"Diaspora politics run wild"

Will polarizers and rejectionists continue to drive the day, or will we listen to what people on the ground say they need in order to strengthen the path toward co-existence?

Jan 30, 2024

We are at an inflection point. The deaths of three American soldiers in Jordan this past weekend from a drone launched by an Iran-backed militia in Iraq has triggered pressure on President Biden from hawks in Congress to retaliate by striking Iran directly. The proxy war between the US and Iran that has been playing out since Hamas launched its October 7 attack on Israel could now tip into a direct confrontation. At the same time, in Israel, some combination of battle stalemate, growing domestic protests, American pressure, and international criticism has led Prime Minister Netanyahu to offer a de-facto multi-week stop in the war centered on a major deal on a hostage-prisoner exchange—the first major shift in his “all-out war on Hamas” strategy.

It’s very strange to see how these developments are being responded to here in America. Who is speaking out most loudly against escalating the shadow war with Iran? Far-right isolationist lunatics like Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy, rather than anyone of note on the left. Who is silent on the prospect of an Israel-Hamas deal (which, by the way, would help de-escalate the tensions with Iran)? Why, the very people who have been out in the streets demanding a cease-fire now. (I found no mention of the pending deal from either If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace on their websites or Twitter/X feeds.)

If you think the world has gone topsy-turvy, join the club. As I’ve been writing here since October 7, what’s missing from this picture is a broad-based peace movement focused on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a just compromise. Instead, what we have is an ideologically-driven pro-Palestine movement that exults in delegitimizing Israel, signaling its virtue and objectively helping Hamas and Iran.

There is a different path possible. As Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ former foreign policy advisor, is arguing, the US should seek an updated “modus vivendi” with Iran. After all, both countries have a big interest in not going to war. At the same time, he adds, that requires more effort to revitalize the two-state solution and a shift in America’s unconditional support for Israel’s Gaza war. A broad peace movement could help make the case for such an approach, and you can find glimmers of that in statements from Win Without War and J Street. But such groups face an uphill battle, when so much of the oxygen on the progressive side has been taken by people who want a “Free Palestine” from the river to the sea, not a secure Israel living side-by-side with a secure Palestine.

What follows is a fresh illustration of the problem American progressives are dealing with. I wouldn’t bother traveling so far down this rabbit hole if it weren’t clear to me that major groups on the left are right now wrestling with a very hard strategic question as the 2024 election heats up and the Israel/Palestine issue reverberates in many intra-party battles.

BDS vs Standing Together

Last week, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), one of the founding members of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, put out a statement that encapsulates quite nicely how the “Pro-Palestine” left in the West has become more interested in winning ideological arguments and signaling its virtue than actually working to change the reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine.

The statement condemned the Jewish-Arab solidarity group Standing Together (which I wrote about back in November), urging “conscientious people” around the world to shun it, claiming that it is an “Israeli normalization outfit that seeks to distract from and whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Opposition to “normalization,” to the BDS movement, means rejecting any project that brings together Israelis and Palestinians without the Israeli side publicly recognizing the Palestinians rights to their homeland, and without explicitly resisting “the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”

What is Standing Together’s supposed sin? PACBI is offended because Standing Together believes “a shared home can be achieved for Palestinians and Israelis if they refuse ‘hatred and choose empathy’.” The horror! Standing Together is also verboten because while it “pays lip service” to ending the occupation, it doesn’t call out “Israel’s 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid” and instead supposedly treats both sides as equally responsible for today’s oppressive reality.

Instead, PACBI calls normalization “a form of violence committed against our people, whereby the Israeli state attempts to colonize our minds, and make occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism seem normal.” It’s positively Orwellian to describe peaceful gatherings jointly led by the Israelis and Palestinians of Standing Together, who by the way have been in the lead of efforts inside Israel to demand an end to the Gaza war, as “a form of violence” but I best be careful here lest my words cause physical damage to someone even more. The statement continues, “In response, anti-normalization is an important tactic that calls on people to refuse to participate in projects, events, or activities that promote the normalcy of the Israeli state as a legitimate entity or that would create a parity in the relationship between oppressor and oppressed.”

(Parenthetically, it’s worth noting that the anti-normalization position is a perfect mirror of the far-right Israeli settlement movement, whose leaders insist that Palestine and the Palestinian people are themselves not legitimate entities and that they should simply accept their fate as second-class residents of Greater Israel or leave, and whose leaders flexed their muscles this weekend, holding a big conference in Jerusalem demanding the Jewish resettlement of Gaza and the expulsion of its Palestinians. This is not the only way that the pro-Palestine far-left and the pro-Israel far-right copy and reinforce each other.)

What prompted the attack on Standing Together? PACBI apparently noticed that the group has struck a chord among “conscientious people” in the West, which is indeed true. So it accuses it of “serving a key role in Israel’s international propaganda strategy at this time” and calls out “the group’s sudden efforts and visibility abroad to get the world to engage with complicit Israeli narratives at this very moment when Israel is on trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza and when Palestinians are calling for apartheid Israel’s isolation.”

Leaving aside the slander of Standing Together, whose leaders actually do not shy away from words like apartheid or colonizer, but in fact prefer not to use them for how they disconnect listeners from productive engagement, I’m highlighting this statement because it helps illuminate a critical choice facing conscientious people here in America: As the crisis in Israel/Palestine now has your attention, do you want to devote your energies toward strengthening the most doctrinaire forces in the debate, who believe the path to change is through ever-increasing polarization and rejectionism? Or do you want to devote your energies toward listening to what Israelis and Palestinians on the ground say they need in order to strengthen the path toward co-existence?

On Twitter/X, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian-American from Gaza City who describes himself as a pragmatic realist who is pro-Palestine and anti-Hamas, called the PACBI statement, “puzzling & truly short-sighted.” He added, “It is also symptomatic of how far-left radical activists have & continue to sabotage, undermine, and weaken pro-Palestine activism with unrealistic, maximalist, aggressive, and, at times, even prejudiced positions, goals, and proclamations.”

Alkhatib notes that he was once a supporter of BDS, but that as time went on, he saw it become a “vehicle for the ideological expression of leftist dogmas and radical beliefs,” namely “dismantling Israel, eradicating Zionism, eliminating colonialism, and exceptionally maximalist, unrealistic, ineffective, and detrimental slogans and objectives.” He adds, “BDS only allowed for or promoted engagement with anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis, who are a minority that wields limited to no power. But any attempt to engage with ‘mainstream’ Israelis or Zionists becomes a supposedly shameful act of ‘normalization’ of Israel.”

The most critical point Alkhatib makes is the one that conscientious people should take most seriously: engagement with Israeli and Jewish audiences is vital for solving the problems of occupation and settlement. “Palestinian liberation will occur partly due to cooperation with Israelis, not despite them,” he says. “Palestinian freedom and self-determination will not take place if the long game is to dismantle and deconstruct Israel, Zionism etc., etc.”

My friend Charles Lenchner, the former Israeli draft resister who I’ve quoted here before, says that the BDS network is a “good example of diaspora politics run wild, detached from the main things happening back home.” Standing Together represents a real threat to BDS, because it has a genuine Palestinian leadership cohort alongside its Israeli Jewish leaders. “They are unwelcome competition,” he adds. “What they do, how they operate, the clear and strategic politics, threaten the Palestinian maximalists, the hard left. If a truly united Israeli, Jewish + Palestinian leadership cohort emerged that folks in the US who are in favor of Palestinian liberation could be with, it would be a serious challenge to the ability of the crazies to insist on and demand obedience from other parts of the left.”

So here’s the question facing Democratic progressives: In the interest of blocking efforts by the pro-Israel right, which is very much in alliance with MAGA election deniers, to punish progressive office-holders for being too critical of Israel, should electoral liberals make common cause with the pro-Palestine left? Very specifically, should they look the other way when groups like Justice Democrats, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment (BDS) movement insist on hammering hard on the “Zionist entity” for its pursuit of apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide—even as such language choices clearly fracture the broad Democratic coalition? Or should they push back and demand a less polarizing, more constructive approach to building the power that could match that of the pro-Israel right? As I’ve written here before, we need a broad peace movement far more than we need a pro-Palestine vanguard. Which is, again, why we need to listen to what Standing Together is asking for, rather than what its ideological foes seek.

P.S. Here is a statement from Standing Together’s Palestinian leadership, in response to the BDS attack, that was just released today. They call PACBI’s statement “infuriating.”

Doing the Cease-Fire Shuffle

One of the talking points that has been raised almost continuously since the Gaza war escalated with Israel’s land invasion is that the American public, including a majority of Democrats, wants an immediate cease-fire. In early December, Data for Progress came out with a poll showing that roughly three-in-four Democrats wants a permanent ceasefire, a sign of a serious disconnect with President Biden’s one-sided support for Israel.

There are two problems with polls like these. First, they don’t quite prove what advocates claim, which is that the this will be a top issue for many voters. As I noted a few weeks ago, despite the horrible news from the region, only one percent of Americans said that the Israel/Palestine conflict was a top concern for them in December, according to the New York Times/Siena poll. Four percent of people under the age of 30 said so, just a slightly larger cohort.

The second problem is that no one agrees on what exactly people are saying when they endorse the word “ceasefire.” The Data for Progress poll actually asks, “Do you support or oppose the US calling for a permanent cease-fire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza?” which adds even more ambiguity. These words all sound good—who would be against de-escalating violence? And when respondents were asked a follow-up question that first defined a permanent ceasefire as requiring a deal between Hamas and Israel to end the violence and release all the hostages, and also told them that Hamas would stay in power with such an agreement, support among all likely voters as well as Democrats dropped ten points.

It turns out that cease-fire can mean a variety of things. In the early days of the war, people who were calling for an immediate ceasefire like Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) only called for a cessation of hostilities and the provision of aid to Palestinians in Gaza, which was too one-sided in my opinion. Surely, the taking and holding of civilian hostages is a continuous act of war, is it not? So if the word cease-fire were to have a full meaning, then it would include insisting that those hostages be released unconditionally, no? Why not say so, unless you didn’t think so?

Now, even Jewish Voice for Peace in its call for a ceasefire refers to the need to free the hostages (even if it can't bear to mention Hamas by name). Of the 65 Member of Congress who have called for a ceasefire, only 20 have done so by endorsing Bush’s House resolution. I haven't looked at all of the others (see this page for a running list) but my sense is the other 45 all include the demand that the hostages be released.

As I write this, it appears that American, Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari negotiators are close to finalizing a deal that will involve the staged release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli, greater provision of humanitarian aid, and a multi-week what-the-heck-shall-we-call-it in the war between Israel and Hamas. If we are lucky, such a deal, including the stoppage of hostilities, will finally trigger mass protests that will topple Bibi from power – something Israelis won’t do in the middle of a hot war -- and allow a more centrist Israeli leadership to take charge. Which then opens more possibilities, including perhaps a “grand bargain” involving Saudi Arabia trading recognition of Israel for a commitment to a two-state solution. (Which at least one recent poll found would be supported by a narrow majority of Israels.)

If that happens, it will be a moment to rejoice in the shift of the winds. And mark my words—the people who will despair at this turning will be a strange-bedfellow coalition of rejectionists: Israeli rightwingers who want to depopulate and resettle Gaza and who will claim that the war was not fought vigorously enough, plus Western leftists committed to the rejectionist narrative of opposing settler-colonialism and who want to delegitimize Israel and keep it isolated. Should hostilities wane, their books will stop selling and fewer people will come to their events. Conflict entrepreneurs hate peace. But the rest of us need this shift to begin.

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