Our Zoom call this Friday will be at its regular time: 1 PM ET. Our guest will be State Representative Chris Rabb, who recently won the Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives in Pennsylvania’s third congressional district. Rep. Rabb’s victory is part of the wave of recent victories by members of the Democratic Socialists of America. In response to the recent controversy surrounding Hasan Piker, he tweeted:
“This is what the institutionalists are focusing their efforts on now: Disavowing #HasanPiker. Not white Christian nationalists? Not the broligarchs? Not the AI overlords? Nope, the guy encouraging young people to use their collective political power for good. F*ck that noise.”
We’ll talk about the DSA, the struggle to change the Democratic Party’s position on Israel-Palestine and why Donald Trump twice won Pennsylvania. Please join us.
Cited in Today’s Video
The video of Brad Lander at the counter-RSS protest.
Muhammad Shehada on why Brad Lander is an ally.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Dikla Taylor-Sherman details the pervasive torture in Israeli prisons.
On September 10, I’ll be speaking online with Omer Bartov at the Stony Creek Forum.
Help Hossam and Miriam Elzowidi
Over the last few years, I’ve been receiving updates from Abir Elzowidi about her brother Hossam, his wife Miriam and their children, who live in Gaza.
Last week Abir wrote that,
“I received a message from my brother Hossam. All of the children passed their school and university years and received their certificates. I read that part more than once. A certificate may sound like a small thing compared with everything happening around them. But to me, it says so much about what Hossam and Miriam have been doing quietly every single day. They are parents before anything else.
In the middle of all this uncertainty, they are still asking their children about their studies. They are still worrying about classes, exams, internet and electricity. They are still trying to create some kind of normal family life in a place where normal life has become almost impossible.
Hossam told me that right now they are mostly staying inside because going out has become too dangerous. Some basic goods can be found again, but at prices that make ordinary life very difficult.
Their battery has finally stopped working, and there are no replacement batteries available. They have had to subscribe to electricity from private generators at around $50 every week.
And they pay it. Not because electricity is a comfort, but because their children need electricity and internet for university.
That detail stayed with me. When so much of life has been reduced to getting through one day at a time, Hossam and Miriam are still making decisions based on their children’s future. They are also still waiting for the crossing. Hossam says it remains closed except for a very small number of critical medical cases coordinated through medical organizations. There is no date they can circle on a calendar. No answer about when their turn might come. They simply wait.
Yet his message to me wasn’t filled with despair.
He wrote:
‘We are determined to continue living and to protect ourselves, whatever the circumstances.’
That sentence is Hossam.
And I see Miriam in it too. I see two parents doing everything they can to hold their family together and raise their children with purpose when so much around them is uncertain. When I think about what your help means to them today, I don’t think only about food or electricity. I think about Hossam and Miriam being able to say yes when one of their children needs to get online for a class, study for an exam, or simply continue their education.
For those of you who have been following Hossam and his family for so long, I wanted you to know about this moment. You have watched these children go through things children should never have had to experience. Today, I want you to know that they also accomplished something.
They finished their year. They passed. They received their certificates. And their parents are already figuring out how to keep the electricity on so they can continue.”
Please consider helping Hossam, Miriam and their family.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
There’s an upcoming speech at Madison Square Garden in New York City by a leader of a Hindu nationalist group called the RSS, a kind of really kind of quite fascistic organization. And one of the leaders is going to be speaking in New York. The speech was condemned by Zohran Mamdani, which is just worth noting, because reading media coverage, you might think sometimes that the only political movement or only government that Zohran Mamdani has a problem with is the government of Israel.
But in fact, Zohran Mamdani has been a pretty vehement critic of Hindu nationalism, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, and of associated groups like the RSS because actually he has, I think, a pretty consistent principle of believing that states, whether they’re Jewish, Hindu majority, Muslim majority, whatever, that they should treat people equally under the law.
But what got attention in the last couple of days was that Brad Lander, the Democratic nominee for Congress, who recently won his nomination in Brooklyn, went to kind of a protest against this speech, and there were some folks there that were screaming at him to get out of the protest because he’s a self-declared Zionist. And this video is going viral because it’s a very convenient video for supporters of Israel to show because the argument has long been, in kind of pro-Israel circles, that the Palestinian solidarity movement is irredeemably antisemitic, and therefore those Jews who sympathize with many of its goals, as Brad Lander does, are basically dupes because they think they’re allies with these people who fundamentally hate Jews.
And I think it’s just worth saying that I think that analysis of this video is wrong. First of all, from the parts of the video that I saw—at least, again, there may be other parts that I didn’t see—there’s what the people are yelling at Brad Lander is not antisemitic. The people are rude, obnoxious, self-righteous, they’re really kind of acting like assholes. But they’re not saying anything antisemitic. They’re saying, you’re a Zionist, get the heck out of here, right? There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t be saying the same thing to another politician who was publicly known as someone who was Zionist.
And I just think it’s important for us to say that, because the term antisemite should be reserved for clear cases in which people have an animus towards Jews as Jews, and this constant invocation for other situations. Someone can be obnoxious. Someone can be rude. Someone can be acting like an asshole. Someone can be very, very obnoxious. It doesn’t make them antisemitic. That’s a particular thing, right? What I think you see in this video is a particularly kind of toxic form of political purism that you can see on the left. And not just on the pro-Palestinian left, but you can see it in general, right, in which if someone doesn’t agree with you 100% of the time, then they are an enemy.
So, that’s the analysis of Brad Lander. Because Brad Lander calls himself a liberal Zionist, these people see him as the enemy, right, and as kind of evil, even though he has said Israel’s committing genocide. He has said Israel’s an apartheid state. He wants to end U.S. military aid. He wants to severely restrict U.S. weapon sales. And I want to quote my friend Mohammed Shahada, who writes exactly about this. He writes, ‘Brad Lander’—this is in response to the video—Mohammed writes, ‘Brad Lander played a huge part in getting Mamdani elected. Lander recognized Israel’s genocide and apartheid, opposes AIPAC, and supports halting U.S. military aid. Attacks on him are appalling and self-defeating to our movement. You can’t demand every ally agrees 100% with you on everything else or be a traitor. Our goal is to unite the many against the few, not the few against the many.’
I think Muhammad is laying out succinctly why this kind of political purism is a kind of form of political idiocy. And yes, this political idiocy exists on the left today in pro-Palestine circles. It exists in every species of leftist movement, and it has for a long time. And it’s particularly difficult to deal with in this movement because there is not a centralized Palestinian political organization that can essentially police these things, right?
In the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s against apartheid in South Africa, you had the African National Congress. And the African National Congress was widely understood as a political body that could set the agenda for what it meant to be in solidarity with the struggle for freedom for Black South Africans. And so, in some ways, if there was a chant or a particular action or strategic question, people could look to them.
Because Palestinians have not been allowed to choose a kind of unified, legitimate leadership, and they’ve been fragmented politically, that you don’t have the equivalent of the ANC in Palestinian circles, or pro-Palestinian circles. And I think that’s part of the reason that these things are difficult to deal with. But the fact that it’s just important—hopefully this would be obvious—but just the fact that you have certain people who associate themselves with the movement, who say stupid, obnoxious, politically, I think, self-defeating things, doesn’t mean that the movement itself doesn’t have goals that are fundamentally just.
I mean, you know, it was commonplace at anti-Vietnam War rallies to see people saying things that I think were very, very politically, you know, stupid and counterproductive. Things like, you know, ‘ho ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF’—the Vietnamese, the communists—’are going to win,’ right? I remember myself going to an anti-apartheid movement rally, back in the early 1990s, and I heard people chanting this slogan: ‘it’s a black thing you wouldn’t understand,’ which was really a very, very stupid slogan to protest as part of the anti-apartheid movement given that the anti-apartheid movement was very explicitly multiracial. In fact, the head of the ANC’s military wing at that time, Joe Slovo, was a white man, a Jewish white man. So, it was a kind of direct misunderstanding or even repudiation of the principles of the ANC itself to say this, right?
But these things happen in protest, and it’s really kind of bad faith actors who, I think, take these things and say this is the essence of a movement, rather than trying to look at it in context. I think Mohammed Shahada has a lot more credibility as someone who understands the struggle for Palestinian freedom than these handful of guys who were, you know, screaming at Brad Lander.
And the last point is just that, you know, you have to be very careful about watching just small parts of videos, which is what people did, because I watched actually a longer part of this video, and what you see is that there’s some people yelling at Brad Lander to get out because they don’t want his solidarity, because he’s a Zionist. But there are actually lots of other people, at least as many other people, who are thanking him for being there, right, because they’re glad that he’s opposing Hindu nationalism and because they understand that even if they don’t agree with him on everything when it comes to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, they understand that he’s actually going to be an important figure in Congress pushing for tangible change in U.S. government, that it’s going to mean that the U.S. government is sending fewer weapons to Israel that are being used to kill Palestinians.
And I will just say, in my own experience, over quite a few years, particularly among Palestinians themselves, I found that it’s much, much more common, in my experience, to be treated with grace and kindness by people who might not agree with me on everything, and who are willing to engage in dialogue, than what you saw in this video. And I think there’s a constant effort to kind of dehumanize Palestinians and their supporters, to kind of put them in this position of making them look, kind of, you know, irredeemably hostile and irrational and obnoxious.
And sure, again, in every movement, you’re going to have a wide spectrum of people. But I think, speaking for myself, and I think for the vast majority of Jews who have spent time in pro-Palestinian spaces, and particularly among Palestinians themselves, I would say that actually, it’s much more common to find a response of people who respond with civility and open conversation even when there are some differences. And so, this effort to basically suggest that this video of Brad Lander suggests that there is no space for Jews in pro-Palestinian circles, or no place for anybody who doesn’t toe exactly the party line, I think actually isn’t really true to reality, and is in large measure an effort to discredit a movement that I think actually has shown that it has the capacity to make space for a lot of people, in pursuit of some very fundamental principles about the idea of freedom and equality and justice and peace.
