The Democratic Party is facing a huge problem, and the New York Times is trying to patch it up. Young people and people of color are walking away from Joe Biden over his blank check for Israeli war crimes, just when the party needs them to defeat Trump and “save democracy.”
The latest effort in the Times is an Op-Ed, “Our Fathers Marched With King. Here’s What They Would Say to Activists Today.” Authors Donzaleigh Abernathy and Avi Dresner mourn the “erosion of the Black-Jewish alliance” and urge pro-Palestine activists to find “common ground” with Zionists.
The advice is fatuous because it makes only glancing reference to Israeli war crimes while directing its criticism at protesters: Martin Luther King Jr. was a Zionist, and the protests are antisemitic.
King saw Israel as having risen from the ashes of the Holocaust. He was a supporter of the Jewish state and explicitly linked anti-Zionism to antisemitism…
[W]ithin hours after the [October 7] attack, onlookers immediately turned in a newly dark direction: with an explosion of antisemitism, a celebration (at certain protests) of the Hamas attack rather than a condemnation, a division between communities over a hierarchy of victimization in the region.
We want to bring our fathers’ much-needed messages and methods of love and unity to campuses experiencing turmoil. We want to bring together Zionist and pro-Palestinian demonstrators to find common ground.
“This is the standard New York Times stance — in the entire country, the only Americans who are ever criticized in the newspaper are the pro-Palestinian protestors. Nobody else. It is pseudo liberal hypocrisy,” Donald Johnson wrote, in alerting me to the article.
This plea will fall flat because there is a clear hierarchy of victimization in the Middle East. Israeli Jews have first class rights, including the right to take Palestinian land, and Palestinians have no rights or at best second class apartheid rights, human rights groups agree. The atrocities of October 7 were a reaction to decades of persecution.
Abernathy and Drezner misrepresent the student protesters as proponents of “violence and violent rhetoric” when they are in a great tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience. Since October 7 the world has glimpsed horror upon horror visited on the innocent people of Gaza by a vengeful Israeli government and society – and the only address for outrage in the United States besides a few offices in Congress now under siege by AIPAC are the brave students and activists.
They are as appalled by this war as the young were by the U.S. onslaught in Vietnam in the 60s.
Abernathy and Dresner are anti-Palestinian because they deny Palestinians the tools that the civil rights movement took for granted. Segregated lunch counters and buses were met by civil disobedience and boycott. When Palestinians take up these tools, they are teargassed and shot, and in the U.S. smeared as bigots.
The authors’ underlying fear is the loss of the traditional Democratic coalition of Blacks and Jews, both minority groups with grievances. It is of course a bond of great historical force, and it has survived for decades, though Jews are now one of the wealthiest groups by religion in our society. But today the main Jewish role in the campaign appears to be fundraising to defeat “anti-Israel” candidates. Like the $8 million being poured over Rep. Jamaal Bowman by the Jewish pro-Israel group AIPAC because he used the word genocide.
Biden’s policy is driven by his need not to alienate that Jewish community. The latest dispatch from the official Jewish Council in the Democratic Party is that Joe Biden is more of a Zionist than Trump and his “commitment to defending Israel” is “ironclad”, as Halie Soifer states. Pro-Israel Jews make up as much as 90 percent of the Jewish community, according to another Jewish leader.
Of course, progressives are disappointed by Biden’s failure to do anything to stop the genocide. And mainstream Democrats have adopted various strategies to try and placate them. They’ve said that Biden is doing his utmost. They’ve said that it’s Netanyahu’s fault, and Netanyahu must go – and that he must address a joint session of Congress next month. They’ve said that no one in U.S. politics really cares about the issue.
Or they simply lie to the left, saying that we all care.
The young people won’t find common ground with Zionists so long as Palestinian children are being killed under unimaginable terror day after day. They will stand up for a persecuted people in the best traditions of U.S. idealists. The Democratic Party just doesn’t get it.
The Democratic Party: “Progressive” except for basic Human Rights for the Palestinians.
“urge pro-Palestine activists to find “common ground” with Zionists”
WHAT?
How the hell do they think that even makes any sense?
As for the New York Times, that’s the paper that ignored a pro-Gaza march in January of 400,000 people. Some “paper of record.”
With regard to MLK’s supposed Zionism, the first thing to remember is that he was assassinated less than a year after the Six-day War, when sympathy for Israel (the plucky little nation that had defeated Arab invaders) was at its height and scarcely anything was known about its treatment of Palestinians. Much reliance seems to be placed on a letter “To an Anti-Zionist Friend” that is of dubious authenticity.
Authenticated statements show him to be much more even-handed:
The whole equation will evolve once secular Palestine and secular Zion learn to respect each other and realize the future is in their ability to find a just, fair accommodation.
Instead of focusing on the negativity which is inspired in me by the propagation of the narrative one finds on Mondoweiss, let me share the positive words of Gershon Baskin, in Times of Israel. An open letter to Palestinians: You can break this cycle | Gershon Baskin | The Blogs (timesofisrael.com)