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israel palestine
Israel-Gaza War Set to Splinter Democratic Party
If the party’s leadership wants to succeed in 2024 and beyond, they will need to intervene—before it's too late.
Nov 13, 2023
The war over Gaza has had an explosive and surprising impact on the cohesion of the Democratic coalition. For decades now, the American body politic has been fractured mainly over critical social and cultural issues ranging from race and gender to guns and immigration—more often than not with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other. Only in rare instances have foreign policy concerns entered the equation and never in the way that Israel/Palestine has in recent weeks.
The few occasions when the Middle East has become a deeply partisan issue in the past involved Republicans recruiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to score points against a Democratic president. The first was when then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress to crown the GOP’s efforts to sabotage President Bill Clinton’s work in supporting the Oslo peace process. The other was when then-Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to try to defeat President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. Over the long haul, both efforts ultimately bore fruit, putting obstacles in the way of peace and paving the way for President Donald Trump’s scuttling the nuclear deal.
As contentious as these issues were, they were largely confined to Washington and never filtered down to the grassroots of politics in the way that Israel/Palestine has in today’s fraught political environment. Both support for the peace process and the Iran deal remained partisan issues and neither had broad appeal, nor mass demonstrations in favor of or opposed to either concern.
Hamas’ October 7th deadly attack on Israelis and the now month-long Israeli brutal assault on Gaza have been quite different. In the first place, these events viscerally impacted both of the affected communities—American Jews and Arab/Palestinian Americans. Seeing the scenes and hearing the reports of the wanton slaughter, the Jewish community was horrified. It evoked the painful trauma of the Holocaust and pogroms of their past and feelings of their vulnerability.
Palestinians and Arabs recoiled in shock and anger when it became clear from Israel’s devastating bombings of Gaza and the racist, genocidal language used by Israeli leaders that this wouldn’t be like previous attacks on Gaza. With thousands dead, one-half of the dwellings in Gaza City and its environs destroyed, and witnessing the scenes of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing for their lives to an uncertain future in the southern part of the impoverished Strip, Palestinian and Arab Americans saw the Nakba playing out in real time. Here too there was vulnerability and trauma.
What is unfolding in Gaza and here in the US has resonated with the very component groups that Democrats have long seen as essential to their electoral victories.
To some extent, this drama had a partisan dimension with Republicans, fueled by their hardline right-wing Christian base, siding with Israel. But while Democratic elected officials, long deferential to the wishes of the pro-Israel lobby, also demonstrated their support for Israel, there has been a fracturing of the party’s base.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have erupted nationwide, culminating last week in a huge gathering in Washington. Never before has there been such massive outpouring of support for Palestinians. And, most significantly, those involved in the mobilizations demanding a ceasefire and Palestinian rights have been extraordinarily diverse, including large contingents of young American Jews, Arab, Black, Latino, and Asian Americans.
What is unfolding in Gaza and here in the US has resonated with the very component groups that Democrats have long seen as essential to their electoral victories. This has never happened before. When Jesse Jackson raised the issue of Palestinian rights during his two presidential runs in the 1980s and when Bernie Sanders did the same in the last decade, they were able to mobilize support, to be sure. But this is different in that it is similar to the mass eruption of support that we witnessed in the Women’s March, the anti-Trump Muslim ban, and the Black Lives Matter movement. But, once again, there is a difference.
Those demonstrations were mobilizations of Democrats and faced no real opposition from the party leadership. The pro-Palestinian demonstrations, on the other hand, have become an intra-party fight, as pro-Israel groups have mobilized to threaten, demean, and punish those who are speaking out against the Israeli assault on Gaza. Campus groups have been disbanded, some Latino and Black groups have lost their funding, and outspoken individuals are publicly scorned as antisemitic.
The party was already divided on Palestinian rights before October 7th, with Democrats having more favorable attitudes toward Palestinians than Israelis. While one may have thought that Hamas’ massacre of civilians would have altered that, as the horrors of the Israeli response became clear, polls are showing that a majority of Democrats are opposed to what Israel is doing and want a ceasefire. And key groups like young people and people of color remain supportive of Palestinians.
With pro-Israel groups taking repressive measures against students and others, and announcing that they will spend millions to defeat members of Congress who speak out against Israel or in support of Palestinian rights, a real rupturing of the Democratic coalition is possible. As all of the congressional representatives who are being threatened are young people of color, the optics of a pro-Israel group threatening to spend money (raised from a handful of billionaire donors—some of whom are Republicans) will not sit well with other Democrats.
If the party’s leadership wants to succeed in 2024 and beyond, they will need to intervene to tamp down this behavior. Debate and reasoned discourse should be encouraged. But threats should be stopped before the division is too deep and it’s too late to turn back.Keep ReadingShow Less
Our Message to Antony Blinken on Failed US Policy on Israel and Palestine
The two-state solution is no longer possible and US silence in the face of Israeli actions makes it clear that we will not defend Palestinian rights or respect their humanity.
Feb 07, 2023
I was part of a small delegation of Arab Americans invited to meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken the day before his recent visit to Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. Our meeting came on the heels of two tragic days in Israel/Palestine.
On January 26th, 10 Palestinians were killed during an Israeli undercover raid into Jenin. Nightly Israeli invasions of heavily populated Palestinian communities have taken almost three dozen lives so far this year. These raids and killings coupled with a new round of mass expulsions and intensified settler violence have left Palestinians both seething in anger and despairing of any improvement in their lives.
The next day a lone Palestinian gunman murdered eight Israelis as they walked home from their synagogue in a settlement to the east of Jerusalem.
Both mass killings were deplorable and yet tragically predictable.
While all of this left the region concerned that the violence would spin out of control, it appears that things may remain on a low boil. While extremist elements in the Israeli government may want to accelerate matters with more violence, Netanyahu himself intensified a series of repressive measures that included: sealing the homes of the Palestinian attackers and the arrests and/or expulsion of their family members and friends; sending more Israeli forces into the Occupied Territories; and issuing more weapons to settlers. For its part, the Palestinian Authority condemned the raids into Jenin and said it would cease security cooperation with Israel, but both the PA and Hamas appeared to have more interest in tamping things down than accelerating toward more violence.
We met with Secretary Blinken against this tense backdrop. We expressed our concerns including: admitting Israel into the US visa waiver program without Israel guaranteeing full reciprocity and respect for the rights of Arab Americans to enter and depart without harassment; plans to build the U.S. embassy on Palestinian-owned land in Jerusalem; and the State Department’s definition of antisemitism which includes legitimate criticism of Israel.
In my remarks, I attempted to place the recent events in the context of decades of failed US policies that have brought us to where we are today. The asymmetry of power that has existed between the Israelis and Palestinians has been amplified by the US’s asymmetrical approach to both. We have given full-throated support to Israel, while applying pressure mainly to the Palestinians.
When Palestinians have taken actions with which the US has disagreed, we’ve called them out or taken punitive measures to sanction them. But when Israel has acted contrary to international law or our own policies, we’ve responded, when at all, timidly with private communiques or public statements of concern. Knowing that there would be no consequences to their bad behavior, the Israelis would either simply proceed, or delay until the heat was off.
The result of having no consequences for Israel’s bad behaviors has been devastating on multiple levels. We have enabled Israel’s drift to the far right. Our enabling of hardliners and their policies has weakened Israel’s peace forces, who came to realize that they would have no backing for their opposition to human rights violations and the deepening of the occupation. At the same time, as prospects for a two-state solution became impossible to implement, we have discredited those Palestinian moderates who endorsed the Oslo Accords, while also emboldening Palestinian hardliners and advocates of violence as the only way forward. I made it clear that this was not the result of the last two years, but decades of US failed policies.
It’s not enough for the US to express concern about Netanyahu’s efforts to run roughshod over Israel’s democracy, while falling silent in the face of his proposed responses to the recent terror attack—all of which (including home demolitions and expulsions) are clear violations of international law. And it’s not enough to continue to express support for a two-state solution and speak about “the equal worth of Israelis and Palestinians.” The two-state solution is no longer possible and US silence in the face of Israeli actions makes it clear that we will not defend Palestinian rights or respect their humanity.
To dig our way out of this hole and begin to transform the downward spiraling dynamic, I recommended that the US reverse course. The Israeli side needs to hear that there will be consequences to policies that violate rights and international law and provoke violence. I suggested that we remove the sanctions that have been placed on the ICC, meet with and offer direct financial support to the Palestinian human rights organizations that Israel has banned, and make it clear that there will be direct consequences in aid and political support for any further movement on settlement expansion, home demolitions, and expulsions.
Such actions won’t make immediate change, but they will send a message to the Israeli right that their decades-long impunity is over. It will strengthen those forces in Israel who support ending the occupation, give hope to Palestinians that they have US support, and open the door to new possibilities. Change will not be overnight. It’s taken us decades to dig this hole that we, Israelis, and Palestinians are in. There’s no time like the present to stop digging and reverse course. If we don’t, the violence and repression will continue, and we will have only our inaction to blame.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Arab American Institute. The Arab American Institute is a non-profit, nonpartisan national leadership organization that does not endorse candidates.
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