“The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.” – Refaat Alareer
On Self-Proclaimed Allies of the Palestinian Liberation Movement
On Saturday, June 22, 2024, Within Our Lifetime, along with a coalition of Bronx-based community organizations – including The Bronx Palestine Solidarity Network and Bronx Anti-War Coalition – gathered at St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx to protest U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Nydia Velazquez in response to their endorsement and support for the architect of the genocide against the Palestinian people: President Joe Biden.
The reasons we demonstrated are no surprise to any who have been paying attention to the Palestinian liberation struggle. Progressive politicians have been roundly condemned for years over their material support for “israel” and milquetoast rhetorical support for Palestine – either through their votes in Congress, their parroting of racist and zionist narratives, or their staunch support for Genocide Joe’s reelection campaign. Politicians including AOC, Jamaal Bowman, Brad Lander, Shahana Hanif, Nydia Velazquez, Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, Ritchie Torres and Joe Biden recently slandered our organization and hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters after our mobilization against the Nova propaganda exhibit on June 10, 2024. A full account of that demonstration can be read on our website.
This is the context in which we decided to mobilize against politicians who have ostensibly gone on the offensive against AIPAC, yet are dedicated to toeing the party line and reelecting Genocide Joe, painting him as the “lesser of two evils.” As the poet and martyr Refaat Alareer said in his last tweet, two days before he was murdered by a targeted bombing of his home in Gaza: “The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.” Even as millions of Americans affirm their support for Palestinian liberation, the Party’s most “progressive” members still trail shamefully behind on the path to justice.
On Saturday, we demanded that AOC, Sanders, and Bowman fulfill the floor for what it means to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people:
- Revoke their endorsement of Genocide Joe Biden as he is the primary architect of the genocide in Palestine;
- Revoke all previous condemnations of Palestine organizing and affirm that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism;
- Affirm the universal right of all people under occupation, including the Palestinian people, to resist by any means available, including armed struggle.
At the rally, these politicians once again proved to be “progressive except for Palestine” as WOL stood alongside grassroots organizations from The Bronx in protest, like the Bronx Antiwar Coalition and the Bronx Palestine Solidarity Committee. AOC staff members were documented profiling and removing individuals at the event with keffiyehs. Shamefully, though not surprisingly, Sanders (once again) demonstrated his commitment to zionism, proudly affirming “israel’s” right of self-defense. Not only is his framing of the zionist genocide morally reprehensible, it is also completely backwards interpretation of international law. United Nations Resolution 37/43 affirms a people’s right to resist against an occupying entity by any means necessary, not the other way around.
On AIPAC and Assessing our Enemies
In the lead-up to the protest, a few loud people within electoral circles asserted that we were acting in the interests of AIPAC for protesting AOC, Sanders and Bowman – as the lobbying group AIPAC has donated $14.5 million towards Bowman’s opponent – despite our organization’s work for nearly ten years to advance the cause for Palestinian liberation. Meanwhile, these progressive politicians are capitalizing on genocide in Gaza for their own campaign without making any material gains for our cause, which is utterly egregious as we’ve watched our people be slaughtered for well over nine months.
The U.S. empire’s support for Zionism pre-dates AIPAC and AIPAC is only one aspect of the infrastructure that maintains U.S. interest in the colonization of Palestine. The United States is an Empire. It is an imperialist state. It is acting to secure political, military, and economic hegemony over entire regions of the world, with or without a special interest lobby. Of course, AIPAC should be combatted. However, to essentialize the role of AIPAC is to fundamentally misapprehend our enemy. This liberal Zionist framing, which treats AIPAC as the problem, will inevitably fail our people in Palestine. Our enemy is not simply one lobby group or the bad-apple politicians who take its money and it is often those who collaborate with or represent the other institutions that maintain support for zionism (like J-Street and countless other zionist organizations) that attempt to shift all of the focus onto AIPAC. Our enemy is Zionism and the Empire that manifests the colonial ideology into a material force that genocides our people, steals our land, and strangles any semblance of self-determination or sovereignty for oppressed nations.
For this reason, Within Our Lifetime is an anti-imperialist organization that locates the struggle for Palestine within an imperialist world system that must be destroyed for our people and all oppressed people to be free. If your analysis begins and ends at the role of AIPAC, your goals are not to struggle for the liberation of Palestine, but instead to reform the United States into a more humane Empire. It is time to sharpen your politics, or be honest with yourself and get out of the way.
On the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
Our demands on Saturday were levied towards AOC, Sanders, and Bowman. Despite multiple days of disgraceful condemnations from people claiming DSA membership, this protest was not directed against or targetting the DSA. We, along with many in the Palestine movement, have distanced ourselves from the DSA since 2021 following both their failure to expel Jamaal Bowman after he participated in a J-Street funded propaganda junket to occupied Palestine as well as the DSA’s unilateral de-chartering of the Palestine Solidarity Working Group (PSWG). Despite this history, we have no interest in mobilizing against the DSA as a political entity — we have worked with sectors of the DSA many times and are glad to continue working with those who maintain a principled position against Zionism, the Democratic Party, and general electoral co-optation of movement work. We seek to build unity with anyone who aligns with our principles, and that includes the DSA. We do not aim to slander the organization, nor do we encourage anyone else to. We welcome responses from caucuses and chapters of the DSA who articulate a position consistent with the tenets of the Palestinian struggle. For example, we are heartened by the response of the DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus to the rally on Saturday, Tacoma DSA’s statement regarding AOC’s history of failing to support Palestine, and YDSA U Albany’s statement in solidarity with our movement.
The immense backlash we received, contextualized by the growing repression we have faced from the state, prompted other organizations within the Palestine liberation movement to issue statements in support of us. Statements from the Palestinian Youth Movement, National SJP, and Jewish Voice for Peace – NY made clear that our movement is all too familiar with these attacks and the egregious assertion that we must put Palestine on the backburner for the sake of an election. To insist we bite our tongues after nearly nine months of genocide is unacceptable. PYM’s statement thoroughly conveyed this: “The lack of accountability we are being asked to accept is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy whose promise is oppression and mass death. Our movement has the right to hold accountable those who deviate from these principles, especially when others will not.”
We also witnessed unacceptable behavior in the lead-up to last Saturday’s rally. DSA members from around the country made unserious yet dangerous accusations of us being feds and AIPAC agents, and claimed that we were single-handedly destroying one of the most consequential electoral races of history. More alarmingly, individuals resorted to misogynistic and racist slurs against Muslim and Palestinian women, including our Chair Nerdeen Kiswani — who has advanced popular support for the Palestinian liberation movement in NYC for over a decade. We expect the DSA to take action and discipline those members who contributed to the unfounded attacks against us, particularly those who used misogynistic slurs in doing so as well as those who egregiously fed-jacketed our organization. In the aftermath of these attacks on Palestinian organizations, we feel compelled to demand self proclaimed allies of Palestine make their position clear.
We call on every organization that claims to stand in solidarity with Palestine to clearly articulate their position on our people’s liberation struggle so that our movement knows, without equivocation, who their friends are; to adopt our demands as their own; and to use resources that would have gone towards campaigning for Joe Biden surrogates to instead materially support the Palestinian liberation movement locally.
Electoral Politics will not Defeat Imperialism
Among misogyny, fed-jacketing, and condescension from many, one of the most egregious reactions to the announcement of our protest was that we were being un-strategic. Given Bowman’s partial responsibility for the largest ever DSA membership exit due to his normalizing position on Palestine and complicity in further aiding the genocidal entity, we reject the premise that holding him accountable is harmful. Our protest was carefully considered and we maintain that pressuring self-appointed allies into making material commitments to match their rhetoric of solidarity is, in fact, strategic. In the name of strategy, it is worth discussing seriously what the role of electoral politics is in our liberation struggle.
We embrace a diversity of tactics and believe that the struggle to liberate Palestine should be engaged wherever we are with whatever we have. Some within the movement take direct action, striking at the heart of production. Some mobilize tens of thousands to take the streets to disrupt daily life in the belly of the beast. Some are tasked with mobilizing students or workers to win divestment and demilitarization goals on campuses or in the workplace. And yes, some engage in electoral work to raise the question of Palestine to the ballot box. We accept the principle of a diversity of tactics, but only when those tactics are oriented towards the same outcome, not the further maintenance of genocide in Palestine. Our movement can only find unity when we agree on a baseline set of principles that cannot be ignored, glossed over, or pushed to the side for the sake of political expediency.
Many self-proclaimed progressive organizations endorse political candidates with the aim of bringing incremental changes to the imperialist system. They prioritize electoral politics so much that they fall into the error of pursuing only electoral struggle indefinitely without assessing historical progress. The same cycle repeats itself by siphoning the rage, energy, and resources of disaffected young people who have material grievances with the system at large, and dumping that energy straight into the Democratic Party and nonprofit industrial complex. By capturing those interested in fighting for a better world and directing them towards strategies which rarely, if ever, produce results, this strategy serves as a demobilizing and disillusioning force.
We saw this during Saturday’s rally in St. Mary’s Park. While Bernie Sanders hosted a rally there in 2016 which boasted 15,000 attendees, eight years later no more than a few hundred supporters came out. The decline in popularity experienced by politicians like AOC, Bernie, and Bowman is a reflection of their unprincipled positions and their failure to meet the needs of the working class. There is a reason that some of the most effective electoral efforts to pressure the Biden administration and the Democratic Party into ceasing the genocide have not been about pushing candidates forward, but about witholding votes until key demands are met. The Abandon Biden, Uncommitted, and Uninstructed campaigns rapidly garnered hundreds of thousands of votes rejecting Biden across the US.
How many millions of dollars and labor hours have gone into political campaigns which consistently fall short of their promises to the people? What if those resources were allocated towards building an infrastructure of popular mobilization, direct action, and community defense instead? How could the improvement of these tools actually lead to a more serious electoral strategy in turn wherein politicians are beholden to the demands of our movement? We have seen too many politicians rise to power on empty promises of change and progress only to push us backward.
Yesterday, one day after the presidential debate where Biden brazenly reaffirmed that the US is “the number one producer of support for Israel,” we protested his presence in our city. During a pinkwashing tour of New York (pro-Palestinians confronted him at Stonewall earlier in the afternoon) we flooded the Manhattan Center to let it be known that we will not support any politician that does not stand for Palestinian liberation, nor be bullied into supporting the so-called “lesser of two evils” — an evil that has legitimized the existence of israel for his entire career. An army of NYPD officers from SRG, TARU, and the “Hybrid Threat Unit” attempted to block our march at every turn in order to protect the Genocider-in-Chief. Our flood split into streams and managed to get through the blockade and arrive in front of the hotel to confront Genocide Joe.
As we get closer to November, with the next “most important election of our lifetime” looming in the distance, our commitment to our principles will be tested more and more. We will be warned that not voting for the man committing a genocide right now will result in this country’s descent into fascism. Yet the past four years have proven that fascism is a bipartisan affair. It is under Biden that we’ve seen an exponential rise in domestic repression, cop cities, state violence, and the expansion of surveillance efforts against organizers. The bipartisan crackdown against the Palestine liberation movement has demonstrated clearly that dissenting from the state’s imperialist agenda will be met with grave consequences.
Following Biden’s miserable performance at Thursday night’s debate, DSA issued a statement calling for his withdrawal from the Democratic nomination. Although they are now elucidating clearly their position that Genocide Joe must drop out of the race, will it become a red line for the politicians they support to be endorsing him? We must ask, why was a poor debate performance, rather than genocide of Palestine, the dealbreaker? If they assert that “Biden must drop out,” will they actually leverage political capital to make that happen or is this merely a half-hearted position paper?
Over the next five months, a host of narratives will emerge that are designed to instill fear in you and make you think that the only thing you can do to change the world is vote. This is a distraction, and as the months pass we urge you to remember not to be distracted by who might become the next genocider-in-chief. If we actually want to fight against the fascism that is descending upon us right now, we have to agitate, educate, and organize our communities. We have to escalate against the police state and the imperialist system that is crushing our people all over the world. Our goal must be to take power, not just elect people into positions of power within a system working against us. Only by exposing and confronting the fascist and genocidal nature of western Empire will we enact material change and liberation for all colonized people.
“An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.” -George Jackson, Blood in My Eye
Statements of support for Within Our Lifetime:
The Palestinian Youth Movement
National Students for Justice in Palestine
Jewish Voice for Peace – NY
DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus
DSA Tacoma Chapter
YDSA U Albany Chapter