Democrats to Palestinians: Drop dead

Michael F. Brown Power Suits 27 August 2024

Two protesters stand alongside a banner that says Killer Kamala Do Not Come for our votes outside the DNC in Chicago, Illinois

Vice President Kamala Harris rejected protesters’ demand outside the Democratic National Convention that the US stop arming Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Carlos Berríos Polanco SIPA USA

The Democrats’ ignore-the-Gaza-genocide gala concluded last week in Chicago with presidential nominee Kamala Harris insisting that as “commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

She was determined to show voters she can be more bellicose than any Republican candidate. Democratic delegates were enthralled. Indeed, as The Electronic Intifada livestream discussed last week, the party platform brags about how willing the Democrats are to bomb other countries, in contrast to Donald Trump’s supposed “weakness.”

Harris will make President Joe Biden’s genocide in Gaza – in which she is already fully complicit – her own chartreuse genocide.

“I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” she said.

This means she has no intention to cut off the American weapons that the Israeli military is using to cause so much carnage in Gaza, where more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children.

Simultaneously, however, she endeavored to pull back in those voters previously unwilling to look the other way at genocide in order to defeat the fascist Donald Trump. Democrats have touted for months, if not years, both a ceasefire and the realization of Palestinians’ “right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination,” as she put it. Harris thinks empty words will suffice.

She saw no need to mention dispossession, apartheid or occupation. Many delegates didn’t want to hear about these realities funded, supported and justified by Democrats and Republicans alike or be told about Palestinian casualties.

Democrats may have simplified matters for some voters tempted to be pulled in by the excitement around the presidential nomination of the first woman of color of a major political party, however, when they refused to allow a Palestinian speaker to address the Democratic National Convention. That denial provided a sharp jolt of reality as to how anti-Palestinian the party remains – at least for those for whom the Democratic administration’s full support of this genocide was not proof enough.
Liberal commentators Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer both addressed the rejection.

Serwer wrote: “At a convention that showcased the racial, religious, ethnic and even ideological diversity of the Democratic Party and the United States, no room could be found for a Palestinian speaker.”

Coates – at least previously a part-time admirer of Zionism, Israel’s racist state ideology – also ripped the decision but went deeper in a passage worth quoting at length as it speaks to a growing awareness of the discriminatory nature of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians:

Israel and its defenders often claim that it is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ But what I saw was an ethnocracy, where half the people are first-class citizens, and the other half are something less. And this is a system sponsored and endorsed by the United States of America. The endorsement is not contradictory. For most of its history, America too was an ethnocracy in democratic clothing. The ostensible triumph over that old system, which we call Jim Crow, is one of the most uplifting stories America tells itself, one that has been repeatedly invoked at the DNC. How odd I find it that a people, presently brutalized by a similar system, whose relatives are being erased by that system’s wanton violence, are also being erased from the stage.

But Ali Abunimah, director of this publication, also raises a strong point about not seeking crumbs or token recognition from Democrats arming an apartheid military for war crimes and genocide. Stopping the genocide is the vital goal, not securing a convention speaker.

There is a stark recognition among many anti-genocide protesters that Democrats are responsible for the worst of what humans can do to fellow humans. Democrats will now be associated with genocide for a whole generation of young people and protesters.

Democrats walked all over delegates trying to get more public recognition of the horrors faced by Palestinians. There is, however, much greater anger at what the Democratic leadership is doing to Palestinians – knee-deep in genocide as Biden and Harris are – than Democrats negotiating with the Uncommitted Movement encountered in Chicago.

“For a Palestinian to address the Democrats in the middle of the Democrat Holocaust in Gaza, is like a Jew addressing the Nazi Party in the middle of the Nazi Holocaust,” Abunimah wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

He argued that demanding a Palestinian speak at the DNC – and thus burnish the Democrats’ false image as the party of peace, love and diversity – was a diversion from the only demand that matters: ending the flow of weapons to Israel from the Democratic administration in the White House.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders disappointed Gaza genocide protesters with vague calls for a “ceasefire” that were devoid of any call for action from their own ruling party to bring it about: namely, cutting off the weapons supply to Israel.

Ocasio-Cortez claimed falsely that Harris is “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.” This sort of language has been heard for months about the Biden administration, which continues to use the cover of endless “ceasefire negotiations” in which Washington acts as Israel’s lawyer to buy time for Israel to continue its extermination campaign in Gaza.

As Kareem Elrefai writes in The Nation, the Harris campaign quickly highlighted the Ocasio-Cortez segment to boost their fortunes with voters seized with the American-boosted Israeli destruction in Gaza.

Sanders, for his part, limited himself to saying, “We must end this horrific war in Gaza. Bring home the hostages and demand an immediate ceasefire” – again pointedly failing to demand that Biden use his power right now to stop the slaughter.
Oddly, it was Biden acknowledging the presence of demonstrators outside the Chicago venue, as Elrefai notes. “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” Biden said. “A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”

Biden, of course, failed to note that it is his administration sending the weapons killing and maiming tens of thousands of Palestinians.

If there is a sharp decline in how the Democratic Party is viewed by previously supportive constituencies and a deterioration in the region (expanding the conflict dramatically from Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen and Iran) in the months ahead, the convention with its dismissal of Palestinians and the Harris speech with its hypercharged militarism and backing of apartheid Israel may well be seen as the turning point. These anti-Palestinian positions aren’t new, but they’re far more visible today within the Democratic Party – and to more people.

Genocide-touting board member

The Israel lobby group Democratic Majority for Israel, whose board member Archie Gottesman promoted genocide in Gaza even before the current one, extolled the Democrats’ convention and thrilled to Harris’ being “a strong pro-Israel Democrat.”

In June 2018, before DMFI was even founded, Gottesman tweeted: “Gaza is full of monsters. Time to burn the whole place.” She remained on the board with a contextualized and unconvincing apology when the comment came to light.

Also on hand in Chicago was Zioness, an organization that tries to market Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism and violence as progressive. Gottesman previously served on its board of directors.

Zioness hosted a panel event on the sidelines of the DNC smearing anti-genocide protests on campuses as anti-Semitic. Jewish Insider’s coverage did not mention anti-Palestinian racism on these campuses and the harsh restrictions being issued by universities across the country to suppress protests against the genocide.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, and Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, addressed the audience.

There was no mention that Elisha Wiesel, a member of the Zioness board of directors, falsely told CNN in an interview that Hamas “baked babies in ovens.”

This is atrocity propaganda intended to incite rage against Palestinians. It’s doing a terrifyingly good job with tens of thousands of Palestinian children dead, maimed and traumatized following nearly 11 months of Democratic Party-armed Israeli genocide stretching from the north to the south of the killing field that is the Gaza Strip.

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Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.