This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor to Barack Obama, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, co-host of Pod Save the World and author, more recently, of All We Say: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches, and Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center, Washington DC. We’ll discuss the Democratic Party’s rapid transformation on Israel-Palestine: What explains it, what are the new terms of debate, how will this shift shape the midterms and the 2028 presidential election. And will Republican politicians follow suit? Please join us.
Cited in Today’s Video
Congressman Jake Auchincloss’s previous statements about military aid to Israel.
B’Tselem declared Isarel an apartheid state in 2021.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane reports on whether the left can continue its winning streak in the Senate race in Michigan.
Ben Linder describes what he saw while traveling with Representative Ro Khanna in the West Bank.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I talked to Abed Abou Shehada, a community organizer from Jaffa, about the tension between power and purity in Palestinian politics.
I talked about Israel-Palestine on the Comedy Cellar’s podcast, Live from the Table.
On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
The shift in the Democratic Party on Israel is so rapid that I think we really haven’t encountered anything like this in my lifetime in terms of the rapidity of a shift in what is considered mainstream political opinion within a party since the debate about gay marriage, you know. That’s the last debate that I think shifted as rapidly as this one. You’ll remember that Barack Obama was elected publicly opposing gay marriage, which was the position of virtually everyone in the Democratic Party. And virtually by the end of the Obama administration, an overwhelming number of Democrats are supporting it, and even the Republicans are throwing in the towel.
And now we’re seeing a kind of version of this on Israel-Palestine, where the condition of ending U.S. military aid, which even a year or two ago was a very marginal position among elected Democrats, really only the furthest left fringe of elected Democrats held this position. Now you see that it’s become the mainstream Democratic position, that roughly half the Democrats in the House voted for this amendment by Thomas Massey that would have ended all U.S. security assistance to Israel. And the Massey amendment was so broad that probably if you had a somewhat more narrowly tailored, carefully written amendment, it would have gotten more than even half of these votes. And again, this was a position that probably would have just had a handful of Democratic votes just a year or two ago.
I think part of the reason this shift is happening so rapidly is that, like the issue of gay marriage, this is an issue on which there was already a very large gap between what many Democratic politicians believe privately and what they would say publicly. And so, in a way, people could switch so fast because you didn’t really need to convince them of the position. They just needed to be convinced that they could publicly articulate views that they probably had already privately held. And once they realized that actually you could be against AIPAC and still win politically, that it might even be advantageous to be on that position, I think that helps to explain this stampede.
And this is the way politics is supposed to work, right? Most politicians are not conviction politicians in the sense that they take positions that put their political careers at risk because they believe it’s the right thing to do. They follow the wind politically, and that’s why activists focus on shifting their incentives and recognizing that politicians are usually going to come last after there’s been a shift in public opinion and at the grassroots.
So, on the one hand, this is normal. This is the way it’s supposed to work. And certainly, there should be a recognition that, it’s great when people get to moving in the right direction morally, even if they come late to this position. On the other hand, I think there is something frustrating about the fact that you now have all of these people getting all of this attention, not just politicians, by the way, but also foreign policy officials and even public commentators because lots and lots of people, not just politicians, respond when they see that there is a kind of shift in the public mood.
And so, you see people getting a lot of attention, and often a lot of applause, for taking positions that they didn’t hold a little while ago. And the people who actually did hold those positions a few years ago, when they were marginal positions, who were kind of prematurely correct, right, those people were marginalized, often slandered, sometimes even lost their jobs or even criminalized for holding positions that now other people are jumping on board and getting a lot of credit for. And oftentimes the people who were right early on when it was much harder to take that position are often ignored, and sometimes they were even slandered by the very people who now take the positions that they used to hold.
So, Rahm Emanuel is getting all of this attention, right, for saying now that there should be US pressure on Israel. But how about taking a look at Rashida Tlaib, who was trashed by her own party again and again and again, or Ilhan Omar, trashed by her own party again and again and again for taking some of the same positions now that Rahm Emanuel has gotten to later on.
I’m not saying that Rahm Emanuel and Rashida Tlaib agree on everything. They don’t. But the basic idea that the U.S. should seriously curtail military aid to Israel. Stop being complicit in Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life. This was at the core of the argument that’s been made for years by groups like Jewish Wars for Peace, right? And many of these people in the Gaza encampment, the same people who were basically, who were trashed as not just out of the mainstream, but in the case of the pro-Palestinian protesters, often described as radicals, as zealots, as even antisemitic.
And I just think it would be really, really wonderful if some of these people who have now adopted these newfound positions were willing to take a moment and turn and look at some of the people who held those views earlier, and say, you know what? You deserve credit for that, right? And maybe even, I’m sorry that it took me so long to take this view, right? I want to make clear: I’m not suggesting that I am one of those people who was right right at the beginning. I wasn’t. I myself am someone who came to a lot of the views that I currently hold really, really late.
And I remember years ago doing a debate with Yousef Munayyar, the Palestinian public intellectual and writer Yousef Munayyar, who’s a friend. And at that point, I was arguing directly opposing Yousef’s argument for equality under the law. I was still a believer in a Jewish state. And now I’ve come to the view that Yusuf had. And Yusuf has been gracious enough to respond to the fact that it took me quite a long time to get to the position that he already held.
But I think what’s important for us to remember is that while it’s great when people come to views later on, people who came to those views early, that we should take a moment to recognize people who were prematurely, quote-unquote, prematurely correct, and think about why it is that their voices still remain so marginal. Why is it that it would still be so hard for a Democrat to come along and say, you know what, I think Rashida Tlaib should be considered for a very prominent position in foreign policy in the next Democratic administration, right? Secretary of State. National Security Advisor. People would think that’s a crazy idea. Why is it a crazy idea? Rashida Tlaib was saying these things years before Rahm Emanuel and many of the other Democrats. Maybe that suggests that she has some insight, some wisdom that these people only came too much later, and that we should listen more carefully to her on a range of issues.
There’s one particular member of Congress who caught my eye because I’ve followed his career a little bit. He’s a congressman from Massachusetts, a young congressman named Jake Auchinloss. And Jake Auchinloss voted for the Massey Amendment to cut off all U.S. military aid, which is remarkable, because as recently as 2021, he had said in an interview that he was powerfully supportive of unconditional military aid to Israel. In 2020, he said it was a red line for him to have unconditional military support for Israel. Now, it’s good that Jake Auchinloss has changed his position, and maybe he might say, well, you know, I’ve changed because circumstances have changed. Of course, 2020 and 2021 were before the genocide in Gaza, but Benjamin Netanyahu had still been in power for a very, very long time by 2020, 2021. In January of 2021 was actually the month where B’Tselem, Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations, declared that Israel was practicing apartheid, right?
So, I think Jake Auchinloss is the kind of person. He’s a young, ambitious politician. It would be much easier for him to just kind of move on and move to a more politically safe position, and I really think that we should ask people like him to step back for a moment, and reflect on what they have learned, what they got wrong, and maybe to say something to the people who were right long before they were, especially Palestinian Americans, who so often are marginalized and slandered in this debate, and say something along the lines of:
I’m sorry I only came to understand this now. In the future, I will try to listen more carefully to the things that you say. We may not always agree. But I will listen more carefully to the people whose views ended up being correct. And I will recognize that voices from the political margins are often voices that can see realities that people who are in the political center, who are closer to political power, can’t. And I will honor the costs that people who were on the political margins paid for saying things early on that now are being widely adopted by people who have much bigger platforms and much bigger voices than them.
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