On Voting (for Democrats in 2024)

 

Not surprisingly there is a great deal of ~discourse~ about what those of us who care about Palestine should do in the 2024 election. I am particularly moved to respond to an episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast on this subject, in which the host Sam Adler-Bell discussed the matter with three leading political thinkers and activists of our generation: Astra Taylor, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, and Malcolm Harris, all of whose work I greatly admire.

Nonetheless I found the conversation exasperating, because it seemed to take as its starting point the dichotomy between principle, which would entail voting against Harris/Walz in solidarity with Palestine, versus strategic expediency or hard-headed realism, would lead one to vote for them as a measure against the greater threat of a Trump victory, then continuing to agitate on behalf of Palestine and other causes toward the presumably-friendlier audience of a Democratic presidential administration. That was highlighted by Malcolm’s advocacy for disruptive direct action against the national security state and supply chain as a supposed alternative to voting, which Sam eagerly seized on as a foil because it enabled him to juxtapose that supposedly more radical position with his own pragmatism, and in response to which he could graciously state that we need both.

I don’t consider voting for the Democratic presidential ticket to be strategically sound or expedient. If you saw someone trying to convince a dejected, broke gambler to take out another loan and go back into the casino because it was his moral obligation, you wouldn’t consider that person to be giving strategically sound advice—you would hold them in contempt. If you saw a financial advisor telling someone behind on their rent to take out another payday loan because they have a moral obligation to their landlord, you might think that could be the best of a very bad set of options, but you would be very suspicious of the moral claim. If you heard a career counselor telling someone whose career isn’t going the way they wanted to take out a student loan to attend a coding bootcamp, you would rightly wonder whether the career counselor was being paid by the coding bootcamp to take advantage of someone in a vulnerable position. All of these are better analogies for the present situation vis a vis the 2024 election, because the entity whose aims voting serves, the Democratic Party, is a malevolent one that exists to exploit its voting base on behalf of its plutocratic constituency and needs our votes to continue to be able to do so. It doesn’t care how morally anguished we are, only that it gets what it needs to keep the grift going. The idea that we should serve up to our oppressor what it needs to keep oppressing us is repulsive, and that’s before we even get to Palestine.

The most extreme example of this that I’ve seen wasn’t on the Know Your Enemy podcast, but rather in a twitter thread by David Klion.

 

The argument here—that voting for Harris is strategic for the left because if she loses we will be blamed for it—is battered spouse mindset: the bully must be appeased and pampered at all times, because if anything isn’t exactly to his liking, we will be the ones to pay. This is a marriage counselor giving the advice “things will go better for you if you just give him what he wants.”

If Harris loses, that is on her and the party, as was the case in 2016. Of course they will try to blame us; they always do. We don’t have to play along. If you do, you’re tacitly admitting that we are, in fact, to blame. That she is owed anything by any constituency is the negation of democracy. The reverse is the case, and her plutocratic supporters know it. The dynamic we are seeing play out now stems from the ironclad certainty on Harris and her campaign’s part that her plutocrat backers will bolt to Trump the second they sense any deviation from unconditional support for Israel. They don’t care about “protecting democracy” or whatever slogan is used to rally support from the rest of us. They’ve already given it away, having decided that it’s inconsistent with them getting everything they want. The slogan has the same moral and prudential status as an advertisement that says attending a coding bootcamp will solve your career and financial problems: it exists to keep a predatory regime in power and profit.

The question to be asked in this moment is “who should be in power? Trump? Harris? Or us?” If you can’t get yourself to the third answer because you can’t let go of the security blanket you’ve been clutching since you became eligible to vote, you’re of no use politically. Because the question isn’t whether a Democratic administration can be “moved” by outside pressure, versus a Republican one that can’t. The window of opportunity for that as a mode of political engagement has closed, frittered away over the course of the last administration in exchange for fancy-sounding White House jobs for a select few insiders. Continuing to put faith in it is an admission that we ourselves can’t be trusted with power or otherwise don’t aspire to hold it, which in turn validates the people who use the same claim to excuse their own destructive and self-serving conduct in office when they continually come up with excuses not to do what we politely request.

To conclude on an optimistic note: in the last decade Mexico has seen its political system radically upended. In the presidential election earlier this year all the previous major parties jointly nominated a candidate who received 28% of the vote, as against 60 or so percent for the candidate of the now-dominant party Morena. Its newly-inaugurated president Claudia Sheinbaum, at the head of a congressional supermajority, is promising further increases in the minimum wage, constitutionalizing welfare programs, and a national high speed rail network. And her administration has demonstrated solidarity with Palestine. Right before she took office the outgoing one passed a constitutional amendment to elect the judiciary, against cries of outrage from the federal legal establishment and the US ambassador speaking on behalf of the interests he truly represents: those of the transnational corporate elite. What changed is that a political party put itself before the voters as a radical break with a political order that offered nothing other than the hollowing out of their country. When they did that, democracy won.

What Morena is offering isn’t a radical program—it’s less than what was at stake in the Mexican revolution over 100 years ago, namely egalitarian land redistribution. It’s a program that the Democratic party *should* be able to put forward itself here. But it won’t, and the longer we pretend there’s an opportunity to change that, the more we feed ourselves into its death machine, all while telling ourselves we’re being “strategic.” I for one am done with that. Breaking with the Democrats doesn’t require radical direct action as Malcolm proposes, even if it is morally justified, nor does it need to accompany a radical political program. But it would be a radical challenge to the political system and a decisive break with the past, which is exactly what the electorate is evidently crying out for. The longer we fail to give them that, the more complicit we are with prolonging a political system that exists to exploit them, and the more the constituency we aspire to represent knows that about us.

 

Thoughts on the Hamas Attack, Israel’s Response, and the Discourse in the US

 

It’s taken me a few days to get my thoughts together about the conflict that began this past Saturday with Hamas’s spectacular escape from a blockaded Gaza strip, murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians and military personnel, and the taking of an unprecedented number of hostages. In part that’s because I write best in response to what others have written or said, and in part that’s because my mother and first cousin were in Israel when this conflict broke out and my thoughts were torn between following (and opining) on the news and concern for their safety. They’ve since made it back to the states, and enough discourse has been produced that I can lay out coherent thoughts and reactions.

1.       The images of Palestinian fighters breaking out of their imprisonment were nothing less than inspiring. I include two pictures here, one of the gap they blew in their enclosure, the other of Israeli civilians in Sderot watching and applauding their military’s aerial bombardment of Gaza in 2014, from a safe vantage point where they faced no personal danger (or so they thought). In our society, we routinely celebrate such heroic, violent resistance to violent repression, going all the way back to the Exodus. Doing so now is very far from being beyond the pale.

 

2.       This isn’t news to Israeli leftists or to anti-Zionists in the states, but that image of Israelis applauding the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians held in captivity bespeaks the transformation of Israeli society since the 1990s, in which forces of reaction and Jewish supremacy that were once fringe became mainstream, then dominant, and finally monopolized political power (though not public debate within Israel). In that respect Israel is but one of the countries to have embraced reaction in response to the failures of the post-Cold-War liberal order, so it has contemporary parallels. But it also reflects the long tradition of settler-colonialism: an aggressively acquisitive segment of society, geographically removed from the political core whence it emanates, takes resources by force from an indigenous population while operating with the implied backing of that core, but also resents it and develops a tradition of its own moral superiority and self-justification. Hence you have right-wing Israelis openly mocking their patron, the US Secretary of State, for example, while also parading themselves as an oppressed and besieged minority. Another signature of settler-colonialism is the resurgent fear that their victims will one day take vengeance, which in turn animates and justifies further repression. This is why so many commentators have given voice to the idea that what happened last weekend presaged a Palestinian uprising that would retake the entire land of Israel and restore Palestinian property to its rightful owners. That fear seems to me to be borne of the understanding that the original conquest and dispossession was deeply immoral, an original sin for which there will never be actual absolution, whose consequences can only be held at bay by force. 

     I for one find that posture and the sorts of people who adopt it to be despicable, and I want nothing to do with it. Hence I will resist anyone calling for me to performatively ratify its worldview.

 

3.       The Hamas and allied fighters who escaped Gaza went on to murder civilians indiscriminately and take many hostages for future leverage. Those are acts of terrorism, not “pogroms” as I’ve seen some refer to them. Pogroms are organized private violence carried out by a popular mob against a despised minority, with state backing. They routinely occur in both Israel proper (against African migrant workers) and against Palestinians in the West Bank. Terrorism is spectacular violence undertaken by armed factions of a disempowered minority in order to demonstrate their capability to act, and the impotence to prevent it on the part of an oppressive force previously understood to be invincible. I presume the reason why people would falsely claim that what Hamas carried out was a pogrom is to deflect attention from the many parallels in Jewish history for the oppression Israel (and its external backers) inflict on Palestinians.

 

4.       Hamas justified its action on the grounds that it was protesting the encroachment of Jewish groups on the grounds of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, with the full support of the Israeli state. I interpret this justification as a pointed dig at the Saudi regime, which had been on the verge of reaching a deal to normalize relations with Israel. The Saudis, an indescribably wealthy kleptocracy with absolute power in Saudi Arabia and a great deal of regional influence outside it, present themselves to the rest of the Islamic world as the protectors of Muslim holy sites. And yet here you have a ragtag group of fighters who’ve been kept in captivity for decades under the thumb of a non-Muslim state power with unconditional military backing in the west doing more to protect a Muslim holy site than the Saudis could be bothered to offer, compromised as they are. I’m not Muslim, but I have to believe that’s effective propaganda. One effect will be to make ridiculous the claim on the part of world powers that the Middle East is “under control” following the putting down of the Arab spring.

 

5.       The Hamas incursion was an obvious, massive security failure for the Israeli state and military. Liberals in my family and in the media have said or implied that its cause was the redirection of state resources toward enabling settler violence in the West Bank (the aforementioned pogroms), at the expense of securing the Gazan perimeter. A higher-level way of saying that is that the mission of Israeli security forces has shifted from defense of the Jewish state from outside threats of qualitatively-similar capabilities to carrying out the violent repression that is that state’s policy with respect to people whose lives it controls, but to whom it denies citizenship—i.e., internal security, in defense of apartheid.

 Such regimes aren’t particularly prone to competence or efficiency, because they have a ready-made defense when their inadequacy at carrying out the core tasks of government becomes apparent: they can blame the internal and external other. In combination with the aforementioned transformation of Israeli society, that move is a potent deflection (e.g. calling all Palestinians “terrorists,” which is completely routine in Israel). The weakness of Israel’s domestic opposition is decisive here; instead of opportunistically moving to dethrone the Netanyahu government at a point of extreme weakness, they ran to offer him their support.

It would be appropriate—indeed, necessary—for there to be internal political accountability for that security failure, and there would be, but for the unconditional backing of the United States and other hangers-on in Europe like Germany and Ukraine. This is where the parallels to 9/11 are unmistakable: what was by any account a disaster for the national security establishment will instead be re-purposed as an unparalleled political opportunity, an overwhelming justification for that security establishment to gain more power, and to be put to work repressing internal dissent even more oppressively than they have to date.

 

7.       As of this writing, it looks like Israel will launch a retaliatory ground invasion of Gaza. It has already turned off Gaza’s electricity and barred all shipments of food, water, and medicine. It appears to be singling out ambulances and medical personnel for airstrikes, as though to demonstrate to Palestinians that Israel will face no repercussions from its western backers for committing the most flagrant war crimes. The Israeli defense minister (recall: the same man who postponed the enactment of Netanyahu’s ‘judicial reform’ earlier this year for fear it was impairing military readiness, thereby making himself a hero to liberal Zionists) called the two million people who live there, half of them children, “animals.” (I’ve also seen that remark translated as “beasts.”)

 

If that ground invasion happens, the slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people that has been Israel’s policy since the breakdown of the Oslo process will accelerate. And if that happens, it seems impossible now to imagine that western powers will accept any refugees therefrom, given the state of the politics of immigration and mass displacement throughout the western world.

 

I write all of this now because if and when a mass genocide occurs, there should be no doubt that the same people who self-righteously congratulate themselves for moral superiority entitling them to high positions did nothing when they were in the same positions as historical figures we now deplore for acting similarly in similar circumstances—British colonial officials in Mandatory Palestine, for example, who barred entry to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust for fear their admission  would inflame domestic conflict in the territory they administered. I offer this historical comparison that at the very least it might humble people alive now who succumb to moral judgments about the past or to the idea of historical progress.

 

8.       That in turn means this conflict is part of the horrific tableau of human misery under conditions of climate change that we will see play out repeatedly for the rest of our lifetimes: large populations fleeing unlivable conditions, denied sanctuary and hence exterminated because their presence would be inconvenient, including on a moral level for indicating our own culpability in the conditions leading to their displacement. In that way, the present crisis turns us all into settler-colonialists, a thought I find sickening.

 

9.       All of this explains why it’s deeply depressing to see the public discourse in the US shift so decisively in favor of left-punching, the go-to career move for journalistic mediocrities like Andrew Sullivan and Eric Levitz when circumstances call for holding the powerful to account. After the upsurge of left politics in the 2010s following the abysmal 2000s, that’s been the tendency since 2020 at least, and it’s why any rational part of me has no hope for the future beyond my personal circumstances. Any chance of reversing the horrific tableau currently being enacted worldwide would require a broad popular front, and we are very far away from that and getting farther every day.

 

10.   It’s depressing (or worse) for me as an anti-Zionist American Jew to see liberal Zionists here proclaiming that “just because Israel hasn’t always lived up to its values doesn’t mean we have any less of a commitment to its security.” Netanyahu and his government well understand that that attitude on the part of the American Jewish establishment guarantees the success of their political movement, hence it amounts to a unified political consensus in favor of Netanyahu’s politics, which are in turn genocidal and eliminationist. As long as the American Jewish establishment thinks that Israel’s “true” values aren’t Netanyahu’s values, they play directly into his hands. At this late date, it’s impossible to believe they do so blindly, which in turn means that they’re part of a genocidal and eliminationist political coalition.