Ahead of the Democratic Party’s coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee at their convention in Chicago this week, “Not Another Bomb” advocates in more than 80 cities, including Seattle, gathered Sunday to call on Harris to publicly support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel. As many Jewish, Palestinian, and allied speakers argued at Cal Anderson Park on Sunday, the threat of former President Donald Trump’s victory over Harris does not constitute a platform. Harris must earn their votes.
“We want to work with Harris, we want to support Harris,” said Palestinian-American and Seattle resident David McBale. “But not for nothing.”
Harris has inherited the same ire from pro-Palestine advocates as her predecessor, President Joe Biden, who some activists refer to as “Genocide Joe.” Biden, with Harris by his side, has vocally supported the largest aggression from Israel on Palestine since the Nakba in 1948. Israel Defense Forces (IDF), bolstered with US tax dollars, have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians since Hamas’ deadly Oct 7 attack on Israel, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Critics of Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide have marched in cities across the nation, pitched tents on university lawns, blocked highways, interrupted political fundraisers, and withheld their votes in the Democratic primary to pressure Biden into brokering a permanent ceasefire. More than 700,000 people across the country voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic Presidential Primary, earning the movement 30 delegates at the DNC out of the available 4,000. Almost 90,000 voters in Washington joined the protest vote in the March primary, securing 9.8% of the vote and two of the state’s 111 delegates for “uncommitted.”
The Biden-Harris administration finally unveiled and endorsed a three-stage ceasefire proposal at the end of May, but the administration has failed to institute an arms embargo to actually stifle the carnage in Gaza.
Now that Harris will take over as the presidential nominee, the meme-able, wine-aunt gloss on her seems to have distracted some voters from her culpability in the ongoing, US-funded genocide. But for those at the Not Another Bomb rally, the demands remain the same.
Jewish educator Whitney Kahn said they are happy that Biden stepped down and that Harris seems to have a better chance of beating Trump, but the movement must keep the pressure up.
“Genocide cannot be the lesser of two evils,” Kahn said. “We cannot defeat fascism here by supporting it abroad.”
Harris has called for a ceasefire and spoken much more sympathetically of the victims in Palestine than Biden, but her national security adviser said she will not support an arms embargo, which advocates say is key to stopping the genocide.
At the rally Sunday, Palestinian-American poet and writer Tariq Ra’ouf said Harris’s call for a ceasefire is not enough. They have lost almost a dozen family members in Israel’s genocide—a cousin shot and killed by the IDF for collecting rainwater, another cousin shot and killed as he tried to return home to his severely injured brother, and another cousin, just 12 years old, sniped in the head by the IDF, Ra’ouf recounted Sunday.
“So, forgive me if I don’t take your promises of a ceasefire seriously,” Ra’ouf said at the rally. “For nearly a year, almost every single day has been filled with a sharp pain in my heart, and my face has gone blue from holding my breath so much every time a message I send to my cousin doesn’t get delivered, fearing I’ll lose her.”
Ra’ouf said, “No campaign promise will give me my family members back, but an arms embargo might let me keep the ones I still have.”
According to polling from Data for Progress, about 83% of Democratic voters support a ceasefire in Gaza. A plurality of voters, 37%, also want the US to decrease funding to Israel’s military, according to the same poll. If Democrats want to save our Democracy from Trump, as they’ve said, MacBale suggests Harris take up these popular positions.
Some critics of the pro-Palestine pressure campaign on Harris argue that Gaza is not the only issue on the ballot. They argue Harris should already have their support because she will advance a far more progressive domestic agenda than Trump, who represents a threat to reproductive health, trans rights, and the democratic institution as a whole.
But speakers at the Sunday rally argue that the genocide in Gaza is intrinsically linked to domestic policy. Every dollar the US spends on weapons for Israel could go toward education, health care, housing, or any number of domestic issues.
Anti-zionist Jewish educator Whitney sings a list of things the US could pay for instead of bombs. pic.twitter.com/mxMPJoBhbX
— Hannah Krieg (@hannahkrieg) August 18, 2024
Pro-Palestine advocates expect more actions across the country to pressure Harris during the four-day DNC. Thousands of protesters gathered in Chicago this morning to demand Harris break from Biden on Israel policies. While an embargo did not make it on the Democratic platform unveiled last night, MacBale said there’s still time for Harris to do the moral thing to win the election.
@48 “Did I get all of that right?”
Very little of it as it were. Anyone interested in the history of the region would be well advised to read from an independent source like, for example, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine Reading from the British Mandate section on should suffice
“Blood and Soil” is far shorter to type than “settler-colonist yada yada yada,”
For the record, almost all of the information I provide that documents Israeli illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian territories, war crimes, crimes against humanity, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and likely genocide comes from the United Nations, and well known human rights organizations. Nobody should be surprised to see a pro-Israel propagandist like Tensorna attempt to smear his critics by any means possible, however feeble they may seem.
@47 “Arabs who live in the mideast want nothing to do with them”
Demonstrably false. The Arab street cares deeply about Palestinians. Even local dictators have to pay attention to the pro-Palestinians feelings of their people.
I tried to explain to you that there is no greater issue than having one’s humanity denied. I cannot think of anything more racist than denying someone’s humanity by not caring whether they die under the bombs you provide.
@52: You’ve made it clear you regard Palestinian Arabs as the only legitimate residents of the land in question. Starting from that point of view, then by definition, nothing the Israelis could do on that land could ever possibly be legal, right, or just. Your “settler-colonialist” theory, which you also apply, but only to the Israelis (because, in your view, their very presence on the land is wrong) results in nothing more than the right-wing “Blood and Soil” mythology, making the Palestinian Arabs sole legitimate residents of the land.
You’ve somehow picked a region which has been continuously inhabited for ~6,000 years by all manner of persons, ruled by many empires over that time, and you’ve designated one small modern group as the sole legitimate residents. Of course you’re not going to provide justification for that designation, because when you fail, your ‘argument’ fails as well. (That this is all inherently racist is also not something you’ll admit, of course.)
Oh, and referring to Wikipedia as an “independent source” is truly priceless.
@53: “The Arab street cares deeply about Palestinians.”
I believe the point there is that Arab governments most certainly do not. For example, Jordan ruled what we now call the West Bank for twenty years, with no effort to create an independent Palestinian state there.
“…racist than denying someone’s humanity by not caring whether they die…”
So Hamas is racist against Palestinians? (Well, technically, Sinwar told his fellow leaders they DO care about Palestinian deaths in Gaza — they want a lot more of them, so folks like you will attribute those deaths to the Israelis, not to Hamas’ policy of attacking Israel whilst using Gaza’s civilians as human shields.)
@50 The facts that you deny exist are contained in the YouGov poll results: a significant fraction of swing state voters claim that the Gaza issue matters. The polling organization, YouGov, is a major polling outfit. You do not like the results of the poll so you claim that it is faulty without providing any evidence that it is so. Your spin won’t work, give it up.
tensora:
US Law prohibits the countries who receive its military aid from using those arms to violate international law. Secretary of State Blinken has to sign off on Israeli assurances.
So yes, they could stop it all today by 12:00 noon, which is why they must be pressured to the maximum limit to do so.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/19/israeli-forces-conduct-gaza
@54 “You’ve made it clear you regard Palestinian Arabs as the only legitimate residents of the land in question”
You are, once again, lying. I made clear, several times already over the last couple of mos, the population that legitimately owned the land before Zionist mass immigration started, included ~10% Palestinian Jews, a likely smaller fraction of Palestinian Christians, while the balance and overwhelming majority was indeed Arabs. By the time, partition was declared in the late 40’s, Jews were ~30% of the pop thanks to immigration yet were unfairly handed over half the land, and most of the arable land. Palestinians Arabs had been revolting for decades already against takeover of the land by immigrant Jews and refused the deal mostly concocted by Western powers. After decades of more conflicts over land, all of Palestine is now illegally occupied by Israel, a classic colonial settler state in violation of international law including the 1948 partition declaration, that is trying to impose facts on the ground via expulsion/killing of Palestinian Arabs. Facts established by the UN, not the nazis as you and the Israel lobby like to pretend.
I simply decided that however many empires ruled over Palestine in the past, I wasn’t going to claim that somehow whoever ruled it over 2000 years ago (not 4000 or 1000 years ago, god forbid) had a right to that land. I decided that nobody in their right mind would want to reproduce land ownership as it existed millennia ago without generating endless conflicts the world over (yes, Christian Zionists are that crazy). Now, I am not personally advocating throwing out people who immigrated 100 years ago (or 50 for that matter), I am saying that Palestinians haven’t gotten a fair shake (to put it mildly) from the international community. That has to change in major ways and it will surely not be compatible with having an expanding ethno-state like Israel.
“Nobody
should be
surprised to
see a pro-Israel
propagandist like
Tensorna attempt to
smear his critics by any
means possible, however
feeble they may seem.” fucking
B.I.N.G.O THANK YOU
averagebob. your
work Here is
both Heroic
and Much
Needed.
fucking
Kudos.
We CAN
End this
Madness.
let’s begin
with bibi
nutnya-
hoo’s
Israel.
@57: We’ve been over this already. This situation wasn’t organic: “…the population that legitimately owned the land before Zionist mass immigration started, included ~10% Palestinian Jews, a likely smaller fraction of Palestinian Christians, while the balance and overwhelming majority was indeed Arabs.”
In what would become the final decades of the Ottoman Empire’s rule over Palestine, it imposed ever-more restrictions on Jews. It limited how much land they could own, it limited their travel, it even limited how long Jews could stay in Jerusalem on pilgrimage. (https://ismi.emory.edu/documents/Readings/Mandel,%20Neville%20J.%20Ottoman%20Policy.pdf ) This was not done out of any tender concern for Palestinian Arabs, but purely because the Ottoman Empire believed, rightly or wrongly, that restricting Jews from Palestine would strengthen the Empire’s control over Palestine. So you’re taking as a valid starting point a very low point in numbers of Jewish residents and land owners in Palestine, a low point intentionally created and enforced by a foreign imperial power, for the purposes of keeping Palestine under control of a foreign empire. Does that sound like a defensible basis for modern policy?
After the British Empire seized control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, it discontinued the Ottoman Empire’s restrictive policy against Jews. You’re right, by the time of UN Partition, “Palestinians Arabs had been revolting for decades already against takeover of the land by immigrant Jews,” but is that really admirable? Many white Americans of this period were dead-set against Black Americans residing in white neighborhoods, and especially buying land in them. Again, this does not sound like a great basis for a just and fair land-use policy. The British Empire allowed Jews to buy land, where the Ottoman Empire had not. Should there have been restrictions upon Jews buying land in Palestine, just as there were restrictions upon Black Americans buying land and houses in white American neighborhoods?
“…in violation of international law including the 1948 partition declaration,”
I absolutely love how you sailed right past the armed Arab revolt against the UN’s 1948 Partition vote, then spun right around and declared that same Partition as valid. The Palestinian Arabs, backed by Arab countries, chose war. (Whether they were justified in doing so is another matter.) When you choose war, you choose to accept the consequences of war, and the major consequence of Palestinian Arabs choosing war in 1948 was those Arabs losing control over most of the land the UN had intended for them to have. The Arab armies which had illegally invaded Palestine, creating huge numbers of refugees, refused to help those refugees re-settle in their own countries’ lands. (As mentioned above, Jordan wound up in control of the West Bank. It did nothing to help create a Palestinian state there, even though that is what the UN had envisioned. Apparently, depriving Palestinian Arabs of land is just fine and dandy if other Arabs do it.) The result has been a permanent state of one people living under the nonconsensual control of another, with it going about as well as such arrangements historically do, which is to say very, very badly for the ruled people. David Ben-Gurion himself worried this would lead to modern Israel becoming an “apartheid state,” and he wasn’t wrong to so worry.
“I am saying that Palestinians haven’t gotten a fair shake (to put it mildly) from the international community.”
Heck, they haven’t gotten much care from other Arab countries, either. It’s really convenient for those regimes to have created an everlasting issue from which to deflect attention from their own internal problems, isn’t it?
@47- you may be right about Arab-Americans sitting out in swing states. I hope not. But again, how many non-swing states would be back in play for the GOP if Biden did put an arms embargo in place? That is the other side of the electoral calculation.
“There were more reporters than protesters,” observed Bennett Weiss. He was there selling Gaza-related buttons, including one that, he said, describes himself: “Self-Ambivalent Jew Against Zionism.”
…
As the smaller-than-expected group assembled in Union Park near the United Center, hundreds of signs reading “Victory to the Palestinian Resistance” were left stacked and unused. (They were the work of the “Freedom Road Socialist Organization.”) The protesters had their street puppets and their giant bloody hands. They denounced “Killer Kamala” along with Genocide Joe.
…
Only 100 people attended a protest march on the DNC by the “Poor People’s Army,” and that was after they delayed the start by 90 minutes. With Green Party candidate Jill Stein in attendance, their announced intention was to make “citizen’s arrests” of Democrats attending the convention and to charge them with “crimes against humanity.”
https://archive.ph/Ix73g
complicity
oftimes has it’s
complications war
crimes just ain’t Cool
aiding and abetting
can be Expensive
& bibi’s playing
Us for fools.
One
apropos
comment
from the nyt:
@Joseph I’m really tired of Liberals telling progressives to shut up when they point out a bad thing that is happening, only for them to turn around years later and agree that the thing was bad and that they opposed it all along (but oops, it’s too late to do anything about it now…)
I support the protesters, because without people making their criticisms heard, nothing would ever change or improve.
Abolitionists were lynched, Suffragettes were mocked and arrested, labor activists were beaten in the streets [and murdered] and civil rights protesters faced all of the above.
Civil minded centrists mocked all of these people in their day, but in the end, it was the protesters who where proven to be right.
AF; MA
tonnes more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/18/us/politics/dnc-democrats-israel-gaza.html#commentsContainer
history
repeats.
which side
will you be on
@59 Nothing you have said convinced me that Jews have a right to the land in Palestine. Being distantly related to people who lived there millennia ago doesn’t trump the right of those who have occupied that land for as long as it is useful to think about. Whether Jews were prevented to immigrate there by the Ottoman empire doesn’t change any of the above.
Comparing immigrant Jews in Palestine to the descendants of slaves in North America to justify stealing land from its occupants is ludicrous, and not worthy of any elaboration.
“When you choose war, you choose to accept the consequences of war”
Among children perhaps but in the modern world annexing land conquered during warfare and ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants is against international law and a war crime no matter who and for what reason warfare started. Needless to say that committing genocide is a crime against humanity.
You are really scraping the bottom of the barrel but we established a long time ago that little will stop you from spewing pro-Israel propaganda.
@60 I don’t know whether any non-swing states would be put back in contention by an arm embargo. You’d have to be more specific.
@65- I don’t know either. Would it cost enough votes in, say, New York to be of concern? Surely someone has done the math or the polling on this. But I am seriously wondering whether an arms embargo would cost the Dems enough support to lose the election?
@64: ” Nothing you have said convinced me that Jews have a right to the land in Palestine.”
Nothing ever will.
“…who have occupied that land for as long as it is useful to think about.”
And how do you define, “as long as it is useful to think about”? You don’t. You picked the British Empire’s seizure of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire as your starting point, because it allowed you to imply that Jews were naturally a minority in Palestine before the British started allowing them in. You thus defined the current conflict in terms you wanted — a foreign minority of Jews, imported by an Imperial policy, imposed on the locals (Palestinian Arabs), rendering (in your mind) the Israelis as “settler-colonists,” etc.
With your neat explanation in place, you could invoke History to “show” what you wanted. You never checked to see if any history prior to the British seizure of Palestine could explain why there were so few Jews in their ancestral homeland. And yes, indeed there is: an anti-Jewish exclusionist policy, imposed by a foreign imperial power, to keep imperial control over Palestine. Your entire argument rests upon the very basis you claim to despise. Your moral position here cannot exceed the foreign imperial diktats upon which you ignorantly based it.
Informed of this, you simply retreat into denial: “Whether Jews were prevented to immigrate there by the Ottoman empire doesn’t change any of the above.” Suddenly, imperial exclusionary land-use policies don’t even merit your consideration, much less the criticism you blast at anything else you happen not to like. You’ve picked your arbitrary date in history, and nothing, not even the history which immediately preceded and enabled it, matters.
Then you continue with your denial, this time about how fighting new, undesirable neighbors is somehow virtuous when Palestinian Arabs did it, but not so much when white Americans did it (and at the very same time). Watching your supposedly superior morality simply crumble, hammered by fact after fact after historical fact, must be painful for you. Next time, do some real research. Don’t just stop at the point when you’ve (apparently) justified your predetermined conclusions. (Oh, and BTW: not all Black Americans are descended from slaves, but white Americans discriminated against all Black Americans. History, why does it always do this to you?)
“Among children perhaps…”
So, how’s Tsar Paul IV doing in Petrograd? Austro-Hungarian Empire still cranking out Archdukes? Have you visited Strasbourg in Germany? How are Saipan and Guam doing under Imperial Japanese rule? In the adult world, choosing war means choosing the consequences of war. The Palestinian Arabs violently rejected the UN plan for Palestine, and tried to push the Jews into the sea. Their current state is one consequence of their choosing that war.
You may have the luxury of ignoring all of the above history. The persons upon whom you’re trying to impose your views do not, and you should not expect them to behave as if they do. Grow up.