These past days of hearing Trumpworld roll out the President-elect’s expected nominations for positions in the foreign policy/defense space have been harrowing indeed. As human-rights expert Craig Mokhiber remarked about the choice of far-right bully Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the UN:
Other countries send diplomats to serve as UN Ambassadors. The US always sends AIPAC-approved Israel shills. And, this time, one who is also an abrasive, bigoted, far-right clown…
The expected nominations of uber-Zionist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, latter-day “crusade” supporter Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and so on have been equally disturbing. (One possible bright spot was the report of “First Buddy” Elon Musk having met with Iran’s ambassador to the UN, back on Monday.)
Trump is an unstable, idiosyncratic decision-maker. Although most of his prospective nominations are extremely concerning, we still have zero idea of how he will actually wield his power once he returns to the White House January 20. During his first term in office he fairly frequently over-ruled his own cabinet members, or axed them at short notice. It’s also good to recall the number of times he has railed against foreign wars and the costs of overseas bases, etc.
But still, there is currently plenty of cause for concern– in his future conduct of foreign affairs as well as of domestic affairs.
Meantime, though, there is also a huge amount to be concerned about regarding the remaining two months of Joe Biden’s presidency, especially when we review the record of his nearly four years in office to date. Craig Mokhiber once again nailed it when, talking to the Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday about the prospects for the Trump-47 presidency, he said,
there’s plenty to fear. But to pretend that we’ve just gone from a paradise into hell is ignoring the fact that we’ve just gone from hell into another room in hell.
Prime case in point: The Biden administration’s announcement on Tuesday that, at the end of Biden’s previously declared “30-day deadline” for Israel to increase the flow of aid trucks into Gaza to at least 350 trucks/day, or face real consequences, “we at this time have not made an assessment that… the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law.”
That, after UN-OCHA had reported that the aid trucks Israel had allowed into Gaza November 1-9 added up to just 74 trucks/day— many of which, according to media reports, never made it to their destinations.
Since Trump’s electoral victory first became clear, in the late evening of Election Day itself, there has been very widespread grief– and in many instances also shocked disbelief– in Democratic Party circles. I realize I probably should have acknowledged that pro-Dem grief in the corporate-ish newsletter I sent out last weekend, in which I explored both the grief that pro-Palestine people here in the United States have experienced so deeply over the past 13 months (and also before that), and the grief that low-income and otherwise marginalized people in this country have experienced over many years now that had alienated so many of them from the “bi-coastal elites” whom they saw– not wholly wrongly– as dominating the Democratic Party.
Basically, I was writing that the grief/alienation that pro-Palestine people have felt prevented many of them (of us) from voting for VP Harris, while the grief/alienation of many other marginalized/low-income Americans led them to vote for Trump. And the voting figures showed that. Rather than Trump suddenly having won a lot more votes nationwide than he had in 2020, Harris more clearly lost the election because she attracted significantly fewer voters on November 5 than Biden had won in 2020.
So all those of us who, primarily because of the Biden-Harris record on Palestine, declined to vote for her this time, made a clear impact. There are plenty of reports that this position was adopted not only by large portions of the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities but also by many other voters– including younger voters of all races/ethnicities and at least a few older ones like myself. So yes, I still completely own the decision I made two weeks ago, to vote for the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein.
Because genocide.
And because VP Harris never distanced herself in any meaningful way from the president who has continued to give his wholehearted support to Israel’s genocide(s) in Gaza and elsewhere.
Because Harris and her campaign took the obscene decision to ban any Palestinian voices from speaking at the Democratic National Convention (while she welcomed to her receptions there numerous DNC delegates who crudely and cruelly refused even to hear the names being read out of of those whom Israel had butchered in Gaza.)
Because Harris herself insisted on continuing maniacally to project and perform “joy”, while refusing even to start to acknowledge the deep grief that so many people in the progressive part of her previous constituency were laboring under.
So to all those Dems who did vote for Kamala, I now say: I hear and certainly understand the grief you’ve felt since November 5. And welcome to the Grief Party. We clearly all need to work closely together over the months and years ahead!
But I can only do this with a clear heart if you (a) finally and truly acknowledge the ocean of Gaza-genocide-spurred grief that so many of us have been laboring under for the past 13 months, and (b) commit to working hard and in good faith alongside all of us who’re campaigning for a speedy and rights-respecting end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
For far too long now, people in the Democratic Party have asked Palestinian-rights activists to “step back”, to keep away from the podium, to place our deep concerns over the fate of the entire societies of Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon to one side… so that we would not impede the election of the supposedly more “progressive” candidate. in national elections.
Inside what passes for a “progressive” movement here in the United States, this demand that Palestinian-rights activists always demurely go to the back of the bus has a long and sordid history. For many years now, it has been dubbed the “Progressive Except for Palestine” phenomenon: PEP. What happened on November 5 showed that PEP’s time is now– finally!– over. In a world of Israel’s open (often gleeful) pursuit of genocide in Gaza, there can no longer be a “Palestine Exception” for any American who wants to be called “progressive.” The era of PEP is dead.
After November 5, 2024, any citizen of the United States who wants to present themself as progressive needs to openly acknowledge and respect the full equal humanity of Palestinians as people, and the Palestinian nation’s full gamut of rights as underscored repeatedly by the most authoritative bodies of the United Nations.
Those rights only start with the right to the physical (and cultural) existence of the Palestinian society in Gaza as guaranteed by the international Genocide Convention. They also include– as was underlined by the UN General Assembly as recently as last September:
- the right to a complete end to the military occupation that Israel has exercised since 1967 over the lands of Gaza,and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), including the removal of all the illegal Jewish-Israeli settlers from those occupied lands and Israel’s payment of reparations to the Palestinians for the harms visited on them during that 57-year-long occupation,
- full respect of the rights of those Palestinians made refugees during the war of 1947-49, and
- the Palestinian people’s final ability to exercise the right of self-determination that has been guaranteed to it for many decades.
But let’s start with ending this hideous genocide. Let’s work with any party that we can to end the multi-pronged support– military, financial, political– that our government continues to give to Israel’s cruel actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
Joe Biden could have made a start on this, on Tuesday, the day that his “30-day deadline” expired. He chose not to. Even though he was no long constrained by any supposed “electoral concerns” from enacting the halt on U.S. arms supplies to Israel that U.S. law clearly mandates in cases of the recipient impeding humanitarian aid, he chose not to do so. His decision to flout U.S. law in this way was apparently completely his own decision…
OMG. Where is any clear criticism from within the Democratic Party of that latest Biden decision?? All I see is Sens. Sanders, Welch, and Merkley having called in late Sept. for their own ban on the transfer of some weapons systems to Israel.
I first came to this country in early 1982. I had a fellowship at Harvard to write my first book, which was a political study of the PLO. I was not intending to stay, far less become a citizen. That came later. So there I was in Summer 1982, sitting in Cambridge, Mass., collating the notes I had gathered during my years as a journalist in Beirut and pulling the materials together into coherent book chapters… And while I was doing that, the Israeli military invaded Lebanon (under the flimsiest of pretexts) and barreled its way to the hills surrounding Beirut from where, by mid-July, their gunners and their air force rained misery and death down on all the portions of Beirut where I had until recently lived with my (first) husband and our young children, and our neighbors and friends.
I kept going because of the need to keep the kids’ lives in Cambridge as normal as possible and because of the urgency of my work on the book. Oftentimes I could not stop crying; and when I had to go out and do errands or take the kids to their nursery school, or go to the Harvard Library, I would tie a black ribbon round my arm so passers-by would think I was dealing with some deep personal grief.
And then, there on television was Jane Fonda, icon of the American left and until recently a fierce anti-war activist. But now she was on the t.v. screens disporting herself as an “entertainer” and supporter for those very same Israeli military units bombing the shit out of my friends and neighborhoods in Beirut. I guess you could say that was my introduction to this American phenomenon of “Progressive Except for Palestine.”
At that time, and for many, many years that followed, the only national political figures in the United States who dared question the AIPAC-enforced pro-Israeli orthodoxy or to suggest that, perhaps, Palestinians were people too, were liberal Republicans. People like Paul Findley or Charles (‘Mac’) Matthias. The Dems were almost to a man (and woman), squarely in the pocket– or more accurately, the pocketbook– of various Zionist interests.
Luckily things started to change over the decades after 1982, and to a certain degree they’ve been changing even more speedily in recent years. “Liberal” Republicans in the Findley/Matthias mold became extinct– or were chased out of office by pro-Israel money– many years ago. And in the Democratic Party we’ve had the emergence of “the Squad” and a few fairly decent senators like Sanders (not strictly speaking a Dem), along with his Democratic allies like Welch and Merkley.
But still, the demands that Palestinians go to the back of the bus have remained frequent, and broad. Just recently, I even heard one person who otherwise supported Palestinian rights say that “because the Jewish people still had such terrible post-Holocaust inter-generational trauma to deal with, and because processing those kinds of trauma is always a lengthy process”… therefore this person was still unable to support any speedy actions to end the genocide in Gaza.
Yup, even the campaign to end the genocide needed to move to the back of the bus.
Um, what about the layers and layers of inter-generational trauma that Palestinians have suffered over the past century and the daily, hourly trauma that all their generations are suffering in Gaza right now?? How does anyone expect that to play out? (Maybe Palestinians are not as fully human as Jews? Really?)
… Anyway, this is just to say that:
- There is grief a-plenty swirling round within the U.S. citizenry right now. There’s the grief of Democratic supporters at the loss of their candidate. The grief that Palestinian-rights activists have been having deal with on such a vast scale for the past 13 months. The long-term grief at socio-economic collapse that was suffered by many of those who voted for Donald Trump on November 5. And the grief and confusion of many long-time supporters of Israel who have suddenly had to deal with as they watch the collapse of the idealized “Israel” that they thought they knew for so many decades…
- So yes, it’s important to see and to acknowledge all that grief. But we also need to pick ourselves up and choose our allies for the many struggles that will certainly remain ahead.
- On the “progressive”, pro-civil-rights, antiwar side, let’s avoid recriminations and campaigns of blame for the rise of Donald Trump, and commit to working cooperatively together to end the inequalities and injustices within our society and in its conduct of foreign affairs. We need to look out for and protect everyone’s rights both in this country and worldwide. And please, no more “Progressive Except for Palestine”! Working for the rights of Palestinians in Palestine, and protecting the work of Palestinian-rights activists in this country from the heightened assaults that we are almost sure to face– needs to lie at the heart of American progressive endeavors going forward.
