The Democrats Have an Israel Problem
There's never been greater momentum for the Democrats to understand that erasing Palestinians is bad politics.
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Four years ago I wrote a piece for Waging Non-Violence arguing that leftists and anti-authoritarians should vote for Biden to defeat Trump. I still believe that Trump is too great a danger for us all, and if I was an American I would vote for the Democrats for that reason. My argument is one of harm reduction, even though I am painfully aware of how cruel this sounds given the ongoing Gaza genocide.
With that in mind, there is something terrifying about the Democratic National Convention. I've been watching most of it in the mornings (Central European timezone) as the DNC wraps up its evening sessions. I saw Barack Obama deliver an entire speech with no substance other than implying that Trump has a small penis. I saw girl-cop vibes dominate a party that has never quite figured out whether it wants to be a party of 'the people' or the party of the cops that are beating up protesters outside the DNC as I'm writing these words.
Just outside the DNC we are seeing Palestinian-Americans excluded from a platform they are actively trying to be a part of. The Democratic leadership is making the decision to exclude a part of its own base at a time when Trump's defeat is nowhere near a given.
As the Muslim Women for Harris-Walz group pointed out, relatives of Israeli hostages that spoke on stage - because only Israelis are allowed the right to narrate what they're going through - showed more humanity to Palestinians than the Democrats whose current leader is the one funding and arming the genocide. Bend The Arc, "the organization that is home to the largest Jewish effort focused on US democracy", is also demanding that the DNC allow Palestinian-Americans just as they have allowed Jewish-Americans.
The Democrats are refusing to hear a vetted speech - one they already approved - by Abbas Alawieh, a Palestinian-American delegate, ie one that was voted by Democrats to attend the DNC. They are excluding the doctors at the DNC who have worked in Gaza and described it as hell on Earth. They are excluding the dozens of Jewish-American groups urging them to abandon Netanyahu and prioritize a permanent ceasefire instead. As Dan Berger pointed out, this comes sixty years after the Democratic Party refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the party that was co-lead by Fannie Lou Hamer, the same Fannie Lou Hamer that the Democrats at the 2024 DNC keep on bringing up and praising. In her speech, Hamer said “if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.” The Democrats are making the same mistake today even as they praise the woman they previously excluded.
They are making a grave mistake and anyone who is concerned about the very real possibility of a Trump return needs to understand this. The Democrats are not even sticking to whatever they think a 'pro-Israel' position is. There are Israelis on the streets of Tel Aviv every day demanding the exact same thing that the uncommitted delegates are demanding: ceasefire now, the only way to actually free the Israeli hostages. On some days they number over 150,000. The Democrats are actually standing by the most extreme government in Israeli history, lead by the same genocidaire who boasted his ties to Donald Trump. They are doing that as Trump seeks to capitalize on his reputation as an unpredictable politician who can just as quickly turn on Netanyahu as he is to encourage Netanyahu to 'finish the job.' The Democrats are running the risk of many people preferring the uncertainty of Trump - including the very real possibility of this hell getting worse, as unimaginable as that scenario is today - over the ongoing fact of genocide. They are even ignoring Jewish-American progressives and liberals, the vast majority of whom have also been calling for a ceasefire and thousands of whom have put their bodies on the line in dozens of actions and protests throughout the USA since October 2023.
We need to make this clear. This is not a situation where Democrats are standing by one demographic - Jewish American - against others - Palestinian Americans as well as Muslim/Arab Americans. That is an artificial construct, one which does not reflect reality in any way. What they are doing is their utmost to erase the same people that Donald Trump sought to erase. If they don't change that quickly, the damage could be permanent, if it isn't already.
Read: A Palestinian American’s Place Under the Democrats’ Big Tent? by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Anyone who has ever researched the Far Right knows this: the Far Right does not only win through being physically stopped, on the streets and in elections. They also win by having their politics normalized and seeing their extremist worldviews shift to the center to become the norm. The Democrats are doing this with their irrational support for the Netanyahu regime (as well as their right-wing turn on 'border security.') You mix those two with the obsessive discourse around 'law and order' and what you get is a law and order party, not a progressive party, not even a liberal party. There was always space within liberalism for talks of 'law and order' but that was usually somewhat moderated (ineffectively, in my opinion) by a focus on basic human rights first.
The Democrats could still win the November election even as they gaslight everyone by pretending like they are not directly complicity in history's most documented genocide currently unfolding in Gaza. Understandable fears of a Trump return could be enough to push them over the line. They certainly seem to be gambling on that as most of the speeches at the DNC thus far have been about how bad Trump is - not exactly a difficult thing to do - and less about why they are the good ones, with one exception: reproductive rights.
Indeed, we can compare how the Democrats talk about reproductive rights with how they talk about Israel-Palestine. With reproductive rights, they know what to do. Trump is the reason Roe v Wade was overturned. We know what happened as a consequences of that, with women and other pregnant people paying a heavy price for the Conservatives' obsession with controlling non-cismale bodies. So the Democrats have been focused on that: Trump harmed innocent people, we will undo that harm and help people heal. It's fairly straightforward, ridiculously easy even. It doesn't take away from the real suffering experienced due to Trump's policies. It just means the solution is fairly easy and achievable.
Biden's policies are harming innocent people, on a mass scale. They need us to believe otherwise, that what's happening is part of an ancient and complicated struggle, or something. It is not. We don't even have to expect Democrats to be political radicals to understand this. They don't need to talk about the Nakba or a One State Solution with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians under the law because the American bar vis-a-vis Israel-Palestine discourse is very low. They just need to see that Netanyahu is already deeply unpopular among Democrats, and a ceasefire is already very popular. Progressives and others have already done the work to get this result. All that's left for the Democrats is to take advantage of that and gain a whole lot of endorsements from major Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Jewish-American organizations. People are worried about cost of rent, global warming, debt cancellation, healthcare etc. They're not worried about the political future of the Likud, Mafdal–RZ or Jewish Power (yes, this is what Ben Gvir's party is called.)
They will lose AIPAC as well as some of the more conservative pro-Israel groups, but is this the first time they lose a powerful group's support because they decided it was worth it? The Democrats are not spending their time courting the NRA vote because they have understood that it is worthless. Why have they not yet concluded the same vis-a-vis AIPAC and the Israeli government yet? AIPAC has no organic base among Democrats, at least nothing sizeable. All they are good at is spending millions of dollars to silence Democrats who are critical of Israel, and then boasting about it on social media. They are very good at funding Republicans who push for AIPAC-friendly policies, and they are just as comfortable doing that with Democrats willing to take their money. Going after AIPAC and Netanyahu aggressively is actually a winning strategy, and the Democrats need to understand this. They can turn AIPAC and Netanyahu into a Republican thing, dump them in the same camp as JD Vance's reactionary views on women. They don't actually need them. On the contrary, the evidence seems suggest that they are nothing but an obstacle to becoming the party that destroys the Republicans once and for all.
I saw AOC and United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain and Bernie and others rant against the billionaire class. The DNC crowd was happy to go along with it. Polls suggest that this is a popular discourse. There are far more working and middle class Americans than there are billionaire Americans. It took decades and a couple of financial crashes for the Democrats to understand that their base has no love for the trickle-down grift anymore than they love billionaires. The Democrats have also focused on going after Trump for his tax-cuts on billionaires (even Obama gave it a shot, despite his own record as president resembling Trump's.)
It didn't take too long for the Democrats to realize that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was more their people than the all-white delegation from Mississippi. How long will it take them to understand that being against genocide, settler colonialism and apartheid is actually good for them politically?
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