Listening to the cultural conversation on Gaza over the past year has been deeply disturbing, and not just for the obvious reasons. Instead of providing serious context or analysis, the chatter has focused mostly on parsing the ongoing genocide through an individual rather than systemic lens. This failing extends to those who should know better, including the famous filmmaker, Michael Moore. Some of his recent statements on Gaza have focused on things as immaterial and unknowable as Joe Biden’s conscience for God’s sake. By examining his words here with the help of two more serious thinkers, we’ll see how fixating on these political personalities distorts power.

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On a recent episode of his podcast Rumble, Michael Moore broached Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Gaza, if you listened to Moore, is about nothing else aside from what’s inside the head and heart of just one man: Joe “Look Fat” Biden. “[Biden] just goes off on his own thing and follows his conscience,” said Moore, “which makes it so sad, right now, that his conscience is telling him to support the slaughter of tens-of-thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. And it continues every day.”¹

Moore’s remarks reflect a larger trend, where dense political issues are almost always discussed through the lens of individuals rather than systems. They are comments that particularly rile up Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-prize-winning author who DID report on the war in former Yugoslavia. Hedges says that this type of critique atrophies a culture’s political life by leaving power “unexamined and unchallenged.”_²

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism further supports this. Two sections in particular show how it is structural factors not personality traits that have determined Gaza’s fate – so much so that whoever’s wrinkly keister is at the Resolute Desk feels, basically, inconsequential on this matter.

The first involves Jimmy Carter, who made waves by “calling for a homeland for the Palestinians”³ but wound up isolating them further. After trying to launch a comprehensive peace process that included the Palestinians, Carter quickly became mired in pressure from the recently elected Likud government and Cold War military concerns. These factors caused the U.S. to strike a separate deal between Egypt and Israel and align America with “the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights, an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration.”⁴

Later, Barack Obama’s election “raised the hopes” that “he would deal differently with the Palestinians.”⁵ But after trying to restart peace talks with famed “Good Friday” negotiator George Mitchell, he was similarly stymied. Mitchell and Obama faced, of course, an AIPAC-controlled Congress, which said the negotiations were “unacceptable and violated U.S. laws”⁶ for involving Hamas. But the “tenacious power of the permanent bureaucracy”⁷ also helped scuttle the deal. On that latter point, Khalidi specifically calls out Dennis Ross, a lifetime diplomat who had helped block progress for the Palestinians since the 80s. Throughout Obama’s first term, Ross would open backend channels to the Israelis and generally meddle in Mitchell’s work until it became impossible to continue.

Each of these examples illustrate how similar systemic forces, including foreign lobbies, military spending or rigid bureaucracies, have long shaped U.S. policy toward Palestine. Additionally, it shows how they’ve rendered the desires of various presidents relatively insignificant in comparison. Both Carter and Obama were far more sympathetic to the Palestinians than Biden has been, but in the end, it made not a lick of difference. This is exactly why focusing on personalities over the systems that surround them is detrimental to understanding how power works on this issue or inspiring substantive action.

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What’s funny and sort of sad I suppose is that Moore also once understood this, as evidenced by his iconic 2003 Oscar speech. On that night, Moore attacked Bush in front of a horrified crowd of Hollyweird hypocrites, sex pests and degenerates for launching the Iraq war. But Moore also didn’t stop there. He critiqued the system itself, a system which had created “a fictitious election result that elects a fictious president who sends us to war for fictious reasons.”⁸ That type of systemic analysis is largely missing today, especially when issues like Gaza are discussed, and even by Moore himself. It has been replaced by a dominant focus on personalities, which, as the likes of Hedges notes, distorts how power works in general, and as the likes of Khalidi shows us, flies in the face of how power has shaped Palestine historically. It’s deflating to think about this I guess as we approach the November election, and makes you wonder about the utility of the activity. Not to say that you shouldn’t vote, mind you. It’s just hard sometimes to see the value of swapping out one figurehead for another unless the rest of the system somehow goes with them.

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1. https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/eve-of-destruction
2. https://scheerpost.com/2020/10/19/chris-hedges-the-politics-of-cultural-despair/
3. Khalidi, Rashid. “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism.” Metropolitan Books. 2020. pp. 135.
4. pp. 136
5. pp. 232
6. pp. 234
7. pp. 233
8. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/michaelmooreoscaracceptance.htm