It’s not just the Gaza genocide. It’s his decades of warmongering in the Middle East.
Joe Biden coughs as he delivers remarks at the Department of Labor on December 16, 2024.(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
As his presidency staggers to a close, the question of Joe Biden’s “legacy” is hanging heavily in the air. Even though he is ending his term as a deeply unpopular figure who paved the way for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, some liberal politicians and pundits are trying as hard as they can to celebrate his time in office.
“By any objective standard…he was a very good president whose accomplishments will benefit the nation for many years to come,” The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson insisted recently. Vice President Kamala Harris said Biden’s “legacy of accomplishment over the past three years is unmatched in modern history,” and that “in one term, he has already surpassed the legacy of most presidents who have served two terms in office.”
Biden, too, is touting his supposed achievements. In a speech about his foreign policy legacy on Monday, he said that he was “leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play” on the world stage.
For millions of Arab Americans, these statements make us question if we’ve been living in an alternate universe. That’s because, to us, Biden’s legacy will be defined by one thing and one thing only: his support for the genocide in Gaza, and his bloody history in the Middle East more generally, which stretches back decades.
Biden consistently harmed Arabs and Muslims through his foreign policy decisions long before he was president. In October 2002, while serving as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he joined 76 other senators in authorizing the use of military force in Iraq.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, he repeated false claims by the Bush administration that the only way to stop Saddam Hussein’s “relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction,” was to go to war with Iraq.
Biden showed no humility when these lies unraveled. In October 2004, he told the Council on Foreign Relations that he “never believed they had weapons of mass destruction.” He then tried to backtrack on his support for the war in November of 2005, calling it a “ mistake,” but only after more than 39,332 civilians had been killed in Iraq. In 2006, he floated a ludicrous plan to divide Iraq into three zones which the media dubbed “Shiastan, Sunnistan, and Kurdistan.”
As a senator in 2001, Biden also voted in favor of the US invasion of Afghanistan and issued statements supporting the extension of international military force in Kabul. Twenty years later, after his disastrously handled troop withdrawal in 2021, he would go on to lie again, stating: “I’ve been against that war in Afghanistan from the very beginning.”
As vice president, Biden bolstered the Obama administration’s efforts to make Americans comfortable with drone strikes. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were 10 times as many air strikes in the War on Terror” during the Obama-Biden years than during the Bush administration. They launched more air strikes in their first year in office than Bush carried out during his entire presidency.
The air campaign led by Obama and supported by Biden destroyed life in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan and led to mass civilian casualties—despite their claims that their drone strikes were “ exceptionally surgical and precise.”
While serving as vice president, Biden stood behind Obama as he launched his first strike on Yemen, which was catastrophic. Commanders claimed they were targeting Al Qaeda—instead, they hit a tribe with cluster munitions killing 55 people, including 21 children and five pregnant women.
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Biden’s years as vice president will be remembered by Arab and Muslim Americans as some of the deadliest for our families back home, with 582 civilians reportedly killed on average annually from 2007 to 2016—an era that largely encompassed his tenure. In 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs across seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
Now, while liberals are scrambling to find a way to glorify Biden for his domestic policy decisions, they need to remember that for Arab Americans, he will forever be remembered as the Butcher of Gaza, thanks to his political, military, and financial support for Israel’s genocidal campaign.
In just one year, from October 2023 to 2024, Biden sent a record amount of military aid—at least $17.9 billion—to Israel, from precision-guided munitions to artillery shells to 2,000-pound bombs. Additionally, he used American taxpayer dollars to fund a $4 billion replenishment of Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems. The weapons transfers he signed off on were used in horrific massacres in both Palestine and Lebanon that international organizations like Amnesty International have said violated both international and US law and amounted to the crime of genocide.
On May 26, Ahmad Al-Najar, only 18 months old, was decapitated when Israel struck the tents of displaced Palestinians in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah. The video of Al-Najar’s headless body shocked the world. “I saw the bodies of my wife Faten, and daughter Huda, my son Arkan and my baby Ahmad,” his father Abdul Hafez told Al Jazeera. “I was told he was headless; I just peeked inside the body bag and saw his body without a head, and I couldn’t stand to see it anymore.”
The weapon used to kill Al-Najar’s family, caused his son’s decapitation, burned down tents, killed 45 Palestinian refugees, and injured 200 others, was identified by an explosives expert as an American-made munition. This happened weeks after Biden claimed that he wouldn’t allow any more US weapons to be used in a major offensive in Rafah.
Biden repeatedly ignored his constituents when they begged for him to call for a ceasefire. Instead, he repeated the bizarre statement that “if Israel didn’t exist there isn’t a Jew in the world that would be safe” (implying that the country he is in charge of isn’t a safe space for Jewish people) and continuously lied about his supposed “red lines” for Israel. (It’s important to note that Western media was absolutely instrumental in washing the blood off Biden’s hands.)
On January 15, Biden stood at a podium, flanked by fellow genocide enablers Kamala Harris and Antony Blinken, and announced that a ceasefire deal had been reached between Israel and Hamas. As expected, Biden took credit for securing the deal, despite the fact that the terms were almost exactly the same as the deal put forth in the spring of 2024. Back then, he had stressed that this was “the Israeli proposal,” but now, days before leaving office, he was insisting that the deal was “the exact framework I proposed back in May. Exact.”
While he walked away from the press conference, a reporter yelled out a blunt question that has been on everyone’s mind: “Who do you think deserves credit for this, Mr. President: you or [Donald] Trump?”
“Is that a joke?” the president asked, with a smug expression. But one of the most recent headlines from The Times of Israel reads: “Arab officials: Trump envoy swayed Netanyahu more in one meeting than Biden did all year.” And according to The Guardian’s source at the Pentagon, the ceasefire was “driven by Trump’s team…and Biden, Blinken and the whole administration secured its legacy as enablers.”
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During the first month of the genocide, author Omar El Akkad wrote on X: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” We can already see how people are trying to rewrite history, but Palestinians were serious when we said we would never forget, and never forgive.
We will remember the way Biden walked away when his constituents begged for a ceasefire; we will remember the lies he told that led to the slaughter of over 17,400 children; and we will remember that in one of his final acts in office, he signed off on $8 billion more for Israel so it could do its best to finish off the genocide.
There is no way I would ever be able to summarize every death sentence that Biden signed in Gaza. There is no way to encapsulate the horrors he perpetrated during his political career and condense them in a neat summary like Biden’s allies have tried to do with his “accomplishments.” I can’t even keep track of all the lies he’s told the American public.
Ultimately, there is no “win” for us in Biden’s retirement. Orphans in Gaza will have to grow up knowing that the man responsible for killing their parents got to live out the rest of his days peacefully on some massive estate in Delaware. The thousands stuck under the rubble, the newborn babies that froze to death, all of the mothers who sobbed at their children’s graves—he will never have to confront any of it. There will never be any semblance of justice here. Some might see a “ towering” or “courageous” figure when they look at Biden. All I see is an unending trail of blood.
Samaa KhullarSamaa Khullar is an investigative reporter and fact-checker based in New York City.