Democrats and Gaza

Jacobin spoke with me and Dylan Saba about the movement for Palestine in the Democratic Party and its prospects for changing US foreign policy.

For Jacobin Radio podcast the Dig, Daniel Denvir sat down with me and Dylan Saba, a staff attorney with Palestine Legal and a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, on May 30 to discuss the movement for Palestine in the United States and its prospects moving forward. A good summary of the discussion can be found here.

I laid out the critical path forward: a multiyear effort to build a left-liberal coalition within the Democratic Party. This coalition needs to empower new Arab, Muslim, and young progressive constituencies to displace AIPAC. Dylan pointed out that this is impossible without fundamentally challenging the US's foreign policy, which prioritizes Israel and US hegemony. He expressed deep pessimism about the prospects of overcoming the entrenched liberal commitment to US primacy, viewing it as a nearly insurmountable barrier to building the coalition we need.

Despite Dylan's rational pessimism, I maintained a pragmatic approach baesd in organizing and majoritarian electoral coalitions. I acknowledged the difficulty of the task but argued that it's a necessary struggle. The current context of the Abraham Accords and the US strategy to contain China indeed complicates anti-AIPAC politics. However, without this transformation, both liberals and the left risk losing to the right. I believe that by strategically and persistently working towards this coalition, we can create a political environment where progressive internationalism isn't just a principle but a path to an electoral majority.

Some excerpts from the recent podcast with Daniel Denvir, The Dig, and Jacobin Magazine.

DANIEL DENVIR

Waleed, what’s your take? Thinking back to the US invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, the United States frequently perpetuates horrible deeds, invades other countries, and starts wars. Yet we have not had sustained mass movements, and definitely not mass movements with this sort of internationalist bent, for my entire time on the Left, since the late 1990s. What’s different now?

WALEED SHAHID

There are three main origin points I see for this current movement. I think September 11 is the place that I would start.

I grew up in Northern Virginia during the September 11 attacks, and mosques were heavily surveilled by the FBI in Northern Virginia. There’s a famous thing about black parents talking to their kids about how to talk to the police; my family always told me never to talk about politics in school because I could get in trouble.

There were many stories about undercover FBI agents at mosques trying to entrap people. This was the days of the Patriot Act. Many of us from the Muslim community, or the Arab community, grew up with parents who were terrified of FBI surveillance, racial harassment, the threat of racial violence. You might remember how many Muslim and Arab and South Asian cab drivers put American flags up as bumper stickers or outside their house — not only as an expression of solidarity, but also as a shield against potential racial harassment or violence.

For a lot of the children of that generation, and for the adults too, we feel like we were politically silenced or scared to organize or protest the “wars on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two decades later, we are part of the country’s fabric — we are part of this country’s democracy — and are civically engaged and feel like we have just as much of a right and have cast away the fear of the post-9/11 era to really bring the politics we may have felt at that time, or the politics of Third Worldism or anti-imperialism that some immigrants come with to this country, to American politics and to the Democratic Party.
You see that a lot in states like Michigan, where in Dearborn and Detroit, in so many cities across the country, the party is essentially a political vehicle for minority communities and communities of people of color. We typically hear in the media about the Latino Democratic Party, or the black Democratic Party. In a state like Michigan, the Arab American community and the Muslim American community are a huge part of the Democratic Party. It’s a different Democratic Party than what it looked like in 2001–2.

The mayor of Dearborn is an Arab American. Rashida Tlaib is a member of Congress representing that community; the Michigan House majority floor leader is Abraham Aiyash, who’s Yemeni. There is some sort of political power that is able to mainstream some of these views in a way that there were very few voices speaking out in mainstream political or media spaces after the September 11 attacks.

How 9/11 shapes Muslim and Arab Americans also shapes millennials and Gen Z even if you’re not Muslim and Arab — because you grew up in a time when you were sold two wars on terror that didn’t make much sense or have any sort of outcomes or guaranteed safety for Americans. With the recent withdrawal by President Joe Biden from the war in Afghanistan, I think many people are left wondering, what was the point of all this money and all this bloodshed? Like you saw with Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama in 2008, and with Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary in 2016, this opposition to the Iraq War shapes that generation.

The other two things that I think are key here: Bernie and the Squad begin to mainstream some of the anti-occupation, anti-apartheid organizing. Even the small ways Bernie brought it up in 2016 contributed to his victory in Michigan over Hillary Clinton. There was a big moment where Vox had a headline at the time, “Bernie uses the ‘P-word’ on a debate stage” — and near New York, of all places.

The Squad gets elected, and very soon their biggest adversaries are AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), especially against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. When you have political actors who represent to some extent the voices of Palestinian human rights, that allows more people to feel like they can also contribute that voice to their values and the way they think about politics.

The third piece is the Jewish community. In 2014, with Operation Protective Edge, that’s when you had a lot of this emerging infrastructure from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow, to protest the horrific invasion of Gaza. A lot of those leaders have been building membership organizations across country to provide, typically, a younger Jewish voice critical of Zionism, and a lot of those leaders have now come of political age, become political operatives, started new institutions, and provided a home for Jewish millennials and Jewish Zoomers to do organizing from a Jewish perspective against the occupation, against apartheid, in Israel/Palestine. They have given young Jews a political home that maybe didn’t exist in the same way a decade ago.

The last thing I’ll say is that social media matters. People are getting their news from TikTok, Instagram, and other outlets and not letting just CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times dictate the frames of this debate. If you look at the generational divide of public opinion on this issue, it tracks whether you are getting your news from newspapers and television or if you are getting your news from online sources. Just the proliferation of voices on Instagram and TikTok that are coming directly from journalists in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza — that [has made it] very hard to deny the reality of how horrifying the war is.

DANIEL DENVIR

I want to return to the question of the liberal alliances with the Right against the Left over Palestine. How do you make sense of the Democratic political leadership entering these sorts of alliances with the Right in order to oppose the Left at the very same moment that they warned of the danger posed by a second Trump turn? What does it mean that Biden, domestically and internationally, is aligning himself practically materially, discursively, with the far right? Lastly, what does it mean if you only hope to defeat American fascism is some sort of left-liberal coalition?

I think all of us, in various ways, have been involved in these new socialist projects that have involved various forms of coalition and tactical alliance with the center left, and now we’re being blamed for ending that coalition and paving the way to Trump’s presidency. But it probably seems pretty clear to everybody that liberals have declared that coalition impossible. What does that mean?

WALEED SHAHID

One of the most influential books in my life is How Movements Anchor Parties by Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins. That book is about how movements ally with political parties and political parties ally with social movements out of self-interest. Does the movement enable the party to have access to voters or donors or networks it would otherwise not have access to? Does it mean the movement receives some sort of policy patronage in exchange?

One thing that I think about is the Democratic Party is essentially a network of interest groups that used to be social movements that anchor the party: principally the labor movement, reproductive rights movement, climate movement, black civil rights, Latino immigrant rights, LGBTQ equality. One of the anchors of the Democratic Party is the pro-Israel community, and it’s a constituency of the party in terms of both voters and donors and network. Ultimately, the Arab and Muslim community, or the antiwar community, is not considered as a loyal part of that coalition.

What’s been interesting for me to figure out is the movements that haven’t gotten through the Democratic Party’s iron gates must now put more of an emphasis on the exact sort of conflict and disruption that all of those other movements had to engage in in order to get a seat at the table at the White House or the Biden campaign, which is through disruption, conflict, primaries, social movement activity.

One of three things would have to happen. First, the pro-Israel community of the Democratic Party fundamentally either becomes Republican or shifts its view on this issue to be more aligned with the pro-Palestinian left. If that doesn’t happen, the second thing that could happen is that Arabs, Muslims, and young people develop the political infrastructure to supplant the influence of the community in the Democrat Party. The third thing that could happen is what happens if Arab, Muslim, and young people decide to withdraw their votes, on a scale significant enough to toss the election.

I think about someone like my dad, who wasn’t excited in 2020 and isn’t that excited now. If you ask him what his number-one issue is, he would say it’s the economy — inflation. My dad’s a moderate Democrat who has antiestablishment views, and he thinks Biden’s too old to be president. On top of that, you’ve put a disastrous war on Gaza as a third mark against Biden, to now make it even more difficult for people to go to the polls enthusiastically to vote for him or even unenthusiastically to go vote for him.

I don’t understand, if his campaign is about restoring the soul of our democracy, why President Biden would put his ideological beliefs about the place of Israel in the Middle East and the place of Israel in American politics, and the place of the pro-Israel community as a constituency of his and the Democratic Party, ahead of his electoral chances — other than that he has his head in the sand, or he’s really an ideologue about this.

I go back and forth between those two things based on what I hear from people close to the campaign; [I hear] that they have all this polling to show that this is a pretty small percentage of people who care about this. But the amount of work they’re doing to assuage any moderate white Democrat who is critical of the president on the border or LGBTQ issues — they spent so much money and time to persuade that voter on coming back to the Democratic Party, but they don’t when it comes to Palestinians or young people who need to be persuaded to come back to the Democratic Party. There’s no investment to bring those people back into the tent.

DANIEL DENVIR

You have Brett McGurk, who’s been the key adviser to Joe Biden through this war, this moment of crisis. He has been in Washington for a number of administrations now and has his pet project, the normalization program that they’re pushing forward. That’s what everyone buys into. So why would you try to rebuild American power in a whole new radical direction if you know you have this option right in front of you?

WALEED SHAHID

Aaron David Miller went on Ezra Klein’s podcast a few months ago, and he represents the blob in many ways. He said that he believed President Biden would be the last Democrat aligned with AIPAC to be president. On some level because of the politics of the situation and things I’ve heard from people, I’m not sure that even Kamala Harris would be as committed to this project as President Biden has been.

There’s this kind of zombie liberalism aspect to it. There are so many think pieces about how on his approach to climate, student debt, economic policy, even Afghanistan, Biden broke in fundamental ways with the Democratic Party’s old guard and the [Bill] Clinton and Obama presidencies. But on this issue, he’s doubled down on a set of failed policies and not represented the broad coalition of the Democratic Party that has supported his campaigns. Every poll I’ve seen has shown that over 50 percent of his own voters believe that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Then there’s a piece of it that is: the remnants of empire or the ghosts of empire do come home eventually. It is the ironic fate of the Biden campaign to be in the hands of immigrants in Michigan who have witnessed and experienced — whether themselves or their parents or grandparents — the legacy of US weaponry and Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. These are voters in Michigan who have intimate knowledge, personal experiences; people in their families have been killed either in this war or in any of the series of wars that Israel has led in Israel, Palestine, or Lebanon.

These voters could be the ones who decide Biden’s fate. The decisions abroad do come back home eventually. I wish that that would be a [starting point] to develop solidarity and develop some sort of common humanity.

What that can do is directly attack the ideological grounding of the liberal here. [The Left can] say, “How can you purport to be a liberal while you’re authorizing this?” This genocide has brought out truly the ugliest possible things that humanity has to offer. For the political reasons that I was saying, it’s put Biden in a position where he feels like he has no choice but to support it. That’s a profound contradiction and an opportunity for the Left to finish the job of American liberalism.

DANIEL DENVIR

What that can do is directly attack the ideological grounding of the liberal here. [The Left can] say, “How can you purport to be a liberal while you’re authorizing this?” This genocide has brought out truly the ugliest possible things that humanity has to offer. For the political reasons that I was saying, it’s put Biden in a position where he feels like he has no choice but to support it. That’s a profound contradiction and an opportunity for the Left to finish the job of American liberalism.

WALEED SHAHID

Some of the way I think about it is [in terms of] the campaign to rid the Democratic Party of fossil fuel influence, or the even longer campaign to move the gun lobby and gun manufacturers and the NRA [National Rifle Association] out of the Democratic Party. Any fight that the Democrats wage on health care is a fight against private insurers and the doctors’ lobby. In many ways, what is happening here — whether it’s with donors or voters or simply on a cultural level — the contradictions are not that dissimilar from those in other fights that progressives or Democrats had to wage on other issues.

With fossil fuels, that fight is not complete yet, but it has changed Biden’s approach to it. On the NRA, we’ve seen a completely different story; the NRA is almost nowhere to be seen in the Democratic Party. And the party has, for various cultural reasons, decided that it cannot be a party that tolerates any sort of association with the NRA.

What those contradictions look like playing out has to do with this becoming an increasingly partisan issue. These young people are mostly Democrats. As the generation of young people who care about Palestine and Palestinian rights mature, they will increasingly elect people who agree with them, depending on how [much] they’re able to beat back the AIPAC influence.

Trying to think about how this plays out, not just in the next three to six months, but in the next five to ten years, I imagine that a house divided against itself can’t stand. The Democratic Party has to choose either to be a party in which AIPAC is in the tent or one in which AIPAC is out of the tent. Increasingly, there’s a constituency of Arab and Muslim Democrats and young people who feel deeply — in the same way that they might feel about the NRA or Exxon — that something has to give here.

The party’s already struggling to create a political majority of this country for a variety of reasons. This may be another reason why it can’t construct a political majority. If the Democratic Party becomes the party of liberal values, humanitarian values, multiracial democracy, and pluralism in the face of far-right fascism in the characters of Trump and Netanyahu, it becomes increasingly unstable for them to make a case for their alliance with Israel.

DYLAN SABA

I have a hard time seeing that happening. I have a hard time seeing the Democrats disaffiliate with AIPAC without having a foreign policy that can replace our relationship with Israel. I don’t know that that vision exists — because to hold that Democratic coalition together, you need to hold together people who are on the Left, who have no fidelity to an image of American supremacy, with people who do believe in American hegemony and are fearful of a world without it and believe that America should continue to steward global capitalism and be the hegemon. I have a hard time seeing the Democrats disaffiliate with AIPAC without having a foreign policy that can replace our relationship with Israel. I don’t know that that vision exists. I don’t know how you square that; the challenge of squaring that in a way that is anti-Zionist feels like an even more difficult problem to solve. And I frankly just don’t see how it happens. For that reason, I am left cynical about the possibility of a left-liberal electoral coalition that can win elections in the near- or medium-term future.

Part of what Dylan was saying earlier was that the Biden administration’s foreign policy is largely based on containment of China. If you read anything [US national security advisor] Jake Sullivan has written about this, it is not just a foreign policy vision, but a political issue: that one way you can construct a political majority in this country and bring back working-class voters into the Democratic Party is demonizing China and building industrial policy in the United States that is pro-clean energy and in opposition to the threat of the political and economic expansion of China.

There are a million contradictions baked into that foreign policy vision that the current Democratic Party coalition has had. So I agree with Dylan that it’s very hard to see what it would look like to have an anti-Zionist politics, or even an anti-AIPAC politics, within that larger vision that is currently holding the party coalition together. Because all things are related — part of the Abraham Accords and the normalization of Saudi Arabia is also about China.

We could very well just muddle through the next decade or two and maybe toss more elections to the far right and allow Trump to consolidate power. The Left and liberals might together lose the next era of American politics to the far right, which seems more and more likely every day because Biden can’t assemble a political majority.

So I don’t disagree with Dylan’s pessimism on this. But I do think this question will not go away, in terms of how Democrats are able to build a political coalition that can maintain a network of donors and voters and a coherent ideology capable of taking on MAGA and Trumpism.

WALEED SHAHID

I’ve spent a lot of time [talking] with clergy in the last two months on this issue. One thing we’ve been talking a lot about is returning to some first principles that I think animate the Left. Some of the dominant frames and ways to think about this issue are through a postcolonial lens, an intersectional lens, a Marxist lens, a political-strategist lens. A lot of my conversations with clergy have led me to try to [think about] some basic ethical principles of what it means to be human and share the world with people. In the same way that society treats the poor or prisoners or refugees or immigrants, how does it treat people who are stateless?

The House of Representatives and the Senate have yet to hold a single vigil mourning any Palestinian civilian who’s been killed in this war, and they have held several vigils for Israeli civilians who have been killed. Which they should. But the fact that our government is unable to hold a single vigil for any of the children, any of the women, any of the people killed in Palestine, to me, raises profoundly ethical questions of who we are and where the limits of the circle of human solidarity are.

I remember being on consultant calls with Democratic Party strategists. A lot of these elections [involve] big coalitions: there are people on the Left and people who are liberals, whatever. Sometimes we would hear on a conference call that AIPAC may be starting to get involved in this district. Then you would always get a consultant from Washington who would be like, let’s put out a tweet saying we stand with Israel, just to make sure they don’t get involved in this race.

This person hasn’t spent more than three seconds thinking about what they just said. They don’t know anything about the issue. Their whole goal is to try to do what they can to win this race. That is how a lot of Washington operates. You go along to get along, and you try to avoid conflict, and you make things easier for your boss.

I think this movement and this call for the basic equality of all human beings is addressing that normalization of dehumanization. To raise the question of, when you say, let’s put out a tweet saying we stand with Israel . . . like, can you think about it from any more ethical, principled stance that would enable you to have a politics based on some level of human solidarity and some level of solidarity with people who are suffering — and under the worst conditions possible, which are war and ethnic cleansing and genocide?

You can judge a lot from a person, especially in Democratic Party circles, in terms of how they’re willing to navigate this issue, and if they’re not willing to stand up on this issue and stand up to AIPAC. Where else are they going to cave when it gets tough? Are they going to cave on fossil fuels, on policing, on health care? It doesn’t speak well of a person, or a leader, or a staffer, or a strategist if they have no fight in them when the fight gets tough. I think it reveals a lot about a person’s ethical principles.