As people across the United States cast votes earlier this week, a representative of Israel’s military said, “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return.” Another representative has since tried to play down that statement. Nevermind the flattened Gaza City, the sketches of new developments built over destroyed homes, the divisive Netzarim Corridor, the push for new illegal settlements on the Gaza Strip, the plans to annex northern Gaza.

A Harris presidency would have failed us in many ways: insufficient environmental protections, tepid support for trans people, aggressive immigration policies. But nowhere, it seems, as blatantly and proudly as she would have failed Palestinians.

Two days ago, while Kamala Harris was licking her wounds from failing to motivate or inspire trust in voters, Gazan reporter Hossam Shabat posted on Twitter: “I have just finished burying 11 of my cousins.”

Two weeks ago, not long before Harris tried to placate pro-Palestinian voices with platitudes about “want[ing] the war in Gaza to end”—an aim unsupported by the government of which she is currently Vice President—Israeli forces attacked Jabalia refugee camp. They separated men from women, parents from children:

Mothers saw their children lying on the ground and screamed without being able to reach out to them, as any of the mothers who attempted to move were either shot directly by the soldiers, or by quadcopter drones hovering overhead.

Survivors spoke of spending hours in ditches surrounded by bulldozers and tanks. They witnessed the gruesome murders of others—their neighbors, friends, families—under the crushing treads of the machines and suffocating weight of earth. When they were finally allowed to move:

the soldiers made the women climb out of the ditch one woman at a time, ordered them to pick up a child from the ground at random, and told to walk in a predetermined route that took them south. Women were forced to pick up children who were not their own at the army’s orders and made to march on, leaving their own children behind and hoping that some other woman would pick them up.

Two months ago, on the eve of Harris staking her devout support for Israel in the presidential debate, Israeli forces sent missiles designed to destroy buildings into tents of the al-Mawasi camp, an area that Israel itself had dedicated as a “humanitarian zone.” Israel had already killed at least ninety people there a few months earlier; this wave of missiles left massive craters, killed nineteen people, and injured sixty.

The results of this week’s election point to a dark future, both in the United States and around the world. This country’s hegemony, already oppressive in many sovereign nations, will expand, its boot on a thousand necks. I grieve for those in the country whose futures have turned blurry, dim; I fear for those of us elsewhere, whose own countries’ trends toward fascism have been emboldened.

If Harris had won, I would not feel this dread. Nor, though, would I be hopeful. Harris promised the status quo. For the past 399 days, the status quo in Gaza has been brutality. By official counts, Israel’s attacks have killed at least 43,508 people and injured more than 102,500. By other estimates, the dead—including those who have died due to disease, insufficient medical attention, and other effects of more than a year of near-constant attacks and displacement—may number more than 186,000.

It’s extremely likely that Harris’s opponent will enable even more harrowing atrocities. I ache when I consider what the next days, months, years hold for the people of Palestine. Yet it’s not so different from how I have ached up until now, most acutely over the past year, and broadly for as long as I have understood Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestinians.

Palestinians deserve freedom, peace, and joy. We must never accept how our governments are failing them. We must demand a choice beyond the status quo.

Gwyneth Findlay

Gwyneth Findlay is an editor living in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where she mentally and physically collects world maps. She graduated from Calvin in 2018 with a degree in writing and minors in French and gender studies.