Blessed are the Peacemakers

On the Israelis, Palestinians and others who are defying polarization in search of an end to the conflict. Plus, is the #Resistance really "exhausted"?

A dear friend of mine, Josh Yarden, teaches anthropology at Givat Haviva, a Jewish-Arab school and civil society organization in central Israel not far from the “Green Line” border with the West Bank. He’s also a poet, with a new poem just published in Sapiens, the independent anthropology magazine. “Between the Lines” is just one of the many poems Josh has been writing this past year as he struggles to engage fully and openly with the challenge of living in Israel/Palestine during this time of turmoil. His is one more plea to escape the unholy binary. Here's an excerpt:

Do we really have
to step up and decide
it’s time to draw a line

What will happen
to me if I don’t
to you if you won’t
if we each leave our side
and cross the divide

What if we resist the call
to put our lives on the line
create a lifeline together
help one another carry
the burden of memory
embrace every parent
who has lost a child
love every orphan
whose childhood
has been defiled

What if we meet
between the lines
we seekers of peace
forged by so many wars

Josh’s poem came to mind as I watched Ali Abu Awwad, founder of Taghyeer, the Palestinian nonviolence movement, and Ami Dar, an Israeli who is the founder of Idealist.org, engage in a video dialogue about peace, dignity and safety that TED, the global ideas conference, has just released. As Ami (another old friend from civic tech days) says, “There’s a sort of set of poisonous beliefs out there that wants to either rid of the Palestinians or tell the Jews to go back to where they came from. None of that is going to happen. The Jews are staying, the Palestinians are staying. One of the most urgent things right now is to create a sort of informal coalition of all those people who agree on that basic starting point.”

There are many psychological insights expressed by both men in this dialogue, but two stick with me the most. First is Ami’s description of how deeply scarring the October 7 attacks have been on Israelis. The morning of the attacks, as the news reached him in New York, he says he knew simply on the basis of an early report of just 22 dead, that “everything is over…peace in my lifetime, Gaza.” And indeed, Hamas has succeeded in traumatizing Israelis so severely many have no room for empathy for anyone but their own. (People who now only condemn Israel for its “genocidal” response on Gazans are not helping.)

Second is Awwad’s understanding that only a commitment to nonviolence can unlock the Gordian knot of this conflict. “It’s not my humanity that is my weapon in nonviolence approach,” he says. “It’s Ami’s humanity that’s become my weapon. It’s my enemy’s humanity.” He tells the TED audience that he was once a teenager throwing stones at Israeli troops, that he served years in prison and that he and his mother, who was also an imprisoned activist, had to go on a hunger strike for 17 days just to see each other. Then, after he was released as part of the Oslo peace accords, he was wounded by settlers and his brother was killed. But with all that history, he rejects the politics of revenge. “The one who killed my brother and the one who humiliated my mother wanted to bury my humanity in the same grave of my brother,” he says. “I refuse for my humanity to be buried. Why? Because I will never accept a freedom that will be built on other Jewish graves.”

Dear reader, I am tired of the conflict entrepreneurs who insist on polarization and who insist on making the Israel/Palestine binary even more dominant. The last four months here in the United States these people have been rolling like pigs in clover. On the right, AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League are now not just targeting politicians for supposed anti-Israel bias, they’ve created a media monitoring group, the 10/7 Project, which is digging up the old college-era tweets of journalists to attack their current reporting on Gaza. On the left, all kinds of progressive organizations are being riven by caustic and draining internal debates over whether they should take a public position on an issue far from their focus because activists have adopted all-or-nothingism. Planned Parenthood, one of the most important bulwarks for reproductive healthcare in America, has been split by internal fights, Alanna Begianos reports for the Huffington Post. Apparently, there’s only one correct position, according to ARC-Southeast, an abortion fund: “You cannot be Pro-Choice without being Pro-Palestine.” As if Hamas (or Fatah) is pro-choice. They are not.

—Related: Lydia Polgreen offers a fresh take (gift link) on why the “settler colonialism” frame that posits Palestinians as the only “indigenous” people simply doesn’t work or help get us anywhere closer to a resolution of the conflict.

Is the “Resistance” Exhausted?

On the front page of The New York Times today is a Katie Glueck story headlined “Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted.” Her evidence? She talked to nearly two dozen Democratic voters, activists and officials, including a purveyor of “resistance-era apparel” who says “people are tired.” Well, there are only so many “Vote” beanies that anyone can buy, no?

Glueck’s piece is notably thin. She links to the news that Run for Something recently announced about some staff layoffs, though if you click through to cofounder Amanda Litman’s post you’ll see that actually there are plenty of other movement-related jobs looking to be filled. And she cites a Yahoo News poll from last September (!) as proof that Democrats today are supposedly more exhausted by politics than Republicans. That’s all she’s got, and there it is on the front page of the paper of record.

This is what one of my intellectual heroes, the historian Lawrence Goodwyn, called the “view from afar.” Instead doing some actual on-the-ground reporting, Glueck found a few people with stories that fit a neat narrative that anyone could write up from their desk. Too much political coverage is like that—produced cheaply rather than sourced deeply.

If Democratic activists were “exhausted,” then who made 2 million phone calls and knocked on 150,000 doors to help drive Tom Suozzi to a comfortable 8-point win in the New York third congressional district special election last week? Glueck didn’t talk to any volunteers who put time and shoe-leather into that race. But according to The Grassroots Connector, one of my favorite new Substack’s, Suozzi’s open-armed embrace of grassroots activists (not something most Democratic campaigns do) was crucial to his victory. “There’s often a gap between campaigns and external groups,” Susan Wagner, co-founder of Markers for Democracy, recounted. “It’s — ‘you go do your postcards and send us money but frankly, we are not interested in your opinions.’ But with the Suozzi campaign, we established two-way communication that led to synergistic collaboration between activists and campaign organizers.” Most interesting to me, the Suozzi campaign didn’t try to slot volunteers into generic pre-programmed GOTV work but instead worked with existing groups who coordinated their own phone-banks, door-knocking and post-carding efforts.

This is not to get all Panglossian about the relationship between national Democrats and the activist base. There is still a big disconnect. But according to a recent blog post by ActBlue’s Megan Hughes, in 2023 Democratic small dollar donors are not exhausted. They gave nearly 30 million contributions totalling $1.12 billion last year. For me, the most interesting number in in that report is 3,510,090—that’s the number of unique donors giving through the ActBlue platform last year. In 2021, the last off-year period, 4.5 million unique donors gave through ActBlue, so yes, there’s been a drop-off. But if people were truly exhausted and burned out, we wouldn’t see so many still giving so generously.

The other interesting fact that jumps out of ActBlue’s summary is the rising importance of protecting access to abortion and reproductive healthcare to grassroots activists and donors. “Of the 100 entities on our platform that raised at least $50,000 and whose donors gave the highest percentage of their total fundraising through recurring contributions, nearly one-third were abortion funds or reproductive rights organizations,” Hughes writes. And attacks on abortion care at the state level are driving big surges in giving, she notes. The news that the Orange Cheeto favors a national abortion ban will undoubtedly continue to generate a fierce, not exhausted, response.

Deep Thoughts

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Ilyse Hogue have a smart and worrying piece up on MSNBC’s website about spoiler presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr.’s appeal to younger men. Recent polling shows the anti-vaxxer leading well among voters under 45, and as they write, “his appeal to young men especially bears careful scrutiny; Kennedy’s popularity is concentrated in the podcasts and blogs that make up the ‘manosphere’ — a medium he has committed to dominate — at the same time growing evidence indicates young men are gravitating rightward politically and feeling disaffected socially.” I think Petrzela and Hogue are right—as much as you may be tempted to ignore RFK Jr., it’s better to talk to the young men in your world and try to engage them—they may be struggling for their place in the world and in need of a “a counternarrative that acknowledges the frustrations and harnesses the aspirations of young men in a pro-social way. If our attempts to defeat this spoiler end up allowing the icons of the manosphere to chart their path, we will likely watch these young people slide from a fascination with fitness to become followers of fanatics.”

Programming Note

Next week, I’m taking off for Israel/Palestine myself, spending nine days traveling with a delegation organized by American Friends of Peace Now and also visiting with family and friends there. I’ll be out for most of March and taking lots of notes, but I’m not sure if I’ll have much time for posting. Keep calm and carry on!