I'll Take My Stand: Palestine

I feel obliged to weigh in. I doubt it will do any good. It’s a way to organize my thoughts a bit, or at least to vent. I will regret losing any friends over this, since I have none to spare. Pressing on . . .

1. The Hamas attack deserves unambiguous condemnation. Hamas is a horrible, anti-Semitic, neo-fascist organization. However, any remarks extending this in any non-redundant fashion are subject to instant attacks on grounds of insensitivity, or worse, to the suffering of Jewish innocents.

But there is still more to say.

2. Musk has so thoroughly degraded Twitter/X that nothing on it, no purported fact or image, should be taken at face value. Moreover, there is a lot of policing of language — you said X but failed to say Y — among apologists for what Israel is about to do. This amounts to lawyering designed to afford the IDF a blank check for its revenge strikes on Gaza.

3. Every time I see the face of a Israeli Jewish victim of Hamas’s attack, I imagine Palestinian victims of the Israeli Defense Force or Jewish settlers whose stories we are not shown with the same intensity, if at all.

4. It should be possible to condemn what Hamas did over the past week at the same time one condemns what the Israeli Defense Force and maniacal settlers have been doing for the past twenty years, and what the IDF is about to do. Politically, however, in the U.S. this proves to be a daunting task, so heavily is the deck stacked against Palestine nationalism.

5. Israel has the right to defend itself, but that is not what it is about to do, nor what it has been doing in Gaza or the West Bank. What’s in store is revenge, two wrongs don’t make a right but so what and fuck you.

6. There is no such thing as precision bombing or shelling, nor is there any pretense that such bombardment will be targeted on Hamas. Any time a non-Hamas target is blown up, the Israeli government claims it was some kind of Hamas facility or person. And who could contradict them, since what remains is a field of rubble.

7. The U.S. Left is pretty much out of business for the foreseeable future. My Democratic Socialists of America (sic) has fucked itself, thanks to its leaders’ chronic political ineptitude, but chances are it would be in the desert in any case. There are just too many perverse political voices on the Left that can be portrayed as DSA-adjacent. In this respect, the truncation of political discourse will mirror the aftermath of 9-11 in the U.S., which torpedoed what at the time was a robust anti-globalization movement.

8. For a demonstration of how to react to all this effectively, the statements by Bernie and AOC and others in The Squad are good models. A DSA not led by idiots could have done similarly and might not be swirling around the toilet bowl.

9. Speaking strictly for myself here, old-timers are talking about quitting DSA. I’ve thought about it myself. What matters more than specific deficiencies in its immediate reaction to the Hamas onslaught is the more general feeling that DSA’s current leadership are political incompetents, so we take to asking why we should be in the same organization, following their dumb asses.

10. There are alternatives. What we could call the heart of the U.S. Left remains vital in the constituencies of ‘The Squad’ in the U.S. Congress. That’s where the action is. Otherwise it is in progressive organizations such as the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats who have not gone off the deep end. (I don’t see Progressive Democrats of America or Our Revolution doing anything but squatting online.) Unfortunately, the “democratic socialist” brand will be radioactive until such time as it is no longer associated with DSA.

10. Here’s a thought. The members of the DSA National Political Committee resign from their leadership posts and pledge to run new elections online. Do that.

There is renewed chatter about two-state solutions. I will have a note on that in a couple of days.

(Hi, A-M)