,540 more civilians died nonviolent deaths than would have in a similar period before the war. They were, for instance, dialysis patients who could no longer get treatment for diabetes and just died.
The article confirms the Ministry of Health estimate that about 56% of violent deaths were among children, women and elderly men, that is, among noncombatants. It should be noted that the remaining 44% of violent deaths included many innocent male civilians between the ages of 18 and 65. Adult male does not equal Hamas fighter.
Joe Biden meets with Benjamin Netanyahu, October 18, 2023. White House Photo. Public Domain. Via Picryl .
About 15,000 innocent civilians have been killed by the Russians in Ukraine. Not only is that much lower than the 40,000 or so Palestinians killed by the Israelis through January of last year, it is proportionally tiny compared to Gaza, because Ukraine’s population is 38 million, whereas Gaza’s is 2.2 million.
So no, the slaughter in which the Israelis have engaged isn’t par for the course in modern warfare. Netanyahu has far more innocent blood on his hands than does Vladimir Putin, even though our American press and elites lionize Netanyahu and demonize Putin.
Biden threw away the 2024 election to help enthusiastically with a genocide, delivering America into the hands of ruthless fascists for the sake of his illusions about the Israeli governing elite. His remark about not believing the Palestinian statistics will go down in history as a gaffe of the sort Jimmy Carter committed when he called the Shah’s Iran an “island of stability” in the Middle East in 1978. He lost his election, too.
© 2026 All Rights Reserved