1/ This whole eruption around Ocasio-Cortez and the two-state question has got me thinking. There's a real stalemate in the Israel/Palestine discussion in this country, and in some ways, the one-state v. two-state debate plays into it.
2/ It leads us to debate these maximalist questions, over which we have absolutely no leverage right now, and meanwhile, we leave the terrain of Israel's existing human rights abuses almost completely protected from critique by mainstream politicians.
3/ This week, the Knesset votes for a law that essentially allows communities in Israel to declare themselves to be for Jews only. Think of the radical hay you could make, as an up and coming politician, by saying:
4/ You know what? This sounds an awful lot like the one of the deepest, darkest stains on American history. Jim Crow Jerusalem is not what this country should be supporting. (Remember all the connections the anti-apartheid movement in the US, which was initiated and led by
5/ African Americans and the Civil Rights Movement, made between Jim Crow and apartheid in South Africa? Why not do a version of the same here?)
6/ To my knowledge, not a single Democratic politician has spoken against this. That is a great opportunity for our up and coming political leftists running for office. Can you imagine the waves, the positive waves, they could make, speaking out against these
7/ eminently intelligible evils, ones that ordinary Americans (who aren't hardcore Zionists or Republicans) can easily understand and oppose. But not a single Democrat is saying a word about it.
8/ And if a new politician did say a word, just like that: she'd get at one of the basic goals of BDS, which is that the question of Palestine is not just about Gaza and the West Bank; it's also very much about the rampant discrimination against Palestinians within Israel itself.
9/ Or this: Right now the US is providing extensive funding to a terrible human rights abuser. In the 1980s, we—because it was the left that did this—generated a massive social movement oriented around the position that the US should cut all military aid to El Salvador because
10/ of its systematic violations of human rights. Gerry Studds—remember him?—introduced legislation to that effect. In 1990, Christopher Fucking Dodd passed legislation in the Senate cutting of all military aid to El Salvador because six priests had been murdered by the military.
11/ Israel murders innocents in Gaza. We just saw this. And unlike El Salvador, where the regime was fighting an armed guerrilla insurgency, supported by the Soviet Union, at the height of the second Cold War, the bulk of the Palestinian resistance is non-violent.
12/ These political formations—knee-jerk support for Israel—have a kind of false sense of inevitability about them. We think, oh, that was El Salvador, that was different, this is Israel. Bullshit. We—the left—made El Salvador an issue. And in my lifetime, I've seen the Israel
13/ issue become both more sacrosanct in official US politics (remember, George H.W. Bush was willing to cut off loans to Israel) and now more contestable at the grassroots.
14/ As we see this Pittsburgh Spring turn into a Bronx Summer, let's think of creative and concrete demands we can make, demands that will capture the imagination of ordinary citizens, and that will break this absurd silence and stalemate around Palestine. #End
