Palestine stands for the larger divide in the Democratic party

I was watching a demonstration for Free Palestine outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center this week surrounded by police officers in shorts and on bicycles, the women officers’ ankle tattoos showing, when a delegate in a suit and tie came out and stood taking it in. I asked him what he thought of the demo and he said, “It’s a lot of noise, but we need to give them a space to be heard, and they’ll calm down. We are unified.” Then he set off smartly down the street.

I didn’t see the unity. The spirit of the Democratic convention was Soft Chicago 68. The forces that tore apart the Democrats in 1968 were arrayed in Philadelphia, but the party and the police (the establishment!) were determined to defuse the destructive energies this time round without riots or rage.

Whether or not they succeed we will know in November, of course, but I found it painful to be in Philadelphia, because of the psychic-spiritual chasm before me: two political realities that have very little intercourse with one another and both of which claim to represent the American liberal-left.

In fact the two sides seem to hate one another; they need couples counseling. They would then have to admit that even though one side is truly more popular (Hillary) than the other (Sanders), they need one another and so far the Hillary side has sold out the Sanders side on many issues of great importance to the Sanders side, leaving the Sanders people with the seething passive-aggressive belief that they can blow things up. Ala 1968.

This alienation was sadly visible throughout Philadelphia. The fence around the Wells Fargo Center, where the televised convention was taking place, was like a wall in an ancient city, though it was constructed out of the most modern materials. Outside it was a hazy torchlit under-civilization of hipsters, freelance internet journalists, Bernie bros, bikers, space travelers, pop-up-gas-grillers making Jiffy Pop, and buckskin Johnny-Appleseed types shouldering boxes of clementines. Inside was the scrubbed and adoring scripted public that you saw on television.

And never the twain shall meet. “At 6 we burn the flag,” a skateboarder/activist in dreads informed me and another web reporter.

I found this atmosphere painful because it produced in me (loosely affiliated with the Sanders camp) such an intense range of feelings of guilt and shame and alienation. “Tell the Bernie or Bust people to fuck themselves and the horse they rode in on,” a New York media friend wrote to me when he heard I was at the convention. My mother’s emails about the New York Times giving airtime to the “Hillary haters” and Ralph Nader starting the Iraq war were just as angry.

Black Lives Matter march, with Hillary Clinton poster
Black Lives Matter march, with Hillary Clinton poster

The people outside the convention feel all this hatred and return it. It’s not a happy vibe. Three engaged and attractive youngpeople demonstrated Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy in a way that I can only diminish by attempting to describe it. See picture below:

Bloodstained hands of liberals
Bloodstained hands of liberals

“Demexit,” a sign said, advising Bernie that his revolution would go  on without him. T-shirts argued the interchangeability of Clinton and Donald Trump. The most creative poster was “White Lies Matter” with Clinton’s face.

Trump and Clinton tshirt, sold outside City Hall, Philadelphia
Trump and Clinton tshirt, sold outside City Hall, Philadelphia

My issue – Palestine – is now a big and organic part of this leftwing activity. Excluded from the convention, Palestine was alive in the Philadelphia streets. At a Black Lives Matter demonstration on the south side of City Hall, one speaker after another addressed Palestinian conditions with knowledge and eloquence. Susie Abulhawa explained that colonial expansion is conducted on a religious apartheid basis. Joe Catron read a letter from Mahmoud Kayed, the brother of hunger striker Bilal Kayed. Forgive me for believing that his writing is more important than my own:

My brother Bilal, as some of you know, spent 14 and a half years in Israeli jails, and when he was scheduled to be released on June 13 – on that date, instead, they sent him to jail for six months under the law of administrative detention. This criminal colonial law is used by the occupation state, “Israel,” in order to keep the Palestinian leaders and activists isolated from their families and their loved ones and the masses of their people. Today, there are more than 700 Palestinians in detention under this unjust law.
Bilal Kayed posters at City Hall demonstration, July 26
Bilal Kayed posters at City Hall demonstration, July 26

The kid at the top of this piece was on a lamppost at City Hall 10 feet up connecting Gaza and Ferguson. Code Pink was storming into the Marriott Hotel lobby chanting Not another Nickel Not Another Dime, We Won’t Pay for Israel’s Crimes.

The tragedy of Philadelphia, for me, is that these issues were utterly suppressed by the organizers of the convention with the complete confidence that it would not hurt the Democratic Party in the fall. Former under-secretary-of-state Wendy Sherman’s confession at a Jewish event that Hillary Clinton herself had directed her to stuff the “settlements” and “occupation” language in the platform was exactly analogous to former L.A. Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa’s confession in 2012 that President Obama was “absolutely livid” at the fact that the Jerusalem is Israel’s capital language had not been put in the platform, and the necessity of getting it in. The one achievement of our side from one cycle to the next is that the corruption that is at the root of that demand – Obama and Clinton’s need for Haim Saban’s millions – is now transparent to everyone.

And mainstream people do feel defensive about Palestine. Chris Matthews approached the Code Pink Palestine demonstration on Wednesday in Center City and got in an argument. “You think I’m pro-Israeli, you don’t watch me,” he said (according to songwriter Dave Lippman and another demonstrator who witnessed it). Geraldo Rivera passed a group of Jewish Voice for Peace demonstrators outside City Hall wearing Palestinians Should be Free t-shirts and said unprompted, “I agree with you” (according to Matt Berkman), right after someone had dunked him with a water bottle.

Geraldo Rivera, post dunking at City Hall, Phila, July 26
Geraldo Rivera, post dunking at City Hall, Phila, July 26

Palestine stands for the larger divide in the party. The Sanders folks have been railroaded. Many are angry. They feel that their issues will never be addressed by Clinton, and that she does not stand for anything, apart from a mix of diversity and corporatist neoliberalism and hawkish foreign policy and I’m-not-Trump-ism. That hollowness was surely evident to a lot of mainstream voters who watched the convention, and seems to be reflected in Clinton’s weak poll numbers.

While the folks outside feel that they are the soul of the progressive energetic movement in American political life, and the future of the party, the ones inside regard them as a force to be cabined off and suppressed. They tried to do the same thing with the counterculture 40 years ago, and everyone ended up losing.

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In Congress, how many democratic congressmen and senators agree with this movement on foreign policy or on Wall Street corporatism? A movement that can get a few thousand for the convention when the Bernie people were predicting 100,000 and cannot elect more than 10 congressmen and more than 3 senators is still in its infancy and the frustration that you are advocating for has not done the leg work to call itself betrayed. they ran a candidate in one election and they could not build bridges to the black community in order to achieve victory. (any white movement that claims that it is better for blacks, but infers that they are just too backward to realize it, is an immature movement.) it is an insular movement that does not know how to make allies or build bridges. It is in its infancy. It has not mastered various key skills in politics and thinks, “we are pure and whoever opposes us is corrupt”.

The movement will be happier with a Trump presidency, because it believes in “get worse before gets better” and because then on November 9th their goal will be clear.

MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S NEPHEW AT THE 1896 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO (ADMITTEDLY AN ASIDE, BUT I SPENT HOURS CORRECTING THE OCR OF A VERY POOR PDF) :

“Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials, and Legends, Volume II”, By Lucian Lamar Knight (1914), pages 235-238

CHAPTER XXIX ~ How Mr. Bryan Secured His Nomination in 1896

AS the result of a single speech delivered with marvelous oratorical effect, at an opportune moment, in the famous Chicago convention of 1896, William J. Bryan made himself the standard-hearer of the National Democracy in three separate Presidential campaigns, and shaped the history of the Democratic party in the nation for more than a score of years. But it was due largely to the prompt initiative and to the bugle-toned eloquence of a gifted Georgian that his nomination for the high office of President. in 1890, became an accomplished fact. The distinguished member of the Georgia delegation who presented his name to the convention was the late Judge Henry T. Lewis, of Greensboro, afterwards elevated to a seat on the Supreme Court Bench. Hon. Clark Howell, for years a member of the National Democratic Executive Committee, took a prominent part in the proceedings of this convention; and, in a racy article which he afterwards wrote for his great paper, he tells the story of Bryan’s nomination. Says Hr. Howell:

“The Democratic convention of 1896 was fruitful of dramatic episodes. The second Cleveland administration was drawing to a discredited close when the 1986 convention met. The opponents of Cleveland and the friends of free silver were in control. It was a crusading lot of Democrats who gathered in Chicago that year to nominate a President and to sail the Democratic ship into unknown seas.

Several men were candidates for the nomination, among them ‘Silver’ Dick Bland and ‘Horizontal Bill’ Morrison. The man who snared the nomination had never been thought of in that connection, save by himself and one member of the Georgia delegation. The man who thought he would be nominated, and who was nominated, was, of course, William J. Bryan. The member of the Georgia delegation who had thought of Bryan in connection with the nomination was Hal Lewis, an ardent free silver man, as were all the members of the Georgia delegation, and he had been attracted by some speeches Bryan had made while in Congress. . .

CONTINUED AT – https://www.facebook.com/notes/john-lewis-dickerson/confederate-postal-history-cover-addressed-to-cadet-henry-t-lewis/10209321321206673

“Dem establishment and outsiders need couples counseling if Clinton wants to win”

I do think Clinton wants to win, and she would do whatever she can to make it happen, couples counseling included. However I don’t want Clinton to win, whatever she may do to get it.

I’m very sure Clinton means more war, death & destruction. Her top choices for defense are already in high gear to do war for regime change in Syria, calculating in a potential war against Russia as a side effect.

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/07/29/hillary-clinton-and-her-hawks/

I do think Trump is better for peace, he will get along with Russia and fight ISIS instead of doing war in cooperation with Al Qaeda to reach regime changes wanted by the Israeli lobby.

PHIL- “In fact the two sides seem to hate one another; they need couples counseling.”

No, they need a divorce. It has gone on far too long as it is. Failure to hold these neoliberal warmongers accountable has facilitated both war and neoliberalism.

Thanks for this thoughtful article.

Elizabeth Warren told a tale of two Hillaries in her interview with Bill Moyers several years ago. White House Hillary wanted to help her resist some bank predation. Later, Senator Hillary voted with the banks on the same issue. Which Hillary will show up if she becomes president? Maybe the first Hillary went undercover in the Senate, and means what she says about embracing Sanders’ goals – a new Glass-Steagall and getting money out of politics, for example. Those would be foundation reforms.

If necessary, Hillary can potentially be shamed on these and the Palestinian issue in a way that George W, for example, could not.

It seems to me Matthews, Rivera, and MANY others in the media are ready to dive into the Palestinian issue if they get adequate cover and support. Many in Congress, too.

I agree today is much like the late 60’s, with its strong resistance to the corrupt, war profiteering, financial oligarchy. In the 60’s the oligarchy eventually suppressed the main public dissent. Getting Nixon elected helped a lot.

But the ideas lived, and many people kept them alive in smaller ways. Today the internet is a new and powerful tool for exposing the corruption. There is more widespread awareness, beyond the college campuses. Though the campuses remain centers of research and information, as Bernie’s campaign showed.

And today BOTH Republican and Democratic candidates at least acknowledge the serious problem of a wealthy “elite” rigging the system. And both are at least claiming an intention to take it on. Their base audiences require different types of appeal, pro wrestling for Trump and civility for Hillary. But they will be fighting over who will be worse for the financial oligarchy.

It’s a momentous time. The oligarchy will fight claw and fang to save themselves. Their victims need to fight equally fiercely for their collective liberty.