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palestinian rights
Three Winners at the Latest DNC Meeting: Israel, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? Because, of course, the sidelining worked.
Apr 16, 2026
In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the US-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.
Last Friday, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article this way: “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well—as a charade for delay and obfuscation.
The day before the derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning US weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”
Given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time.
That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”
Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”
The falsehood that the task force had met “once a month,” when actually it had scarcely met, was enough reason for me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that (mis)information. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”
The basic problem with the working group is not only that it hasn’t done much of anything in the nearly eight months since DNC Chair Ken Martin announced it with great fanfare. The underlying hoax is that it was set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.
Polling is clear. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and a large majority are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. But only a minority of the Middle East Working Group’s eight members has a record of supporting Palestinian rights, while several are firm supporters of Israel. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or mere platitudes. But stalemate and platitudes appear to be just fine from here to the horizon for DNC leadership.
Such stalling mechanisms and scant real representation are as old as the political hills. In this case, an unfortunate boost has come from James Zogby, who for decades bravely worked inside the Democratic Party and elsewhere to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to US foreign policy.
As the most prominent person in the Middle East Working Group, Zogby has hailed it as an important step forward. Aligning himself with Martin’s approach from the outset, he said that the new chair’s move to set it up was “politically thoughtful.”
Zogby can remember when, in the 1980s, party leaders did not want to hear the “p-word”—Palestinians. He has portrayed the current sparse intra-party discussion related to Israel as major progress. “Don’t count me among those who left New Orleans complaining of defeat,” Zogby wrote in an April 14 piece for The Nation.
After that article appeared, I spoke with Zogby, and he summarized his approach this way: “I have a tendency to feel like sometimes there are little victories, and I latch onto them. Moving to catch up to where Democrats are.”
Compare that approach to this assessment days ago from Mike Merryman-Lotze, the American Friends Service Committee’s director of Just Peace Global Policy: “The failure of the DNC to take even minimal action in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is shameful.”
When my RootsAction colleague India Walton loudly interrupted the DNC’s business as usual during its general session a week ago, she was challenging a political culture of conformity that has ongoing deadly consequences. The context involves a simple and crucial choice—between excessive patience or urgency that’s grounded in life-and-death human realities. Those realities exist very far away from the transactional atmosphere of entrenched political institutions.
All this matters for at least two profound reasons: One is that, on the merits, silent or euphemistic complicity with Israel’s methodical policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide is abhorrent.
And given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time (as polls have shown was the case with Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign for president). “Eight-in-10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents currently have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69 percent last year and 53 percent in 2022,” the Pew Research Center reported last week.
In these exceedingly dystopian times, when realism is more important than ever, it’s a grave mistake to let rose-colored glasses distort vision and substitute undue patience for vital urgency.
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The American Medical Association Is Failing to Speak Up for Dr. Abu Safiya
If they speak out to save just one Palestinian doctor's life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.
Apr 10, 2026
Israel tortured a 1-year-old baby. They burned him with cigarettes and drove nails through his feet as a form of torture during his father's interrogation. This isn't some twisted, made-up movie scene; this is real life. And it's the one case we know of right now, but who knows how many other babies, in all their innocence, have been tortured by the Israeli military? It also begs the question: Since they're willing to do this to an infant, what are they doing to older prisoners?
It's always been clear that the Zionist settler colony will go to any length to achieve its goal of being an ethnostate. To achieve this goal, it subjects Palestinians to mass-imprisonment campaigns. No title—child, teenager, mother, father, health professional, aid worker—is spared from the Israeli prison system. Because if Israel can't just outright exterminate all Palestinians at once, the next best option is to round them up and slowly kill them behind bars.
Well, that was the case before March 30, 2026, when the Israeli Knesset passed a bill that calls for the hanging of Palestinian prisoners within 90 days of being convicted of killing Israeli settlers. The bill was introduced by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been wearing noose pins and carrying around a physical noose to publicly show his excitement for potentially becoming Israel's official executioner. When the vote was called out and the bill was passed, Ben-Gvir popped champagne bottles with his cronies, celebrating the essence of killing more Palestinians.
These are illegal settlers under international law, who have been terrorizing Palestinian villagers for years, their attacks becoming increasingly frequent and heinous. Palestinians have had their houses set on fire while inside them at the hands of these settlers, backed by the state. It is important to remember that the Israeli military courts operate outside of constitutional processes and have been widely condemned for their human rights abuses. In these courts, Palestinians have a conviction rate of over 96%, most often for crimes they never even committed.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured.
Israel promotes its interests by incentivizing settlers to brutalize Palestinians and destroy their land. And now, after systematically denying Palestinians' right to defend themselves, they are branding them as cattle to be killed by hanging. Israel is carrying out its genocide in the form of codified law. This is the true face of the settler colonial state of Israel: dehumanization to the lowest level.
Right now, Israel is holding the highest number of Palestinian prisoners ever recorded. One such prisoner is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. He was the sole lead of the only functioning hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital. For the "crime" of providing medical aid to Palestinians, he was surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers and forced into imprisonment in December 2024.
Israeli society is getting more and more draconian: no prosecution, no unanimity, nothing. Simply put, if the Israeli military sees fit to kill a Palestinian prisoner, they will do so. Dr. Abu Safiya has been in an Israeli prison for 16 months, and there is speculation that he is being tortured. But again, if they can torture an infant, what's a middle-aged man to them? The new Israeli bill gives the IOF a pathway to execute prisoners like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: torturing them to force a confession, convicting them, and then hanging them. Clearly, he's been deemed a threat to the very existence of Israel because he helped save the lives of Palestinians.
This is the situation of medical professionals outside of the West, heroes who put everything on the line to provide care for their people. In comparison to the most "esteemed" doctors in the US—like those within the American Medical Association, with all their prestige and shiny titles—the healthcare workers subjected to deadly imperialist brutality deserve our recognition, and they urgently need our help.
You might be thinking, "What does the American Medical Association have to do with a detained Palestinian doctor?" Firstly, we need to contend with the fact that it is our US tax dollars that fund these genocidal soldiers, prisons, and policies that got Dr. Abu Safiya arrested in the first place. The American government and its institutions are just as guilty of the oppression of the Palestinian as the Israelis are. We need to stop operating on willful ignorance because it has cost thousands of lives in the region, a tally that is increasing by the second with the recent attacks on Iran and Lebanon.
Secondly, the American Medical Association (AMA) prides itself on its strong relationship with the World Medical Association, which has already called for the release of Dr. Abu Safiya, demonstrating alignment with its policies that "support the rights of physicians worldwide." The advocacy of foreign doctors is integral to the AMA as a whole. Why is a Palestinian doctor being ignored by them, then? Maybe the topic of genocide is too taboo for them. That would be ironic if so, when a genocide is the culmination of healthcare sectors being destroyed, lineages lost, and eugenics shaping a land and people forever. These are topics any medical association should be speaking about, especially one that represents the literal country that enabled this violence. Imagine the leverage the AMA could have in the halls of Congress when advocating for change.
The recent codification of the execution of Palestinian prisoners poses a grave threat to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya's life. Will the AMA finally act now, in the face of such injustice and wickedness? If they speak out to save just one doctor's life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.
The genocide in Gaza has shown me that so much of what I thought about society was false. I once believed I lived in a world where good prevails, but I have come to realize that selective empathy is the rule. The leaders of this world don't hold empathy for anything or anyone that stands in their way of global domination. I frequently think of how many lives have been lost at the hands of US-Israeli imperial violence. The sheer number of casualties in Gaza, despite being predicted to be in the hundreds of thousands, has never been enough reason to stop. I think of how one of the first targets in the US war on Iran was a girl's elementary school, which they targeted with not just one strike, but three in a row.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured. At this point, advocating for the release of our prisoners who were wrongfully detained is the least we can do.
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Answering the Four Children in the Shadow of the Gaza Genocide
In a historical moment where Jewish identity is facing political and moral division, the inquisitive nature of the Four Children can inspire a new generation of Jewish families to question what we have been told about Palestinians in Gaza.
Apr 03, 2026
During the Passover seder, Jewish families recall our cultural yearning for freedom and liberation through storytelling and asking questions. This week, families across the Jewish world will gather to retell an ancient story, connecting with ancestors who passed on to us a generations-old struggle for justice and peace.
But what makes this night different from all other nights? This Passover, Jewish communities will continue to witness a rupture over Israel’s actions in Gaza, while Israel’s attacks on Iran and Lebanon will surely generate new questions. But, unlike the Four Children, or the child reciting, “Mah Nishtana,” many Jewish children will have their questions left unanswered.
By exploring what the Four Children might ask in this moment, and offering answers aligned to our Jewish values, we honor rather than shy away from the Jewish tradition of asking questions.
The wise one, what does he say? “What are the testimonies, the statutes, and the laws which the LORD, our God, has commanded you?” And you shall tell him the laws of Pesach.
If we truly want to honor our traditions and values, we must not shy away from difficult questions.
The wise child asks, “What are the testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza? What are the international laws that nations follow? What are the Jewish ethics which our ancestors have passed to us?”
When the wise child asks for testimony, you must share the countless firsthand accounts of Palestinians in Gaza who have endured deteriorating conditions and cruelty at the hands of the Israeli military.
When the child asks for statutes, you must guide them to United Nations reports, International Court of Justice cases, and International Criminal Court investigations that provide evidence of war crimes and genocide.
When the wise child asks for laws, you must show how our Jewish texts instruct us to value all life, command us against standing “idly by the blood of another,” and teach us to honor each soul as a universe.
The wicked one, what does he say? “What is this service to you?” He says, “to you,” but not to him. By thus excluding himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental.
The wicked child asks, “Why do they deserve this?” “They,” the child says, and not Palestinians, not families, not human beings. When the child excludes others from humanity, they exclude themself. You must call them in and say, “we must stand with Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza.” “We,” and not, “I,” for our safety is intertwined.
The simple one, what does he say? “What is this?”
The simple child asks, “What is this?” What is the truth about Gaza?” He hears opposing narratives in the news, on his phone, and in his Jewish community. He hears Zionists describe the people who live in Gaza as terrorists, animals, and other dehumanizing labels justifying collective punishment. He sees another reality, a mosaic of humanity–children, doctors, journalists, and families– experiencing profound grief and suffering.
The simple child is confused, and we must direct him to seek truth and act in alignment with his Jewish values: Never again means never again for anyone.
As for the one who does not know how to ask, you must open [the story] for him [...]
And for the child who doesn’t know how to ask, you must open a path for them to question the narratives that Zionists tell of Palestinians in Gaza, just as Jewish culture teaches us to question, challenge, and debate our traditions and worldviews.
Passover is a testament to the power of retelling stories that resonate across generations. The Four Children, a key part of the Passover haggadah, have always acted as archetypes of Jewish engagement. In a historical moment where Jewish identity is facing political and moral division, the inquisitive nature of the Four Children can inspire a new generation of Jewish families to question what we have been told about Palestinians in Gaza.
If we truly want to honor our traditions and values, we must not shy away from difficult questions. Nor should our answers ignore the parts of our tradition that teach us to prioritize life, to love the stranger, and to challenge our worldviews. Our children deserve nothing less.
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