Palestinian Lives Were Invisible To Both Donald Trump And Joe Biden In The First Debate

Palestinians in Gaza are living through historic suffering. Experts saythey are enduring the most destructive military campaign of the 21st century and one of the most devastating offensives in modern history. The U.S.-backed Israeli operation in their region has killed upwards of 37,000 people, left more than 2 million with desperately low quantities of food, spurred deadly shortages of medical supplies and other essentials like fuel and destroyed more homes than World War II.

But at Thursday night’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, neither offered either sympathy or a path forward for Palestinians, whose cause has animated huge protests domestically and fueled outrage the world over. Instead, the two rivals for the U.S. presidency, which has major influence over Palestinians’ fate, offered answers casting them as an afterthought at best and villainous at worst.

Strikingly, given widespread criticism of U.S. media coverage of Palestinians, the clearest concern for Palestinians came from debate moderator and CNN anchor Dana Bash — signaling how low the bar was for the night.

Bash opened the debate segment on the Gaza war by referencing the attack on Israel by the Palestinian faction Hamas on Oct. 7, which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and initiated the latest round of all-out fighting. She then accurately noted Israeli retaliation has “killed thousands of Palestinians and created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Noting that Biden’s month-long effort to secure a ceasefire has not borne fruit, she posed her question to the president: “What additional leverage will you use to get Hamas and Israel to end the war?”

The phrasing there mattered. The Biden administration has largely refused to