Promising signs that Palestine advocacy is building political power in Washington
The defeat of Cori Bush in her primary election on Tuesday left a lot of advocates for Palestinian rights in the United States despairing. It’s an understandable feeling.
Cori Bush is a tireless activist, working against injustice, racism, economic oppression, against apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and genocide in Gaza. In that last fight, she was successful enough to draw the ire of AIPAC. The pro-Israel lobbying group directly spent at least $11 million between its two affiliated PACs to defeat Bush.
That is a stunning amount of money to spend on an election where only a little over 125,000 people voted. AIPAC’s support made up most of the four-to-one spending advantage to Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell. Coupled with Jamaal Bowman’s defeat earlier in his primary, this can be discouraging.
Actually, Tuesday represented a major step forward for the role of Palestine advocacy in Democratic politics. Even Bush’s loss had a silver lining around it. AIPAC and other outside groups poured money into this race, making it the second most expensive congressional race in history. The first? Jamaal Bowman’s loss in June.
Between those two races, AIPAC’s PACs spent more than $25 million to oust two progressive, Black members of the House who had dared to call Israel’s genocide in Gaza what it is. These record-shattering numbers show that it has become much more expensive to maintain Israel’s impunity in the face of a Democratic voter base that is far less supportive of Israel’s actions than it has been in the past. AIPAC itself no longer even defends Israel in the campaign ads it buys. Instead, it attacks candidates it doesn’t like entirely on other issues.
Moreover, AIPAC’s own tactic is a double-edged sword. They can’t get as much money as they would need to primary progressive Democrats from Democratic donors. So they turn to Republican donors, angering even many Democrats who might otherwise be indifferent to the lobby’s tactics. It may work for the moment, but this is not a sustainable strategy.
Palestinian rights in Democratic politics
Another step forward was Kamala Harris’ decision to choose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
Walz was a relatively late entry in the field competing for the spot alongside Harris, and by the time his name was really circulating, it looked very likely that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, would be the vice presidential candidate.
But Harris ultimately chose Walz. We should be clear about what this means and doesn’t mean.
Walz is well within the mainstream of Democratic elected officials when it comes to Israel and Palestine. He supports ongoing military aid to Israel, favors a two-state solution, and spoke at an AIPAC conference in 2010. He called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza as far back as March, but has also reinforced the myth that protests against the genocide there (a term he has never come close to using), make Jewish students “feel unsafe.”
He has also defended the right of Palestine activists to protest vociferously and complimented the Uncommitted movement for being civically engaged. All in all, a pretty straightforward, liberal, pro-Israel Democrat.
But in that, Walz is quite different from Josh Shapiro. Defenders of Israel who are trying to make the bad faith case that rejecting Shapiro as Harris’ running mate is a reflection of antisemitism in the party, claim that Shapiro’s and Walz’s views on Israel and Palestine are virtually identical.
But Walz has never tried to restrict the speech of employees in his state who support Palestine, as Shapiro did. Nor did he compare anti-genocide protesters to the Ku Klux Klan, as Shapiro did.
Shapiro was favored by not only the pro-Israel community, but also by the more conservative economic wing of the party, and by politically inept strategists who couldn’t see past the fact that Pennsylvania is one of the key battleground states in the election while Minnesota is likely a safe Democratic win in November.
The point is not that Walz is particularly good on Palestine. He isn’t. But Shapiro’s more extreme views were certain to alienate the very voters that caused enough concern among Democratic donors and leaders to convince them to press Joe Biden to step aside.
Palestine was certainly not the only issue that made Shapiro a bad pick. He also favors cutting corporate taxes; he supports fracking and other dangerous practices that threaten to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, climate change; and he has other issues, like his attempt to cover up a sexual harassment accusation against one of his aides. None of this would help bring back the voters Biden had driven away.
But Palestine was as significant in the VP calculus as any of those issues. That marks a historic step forward. The idea that a candidate for the vice presidency in a major party could be rejected not because he was perceived as “anti-Israel” but because of anti-Palestinian views is a first. I’m old enough to remember the passionately pro-Israel sentiments of the VP candidates of 2012, 2008, (both Joe Biden) and, especially in 2000 when Joe Lieberman—whose views on Israel were distinctly to the right even of Shapiro’s—was the Democratic VP nominee. These were choices made specifically to please pro-Israel donors and voters.
In the 2024 primary season, Palestine was as big a reason as any for Joe Biden stepping aside and now for Kamala Harris rejecting Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Again, it was not at all the only reason, and, in both cases, if Palestine was the only issue, neither of these political shocks would have occurred.
Politics shift slowly. That is especially true in the case of Palestine. The pro-Israel lobby was decades in the making before it became particularly influential. For most of that time, advocacy for Palestine was ineffective, scattered, and sometimes divided against itself. Indeed, those problems have not been entirely overcome.
But in 2024, the movement for Palestinian rights has far more unity, diversity, and political strategy, and it has become far more politically efficient. That is only now starting to show in terms of political power to make change, but this is how it starts.
That is a change that must not be underestimated. The Israel lobby built its strength, in great measure, on the fact that the opposition to it was politically insignificant for so long. That is simply not the case anymore.
Of course, it’s not enough. That is especially distressing now, as we watch the devastation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza proceeding apace, with a death toll that is rising far faster than official tallies would indicate. And, as the election grows nearer, Gaza falls even further from the headlines, and the ethnic cleansing on the West Bank gets hardly a mention.
It’s not enough when we see Harris, the replacement for Genocide Joe, accuse demonstrators in Michigan of supporting Donald Trump because they sent a message to her, through their protest, that she still has to earn their votes by acting to stop Israel’s genocidal onslaught.
But pushing Josh Shapiro aside and massively raising the price tag to defeat a Jamaal Bowman or a Cori Bush are the results of years of movement building, political organizing, and a new combination of passionate, grassroots activism and professional political messaging and lobbying. For the first time, advocates for Palestinian rights have the foundation to build a force for political change. We have the activists, we have the educational nonprofits, and we have the lobbying groups working together. And we’re starting to see results.
It’s hard to keep the perspective that these were real victories and that they matter, when so many thousands of Palestinian children are dying, so many Palestinians of all ages in Gaza and the West Bank are continuing to live through hell on earth, and are all accumulating traumas on top of traumas, even if they are lucky enough to keep their lives and limbs intact.
But this is what progress looks like. We can and should keep searching for ways to be more impactful sooner because apartheid and genocide are escalating. But part of that is recognizing what is working and building on it. As frustrating as it is to know that Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman will not be in Congress in January, we are finally moving forward in changing the unjust conditions that have stopped us from creating real change in Palestine and Israel. It matters.
Mitchell Plitnick
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. He is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. Mitchell’s previous positions include vice president at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Director of the US Office of B’Tselem, and Co-Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. You can find him on Twitter @MJPlitnick.