Israel-Gaza: The Reasonable Left vs the #AlAqsaFlood Left

To stop a genocide, would you enable a different genocide against another people?

Yesterday, several dozen leaders of progressive organizations descended on Capitol Hill to demonstrate against the Biden Administration’s planned $14 billion package of military aid to Israel. There was strategic thinking behind this move. As the organizers put it in their sign-on planning document, “The vote on military aid is probably our best chance to make our voices effective. While it would be close to impossible to block additional aid indefinitely, the package has already been delayed, and serious discussion is underway about adding conditions to the aid. Dramatic action by leaders of the very organizations that lead the policy campaigns and get out the vote in the communities that Democrats claim as their base could make a difference in bringing a permanent ceasefire and ultimately a lasting peace that the people of Gaza so badly need.”

Who showed up? According to a partial list on the PeopleDemand.org site, the “80+” participants included a number of activists who have long been visible and vocal on Israel/Palestine, like Linda Sarsour of MPower Change, Sandra Tamari of the Adalah Justice Project, Ahmad Abunaid of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Dr. Maha Hilal of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, Audrey Sasson of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Stefanie Fox of Jewish Voice for Peace Action. Most of the leaders who took part were there in their personal capacity only, but several organizations did co-sponsor the event, including the ones referenced above plus the Center for Popular Democracy, the People’s Tech Project, Florida Rising, the New Justice Project MN, TakeAction Minnesota, the Athena Coalition, Resource Generation, and Media Justice, according to quotes on the PeopleDemand site. At the action, people in the Capitol Rotunda chanted “Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go.” Many decried Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. Some got arrested. As best as I can tell, Hamas’s actions on October 7 were not brought up.

What does stopping aid to Israel have to do with the mission of these groups? In some cases, the answer is obvious. For example, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights has a long-term campaign to stop the $3.8 billion in annual aid to Israel, which it says enables “the Israeli military to kill Palestinians, destroy their homes, and steal their native land.” Some showed up because their mission is immigrant rights, and there are real signs the White House will give big concessions to the GOP on “border security” to get its aid package to Israel and Ukraine passed. But others were clearly stretching their mandates, offering a word salad of reasons for doing so. Ryan Gerety, the director of the Athena Coalition, an alliance of dozens of groups focused on challenging the power of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, said on the PeopleDemand site, “In this country, we have the resources and ingenuity to make sure everyone can have a full and happy life. That is what our government should be focused on everyday. Instead, the administration and some members of Congress are wanting to pour money into needless border security and military support for the Israeli government, as it wages a barbaric and genocidal war on Gaza. This spending package takes an unbearable toll on human life in the United States, on the border, and in Palestine. The stakes could not be higher.”

What’s notable to me about this event is who didn’t answer the PeopleDemand call to action. None of the leaders of the major organizations on the American liberal-left, who collectively move tens of millions of dollars and people into electoral and issue activism every election cycle, were there. MoveOn, Indivisible, the Working Families Party…I can make a long list of groups with big memberships and/or electoral budgets who clearly wanted nothing to do with a call to stop all aid to Israel. (MoveOn, Indivisible and the WFP are all on the record supporting a bilateral ceasefire and humanitarian aid for Gaza, by the way; WFP also opposes more unconditional aid to Israel.)

What’s going on? In the view of Saqib Bhatti and Anna Lefer Kuhn, two leaders of the PeopleDemand effort, many progressive organization leaders “are afraid to use their organizational influence and political capital” to speak out on Gaza because a) it’s not their focus issue and they don’t feel they have the standing or expertise needed; b) they have working relationships with elected officials that they are nervous about jeopardizing; and c) they are worried about the “risk of being accused of antisemitism and possibly losing funding.” Bhatti and Kuhn say these fears are overstated. Polls show overwhelming support for a ceasefire, they argue. “Collective action and acts of civil resistance are helping shift the Overton window around the conflict. This public pressure is already forcing some elected officials to rethink their positions.” And their strongest argument is the simplest one: “preventing genocide” shouldn’t be controversial. “If [your] organization’s mission includes human rights, justice, and equality, how can we sit idly by as the bombs rain down on Gaza?”

The answer, I think, is more complicated. Many progressive leaders are clearly troubled by how Israel has conducted its assault on Gaza. But many are also, I think correctly, not sure they want to align themselves with the Hamas-adjacent left. The waters on the #FreePalestine side of American activism are quite murky, and national groups that have their eyes focused on 2024 have good reasons to wade in as carefully as they can.

First, there clearly is a portion of the left in America that objectively supports Hamas, which is why I call it “Hamas-adjacent.” They’re not sending the group money or other forms of aid, but they are definitely carrying water for it. Consider first the “Shut it Down for Palestine” coalition, one of the primary vehicles for the wave of national protests, walkouts, strikes and other actions now underway to press for a “Free Palestine.” It is made up of the following groups: Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, ANSWER Coalition, The People’s Forum, International People’s Assembly, Al-Awda NY and the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC)- NJ. Their primary demands are an immediate ceasefire, cutting all aid to Israel and lifting of the siege on Gaza.

Several of these groups backed the October 8^th “All Out for Gaza” rally in Times Square that DSA-NYC infamously got into hot water for promoting, because it included speakers praising the Oct 7 attack. Of these groups, several still defend that Oct 8 rally, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, The People’s Forum, Al-Awda, and the ANSWER coalition. A statement on the People’s Forum website that these groups have all signed praises the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack—Hamas’s name for its October 7 assault--lauding the “Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza [that] initiated an unprecedented liberation struggle,” and defending “their fundamental right to resist an illegal occupation, break out of their concentration camp, and defy the cruelty of the sixteen-year Zionist blockade.” The “true source of violence” they say, is “the colonial project of Zionism that has laid itself atop the body of Palestine.” This is very “Hamas-adjacent,” do you disagree?

Or take the Democratic Socialists of America. Its international committee recently held a webinar titled “From the River to the Sea: Palestinian Resistance and the Threat of Regional War” where speakers spoke of the Israeli civilian hostages as “prisoners of war” (not “so-called hostages”), claimed that “the vast majority of those captured by the resistance are reservists and active duty soldiers,” and stated that “October 7th showcased the power of the Palestinian resistance” and “demonstrated that there could be a future where Zionism and imperialism are defeated and expelled from the region.”

Or take the US Palestinian Community Network, another lead organization in the #FreePalestine sphere, whose “Stop Gaza Genocide” toolkit heavily promotes the “Shut it Down for Palestine” network’s actions. Some have said that the phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is just a call for the nonviolent liberation of all Palestinians and guaranteeing them equal rights alongside Israelis. But posters from USPCN like this one, which uplift the hashtag #AlAqsaFlood, suggest a much darker interpretation. (The image below comes from a #CeaseFireNow rally in Illinois that US Campaign for Palestinian Rights tweeted about on Sunday.)

To be vulgar about it for a second, perhaps one reason many big progressive organization leaders aren’t rushing to embrace the #FreePalestine left with its glib invocations of Israeli genocide and radical critiques of US foreign policy is that they aren’t sure if then they’ll be standing alongside people who are comfortable with genocidal acts against Israeli Jews. To stop a genocide, would you enable a different genocide against another people who have also experienced genocide in the past?

As my friend Charles Lenchner, an Israeli-American who founded the Shministim in 1987, a movement of Israeli high-schoolers who were conscientious objectors, and who spent some time in prison as a refusenik, put it recently, there are actually two different factions on the left in America trying to respond to the events of the last two months. One is trying to figure out how to present a reasonable agenda to Congress and the public centered on achieving, at a minimum, another lengthy pause in the war (call it whatever you want as long as it allows a surge of humanitarian relief to Gazan civilians and includes more hostage releases) plus increased pressure on the Israeli government to change direction by implementing existing-but-never-used conditions on US aid or imposing stronger ones, or even cutting or stopping aid. You can find this left centered around J Street or the Progressive Israel Network or, arguably, If Not Now. Meanwhile, some of the most active and visible people at the grassroots level—and online--are insisting that colonized people have the right to resist “by any means necessary,” declaring that all Israelis are settlers (not civilians) and promoting things like #AlAqsaFlood.

“This is a trap and an opportunity,” Charles says. “The trap is ignoring it. Doing so makes the pro-Palestinian or pro-peace voice seem muddled, hypocritical, and conflicted about mass murder.” He adds, sardonically, that “conflicted is not the worst position, it's right above 'enthusiastic supporter.'” But he argues that “The opportunity is for more mainstream progressive voices to call out, shame, and engage this contradiction. To push the marginal voices to the margins. I suspect the reason they don't do this is that, first, there's a thread linking the Al-Qqsa fan club folks with the most mainstream progressive political ideas dominant on college campuses, online, and the young people in general, and second, the urgency of ending Israel's murderous campaign.”

This choice, to withhold judgment and ignore the ideological rot spreading in parts of the activist left, makes some practical sense to me. But to go back to a point made by a number of prominent voices back in October, like Eric Levitz and Michelle Goldberg, if we don’t fight for a “decent left” now, one that at a minimum rejects genocidal violence by any actor, where will we be in the future?

What Could Have Been?

One of the most interesting sections of Ryan Grim’s valuable new book The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution comes when he takes a detour away from his main focus on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues on Capitol Hill, and extends some of the reporting he originally did for the Intercept on the way that progressive organizations were being paralyzed from within by intense staff rebellions over their social justice bonafides. A few weeks ago, Grim published an excerpt of that material on Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias’s Substack newsletter, so I won’t recount it all here. But what it shows, in greater detail than I’ve seen anywhere until now, is how an internal challenge over “white supremacy” at the Sunrise Movement, perhaps the most successful of the new movement groups of the last decade, kneecapped its leaders’ effectiveness at exactly the moment when it had the most capacity to shape Biden’s signature initiative on climate, which became the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s another warning about the perils inside progressive organizations today, where maximalism is often the only position deemed “good enough.”

Evan Weber, one of Sunrise’s top leaders, told Grim, “The few weeks leading up to the rollout of the American Jobs Plan—a key moment, peak Sunrise access with the White House—I was spending over fifty percent of my time dealing with internal strife, trying to prevent our organization from im- or exploding, when I could have been extracting as much policy concessions as possible from the legislative document that would end up forming the basis for the reconciliation package, basically, and the infrastructure bill,” said Weber. “This meant that somebody else would be making inroads where Weber had been attempting them,” Grim adds. “People like to sneer and cringe at access politics and things like that, but for the people who sneer and cringe at that, we’re the only group they even halfway like,” Weber told him. “And with the access that we had at that time, if I wasn’t there in those conversations, fighting for environmental justice, fighting for workers’ rights, fighting for the most ambitious climate plan possible, it was gonna be left to the old stodgy legacy greens or business interests or whomever else.”

It wasn’t just about him, Weber worried as the process dragged on. “I was representing millions of young people—it was my job to represent the voices, aspirations, and hopes of millions of young people in those conversations in the White House,” he reflected. “There were definitely meetings that I missed, that I had to show up to some other internal shit for instead,” Weber told me. “Most of the work doesn’t happen in the big group meetings that are formal and on the record. Most of the work actually happens through one-on-one meetings and the relationships. And so, you have to be proactive about that. At every moment that I wasn’t doing that, I was letting other people have that access instead, or just letting the White House do their own thing.” Instead, Weber was facilitating Zoom sessions to sort through his organization’s culture. “That’s what the political director of arguably, somehow, the most powerful climate organization in the country—certainly the most powerful climate organization on the left—was doing in the lead-up to the rollout of that piece of legislation. It’s hard to look back and be, like, ‘I shouldn’t have been doing that.’ I certainly wish I wasn’t doing that.” 

Other Reading

—Robert Kuttner, “Is AIPAC Good for the Jews,” The American Prospect.

—Seyla Benhabib, “An Open Letter to My Friends Who Signed ‘Philosophy for Palestine,” Medium

—Matt Duss, “Ukraine and Israel and the Two Joe Bidens,” The New Republic.

—Ilana Debare: “The Israel-Gaza Tragedy: Why I’ve Been Silent; Why I’m Now Speaking,” Substack.

—More in Common, “Changing Attitudes on Antisemitism in America, Before and After 10/7,” December 2023.

—Hailey Fuchs and Daniel Lippman, “Inside the Rebirth of Mothership Strategies,” Politico.

—What happens when you ask ChatGPT to make a Democratic fundraising email scarier and scarier.

End Times

Greatest mayor of the greatest city in the world, amirite?

It’s time for the holiday break. Go read a book, or two, or just take some time to decompress. That’s what I’ll be doing for the next two weeks. See you in the new year!