As we get closer to midterm elections, notice that the establishment “centrist” Democrats have shifted their rhetoric about Israel in an intentionally tricky way. They know that the general population across party lines despises the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and opposes US tax dollars and resources going to genocide, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the US/Israel war against Iran, and the US–Israel “special relationship.” They know that the appearance of being in cahoots with AIPAC will hurt their electoral chances. The problem is that the establishment Democrats still do support those things and still want AIPAC to support their campaigns.
The trick they’ve come up with to try to be all things to all people is to talk big about being opposed not to Zionism or the racist Zionist project of ethnic cleansing and building an exclusionary ethnostate (all ethnostates are fascistic by necessity) but to make a big show of disliking Benjamin Netanyahu. Notice the language they use: they frame it as Netanyahu being bad for Israel’s defense, as if once Netanyahu is voted out we can get back to business as usual. Can they name even a single Israeli politician who has a realistic electoral chance of replacing Netanyahu who is less racist, less authoritarian, less dishonest, or less genocidal than Netanyahu? What Israeli politician do they imagine will be a good leader who stands for progressive values?
They qualify all of their criticism of Netanyahu in the language of concern for a racist genocidal state’s “right to exist.” They always mention October 7 but never mention the ongoing Nakba that started in 1947. Imagine going back to the 19th century and talking about, say, the many US massacres of Indigenous peoples and the many Trails of Tears as being just about Andrew Jackson being bad for the defense of the United States, and then qualifying one’s milquetoast criticism of Jackson with an ardent affirmation of the United States’ right to exist. It isn’t just a policy failure on the Democrats’ part, it’s a deep moral failure. It is the refusal to see Palestinians as human beings deserving of the same freedom, rights, and dignity of all human beings. It is not enough to oppose Netanyahu. We cannot accept anything less than the rejection of the entire dehumanizing, racist, genocidal Zionist project. That’s the bare minimum.
A big reason Kamala Harris failed to mobilize enough support to defeat MAGA is that a significant portion of young people, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and progressives were repulsed by Biden and Harris’s arrogant refusal to do the most bare minimum action of stopping their round-the-clock arming of an ongoing genocide while Israel gleefully and openly committed war crimes: destroying schools, hospitals, water treatment infrastructure, power infrastructure, roads, and the basic means of existence while mass-murdering entire families, children, journalists, and medics, and even burning people alive in tents in refugee camps. To simply come out now during election season with this “I don’t like Netanyahu” rhetoric is weak and won’t fool anyone. If genocide—and the ideology underlying that genocide—is not a red line, there is no red line and there is no morality: certainly no “lesser evil.”
We cannot accept this “I don’t like Netanyahu but I support Israel’s defense” rhetorical strategy from anyone running for office. This is not a radical demand. It’s the most basic level-one kind of humanity that people of any political persuasion should be able to accept without hesitation or equivocation.
Tariq Khan received his PhD in history from UIUC in 2021, and currently is a lecturer in the history of psychology at Yale University. His book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression was published by University of Illinois Press in 2023.