U$A
A rift over Israel threatens the left’s fragile gains
David Weigel
Fri, October 13, 2023
The News
NEW YORK – Six days after Hamas launched attacks on Israel that killed over 1,300 people, the country’s critics inside the Democratic Party are back on their heels.
Politicians known for almost never “punching left” made clear they needed to do so this time or lose all future credibility. In Manhattan, a rally endorsed by the local Democratic Socialists of America that featured hateful displays was sharply condemned by two of the group’s most closely associated members in Congress — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who’d let his own membership lapse over a prior dispute over Israel.
In Michigan, Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Democratic colleagues attacked her statement that Israel’s “apartheid” system created “conditions that can lead to resistance.” In California, DSA-backed politicians who’d denounced Hamas were called anti-semites by Democratic opponents for not quitting the socialist organization.
As President Biden promised to stand with Israel in response to the “sheer evil” of Hamas and likened the war to U.S. operations against ISIS, some leftists bristled at the criticism from within as an unnecessary distraction, arguing the priority should be taking on the right and preventing a massive unfolding military campaign by Israel.
“Why is there is such a focus on settling local political scores when innocent people are being killed and elected officials are going on national television calling for genocide?” New York state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, told Semafor. “There is a battle right now between war fervor and the truth, [that] the only way to end this violence is to end the occupation and an apartheid system of government.”
But advocates for a new approach to Israel — aid based on humanitarian conditions, boycotts to stop the country from building further settlements in the West Bank — fear they just watched years of political gains get reversed. And prominent progressive and leftist allies, even as they continued to express opposition to Israel’s policies and its military response in Gaza, unleashed a rare outpouring of disgust and rage at voices in their camp who endorsed mass slaughter and kidnapping as a valid uprising or minimized the human toll.
Past defenses — that it was just a distraction pushed by reactionaries, that it was making too much of a fringe campus voice here or there — proved ineffective this time.
“It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities,” the left-wing writer Eric Levitz wrote in a widely shared New York magazine column excoriating activists for a “betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values” on ethical grounds that also did untold damage to their practical goals of ending Israeli occupation.
Some, like New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, went so far as to liken the split to schisms on the Marxist left over communism, in which revelations of Stalin’s purges and the 1956 invasion of Hungary left only a hardine rump of pro-Soviet activists. “It’s too early to know how the left’s widespread failure of solidarity will change our politics, but I suspect some sort of fracture is coming,” she wrote. A prominent economics policy expert on the left, Larry Mishel, announced he was quitting the DSA after nearly 50 years of membership. He had named his son after one of its founders.
The nature of the Hamas attack — a massacre of civilians — and its location — inside Israel proper, not a settlement — drew out and exacerbated fundamental rifts among Israel’s critics: Between those who view its existence as fundamentally illegitimate, and those who want a negotiated two-state solution that respects its Jewish identity; between those who imagine a one-state democracy that moves past nationalism on all sides, and those who envision a Palestinian takeover “from the river to the sea.”
American Jews traditionally lean left and many have direct ties to friends, family, and institutions affected by the attacks, sharply raising the emotional stakes within progressive circles. At the pro-Palestinian Jewish publication Jewish Currents, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel wrote about struggling to publicly grieve those losses “without these feelings being politically metabolized against Palestinians.” But others felt those same feelings were being callously dismissed by their purported allies — with uncertain consequences for the movement moving forward.
David’s view
The comments that led to a wave of condemnation — a Time Square rally attendee mocking the murder of “hipsters” when Hamas attacked a music festival, a Black Lives Matter offshoot justifying a “desperate act of self-defense,” a Yale professor who scoffed that “settlers are not civilians” — had no support in mainstream Democratic politics.
But before Saturday, opponents of unrestricted aid to Israel were making significant headway in a long, trudging effort to drag the party toward a more confrontational approach to Israel’s policies. The movement faces its biggest challenge yet from the Hamas attacks; that pressure alone is likely to create further divisions over how to respond.
“Just days ago, Biden was holding Netanyahu at arm’s length because he was capitulating to the fascists in his cabinet,” said Eva Borgwardt, the national spokeswoman for IfNotNow, a left-wing group that supports “an end to the occupation and Israel’s system of apartheid” in Gaza and the West Bank. “Now we are seeing those same political leaders falling in line to send offensive weaponry to that same Israeli government, whose intentions are to wipe Palestine off the map.”
At the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Democrats told Gallup pollsters that they were more sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians “in the Middle East situation” by an 18-point margin. When Gallup asked that question again in March, Democrats had become more sympathetic to Palestinians by an 11-point margin.
That may have changed overnight. A Fox News poll taken after the Hamas attack found a 17-point shift in support for Israel among Democratic voters. And voices within the party who have been trying to counter the rising tide of support for Palestinian causes and increased antagonism towards Israel’s government, especially among younger Democrats, thought the left’s response would further marginalize them.
“The center of gravity has moved pretty dramatically, as Hamas has revealed itself for what it is — the worst kind of terrorist organization,” said Mark Mellman, the founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, which spent millions of dollars to defeat left-wing candidates in last year’s primaries. “Groups like DSA have done themselves a tremendous disservice by putting themselves outside reasonable and responsible discourse.”
Israel’s advocates and lobbyists watched with dismay, for years, as young progressives challenged the Democratic Party’s unconditional support for Israel. They watched Bibi Netanyahu undermine Barack Obama when he called for a settlement freeze, then watched him ally with Republicans to sabotage the 2015 Iran deal, then watched him work hand-in-glove with Donald Trump.
After the election of Israel’s most right-wing government ever last year — and even though calling Israel an “apartheid” state was a taboo enforced by a congressional supermajority — the country’s American critics were bolder than they’d ever been. Their opponents see a chance now to isolate and divide them, highlighting the most offensive statements from fringe groups and making their associations toxic. That would have implications beyond Israel policy, punishing and limiting left-wing Democrats who’ve made headway inside the party while advocating for a variety of domestic causes as well, like Medicare For All.
“The DSA’s hate rally, glorifying the terrorism of Hamas, represents the beginning of the end for the DSA as a political force in New York,” Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres told Semafor. (DSA endorsed the rally, but didn’t plan it, and later walked back its support.) “Its institutional influence will recede into the fringe where it belongs.”
DSA’s post-2016 relevance in electoral politics after decades on the fringe has made it the biggest target. Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar, who’d joined DSA to build his populist bona fides, denounced and quit it over the Times Square rally. (The metro Detroit DSA chapter pointed out that he’d already been ousted over his support for India’s nationalist prime minister.)
But to the dismay of many pro-peace progressives, less politically relevant groups — college student chapters, local Black Lives Matter offshoots — are getting nearly as much attention, for actions that they argue have next to zero support on the left. Social media users, especially on the right, have become exceedingly efficient at quickly identifying and publicizing offending examples as soon as they arise, forcing people to respond and often drawing out a new wave of incendiary responses to highlight next.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said that the media was telling a too-easy story of infighting, focusing on fringe activists or parsing the words used by Israel’s critics in Congress “who had the temerity to say ‘ceasefire.’”
“There is wall to wall condemnation of what happened, and we’re still in the phase where that’s the appropriate place to be,” said Ben-Ami, who spoke with Semafor shortly after learning that a friend’s daughter had been killed with her boyfriend in the Hamas attacks. “There will come another chapter — a more nuanced discussion, at the appropriate time. But we’re still in a phase where you’re finding, except for a very small number of outliers, nearly unanimous condemnation of Hamas and support for the people of Israel.”
For the students who make up a disproportionate share of activists, though, the campus politics have not been as easy to dismiss. J Street U, the same group’s student wing, issued a lengthy statement saying it was “deeply saddened and angered by attempts to justify, excuse, or ignore Hamas’s horrific crimes against Israeli civilians” by pro-Palestinian student groups.
Nor were these threats treated as merely intellectual in the aftermath of the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust: Around the world, there were concerns about dangers to Hillels, synagogues, and Jewish schools ahead of a planned “Day of Rage” called for by Hamas on Friday. At Columbia University, a longtime incubator of pro-Isrel and pro-Palestinian activism, the school was closed to the public after a Jewish student was physically attacked putting up flyers supportive of Israel.
Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost,who has been critical of Israel’s Gaza response, noted that his Central Florida district had already struggled with a rise in neo-Nazi activity: “Seems like week after week we’ve had Nazis march our streets and now this massacre and terrorist attack by Hamas.”
The 26-year old Frost and other progressives have tried to model a fine line approach of mourning losses in Israel and Gaza; calling out examples of antisemitism at home and abroad while also defending Muslims and Arabs from signs of backlash; and expressing outrage at Hamas’ attacks while challenging the administration to protect Palestinians caught in the crossfire.
On Wednesday evening, IfNotNow co-organized a vigil in Washington Square Park, where its allies commemorated the thousands of lives lost in Israel and Gaza. City comptroller Brad Lander, who had called the Times Square rally “abominable,” led the crowd in a call-and-response prayer.
“If I am for myself only, what am I?” said Lander. “If I can only see my peoples’ pain, how will we ever find those divine sparks, commanded by our tradition?”
Room for Disagreement
Activists whose response to the Hamas attacks have divided the left aren’t walking it back. At the Times Square rally, Eugene Puryear, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation — not DSA — became infamous for joking about a Hamas attack on a music festival that killed at least 260 people. “The resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” he said. Asked if he’d say the same thing again today, Puryear said he would.
“The focus on my comments is just to distract from what’s really happening — nearly 80 years of brutality meted out on Palestinians,” Puryear said. “If I rephrased it, people would be equally as mad about it; the core of my point is that the Palestinians are right to resist.”
BLM Chicago, not affiliated with the national Black Lives Matter organization (but conflated with it in media reports), put out a meme mocking the attack on the festival — a cartoon of a paraglider. “For everyone withdrawing support, saying they stood with us & now they’re removing signs, bye, toodles,” it posted on Thursday morning. “We’ve always been for Palestinian freedom.”
Notable
In N+1, David Klion writes that “emotion and bloodlust” have “overwhelmed” reason, with a clear impact on the left: “The upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground.”
In Politico, Emily Ngo and Nick Reisman see an “internal reckoning” unfolding for DSA, “shining a brighter spotlight on tensions between the often younger, left-leaning DSA-backed politicians and their mainstream Democratic colleagues.”
David Weigel
Fri, October 13, 2023
The News
NEW YORK – Six days after Hamas launched attacks on Israel that killed over 1,300 people, the country’s critics inside the Democratic Party are back on their heels.
Politicians known for almost never “punching left” made clear they needed to do so this time or lose all future credibility. In Manhattan, a rally endorsed by the local Democratic Socialists of America that featured hateful displays was sharply condemned by two of the group’s most closely associated members in Congress — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who’d let his own membership lapse over a prior dispute over Israel.
In Michigan, Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Democratic colleagues attacked her statement that Israel’s “apartheid” system created “conditions that can lead to resistance.” In California, DSA-backed politicians who’d denounced Hamas were called anti-semites by Democratic opponents for not quitting the socialist organization.
As President Biden promised to stand with Israel in response to the “sheer evil” of Hamas and likened the war to U.S. operations against ISIS, some leftists bristled at the criticism from within as an unnecessary distraction, arguing the priority should be taking on the right and preventing a massive unfolding military campaign by Israel.
“Why is there is such a focus on settling local political scores when innocent people are being killed and elected officials are going on national television calling for genocide?” New York state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, told Semafor. “There is a battle right now between war fervor and the truth, [that] the only way to end this violence is to end the occupation and an apartheid system of government.”
But advocates for a new approach to Israel — aid based on humanitarian conditions, boycotts to stop the country from building further settlements in the West Bank — fear they just watched years of political gains get reversed. And prominent progressive and leftist allies, even as they continued to express opposition to Israel’s policies and its military response in Gaza, unleashed a rare outpouring of disgust and rage at voices in their camp who endorsed mass slaughter and kidnapping as a valid uprising or minimized the human toll.
Past defenses — that it was just a distraction pushed by reactionaries, that it was making too much of a fringe campus voice here or there — proved ineffective this time.
“It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities,” the left-wing writer Eric Levitz wrote in a widely shared New York magazine column excoriating activists for a “betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values” on ethical grounds that also did untold damage to their practical goals of ending Israeli occupation.
Some, like New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, went so far as to liken the split to schisms on the Marxist left over communism, in which revelations of Stalin’s purges and the 1956 invasion of Hungary left only a hardine rump of pro-Soviet activists. “It’s too early to know how the left’s widespread failure of solidarity will change our politics, but I suspect some sort of fracture is coming,” she wrote. A prominent economics policy expert on the left, Larry Mishel, announced he was quitting the DSA after nearly 50 years of membership. He had named his son after one of its founders.
The nature of the Hamas attack — a massacre of civilians — and its location — inside Israel proper, not a settlement — drew out and exacerbated fundamental rifts among Israel’s critics: Between those who view its existence as fundamentally illegitimate, and those who want a negotiated two-state solution that respects its Jewish identity; between those who imagine a one-state democracy that moves past nationalism on all sides, and those who envision a Palestinian takeover “from the river to the sea.”
American Jews traditionally lean left and many have direct ties to friends, family, and institutions affected by the attacks, sharply raising the emotional stakes within progressive circles. At the pro-Palestinian Jewish publication Jewish Currents, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel wrote about struggling to publicly grieve those losses “without these feelings being politically metabolized against Palestinians.” But others felt those same feelings were being callously dismissed by their purported allies — with uncertain consequences for the movement moving forward.
David’s view
The comments that led to a wave of condemnation — a Time Square rally attendee mocking the murder of “hipsters” when Hamas attacked a music festival, a Black Lives Matter offshoot justifying a “desperate act of self-defense,” a Yale professor who scoffed that “settlers are not civilians” — had no support in mainstream Democratic politics.
But before Saturday, opponents of unrestricted aid to Israel were making significant headway in a long, trudging effort to drag the party toward a more confrontational approach to Israel’s policies. The movement faces its biggest challenge yet from the Hamas attacks; that pressure alone is likely to create further divisions over how to respond.
“Just days ago, Biden was holding Netanyahu at arm’s length because he was capitulating to the fascists in his cabinet,” said Eva Borgwardt, the national spokeswoman for IfNotNow, a left-wing group that supports “an end to the occupation and Israel’s system of apartheid” in Gaza and the West Bank. “Now we are seeing those same political leaders falling in line to send offensive weaponry to that same Israeli government, whose intentions are to wipe Palestine off the map.”
At the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Democrats told Gallup pollsters that they were more sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians “in the Middle East situation” by an 18-point margin. When Gallup asked that question again in March, Democrats had become more sympathetic to Palestinians by an 11-point margin.
That may have changed overnight. A Fox News poll taken after the Hamas attack found a 17-point shift in support for Israel among Democratic voters. And voices within the party who have been trying to counter the rising tide of support for Palestinian causes and increased antagonism towards Israel’s government, especially among younger Democrats, thought the left’s response would further marginalize them.
“The center of gravity has moved pretty dramatically, as Hamas has revealed itself for what it is — the worst kind of terrorist organization,” said Mark Mellman, the founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, which spent millions of dollars to defeat left-wing candidates in last year’s primaries. “Groups like DSA have done themselves a tremendous disservice by putting themselves outside reasonable and responsible discourse.”
Israel’s advocates and lobbyists watched with dismay, for years, as young progressives challenged the Democratic Party’s unconditional support for Israel. They watched Bibi Netanyahu undermine Barack Obama when he called for a settlement freeze, then watched him ally with Republicans to sabotage the 2015 Iran deal, then watched him work hand-in-glove with Donald Trump.
After the election of Israel’s most right-wing government ever last year — and even though calling Israel an “apartheid” state was a taboo enforced by a congressional supermajority — the country’s American critics were bolder than they’d ever been. Their opponents see a chance now to isolate and divide them, highlighting the most offensive statements from fringe groups and making their associations toxic. That would have implications beyond Israel policy, punishing and limiting left-wing Democrats who’ve made headway inside the party while advocating for a variety of domestic causes as well, like Medicare For All.
“The DSA’s hate rally, glorifying the terrorism of Hamas, represents the beginning of the end for the DSA as a political force in New York,” Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres told Semafor. (DSA endorsed the rally, but didn’t plan it, and later walked back its support.) “Its institutional influence will recede into the fringe where it belongs.”
DSA’s post-2016 relevance in electoral politics after decades on the fringe has made it the biggest target. Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar, who’d joined DSA to build his populist bona fides, denounced and quit it over the Times Square rally. (The metro Detroit DSA chapter pointed out that he’d already been ousted over his support for India’s nationalist prime minister.)
But to the dismay of many pro-peace progressives, less politically relevant groups — college student chapters, local Black Lives Matter offshoots — are getting nearly as much attention, for actions that they argue have next to zero support on the left. Social media users, especially on the right, have become exceedingly efficient at quickly identifying and publicizing offending examples as soon as they arise, forcing people to respond and often drawing out a new wave of incendiary responses to highlight next.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said that the media was telling a too-easy story of infighting, focusing on fringe activists or parsing the words used by Israel’s critics in Congress “who had the temerity to say ‘ceasefire.’”
“There is wall to wall condemnation of what happened, and we’re still in the phase where that’s the appropriate place to be,” said Ben-Ami, who spoke with Semafor shortly after learning that a friend’s daughter had been killed with her boyfriend in the Hamas attacks. “There will come another chapter — a more nuanced discussion, at the appropriate time. But we’re still in a phase where you’re finding, except for a very small number of outliers, nearly unanimous condemnation of Hamas and support for the people of Israel.”
For the students who make up a disproportionate share of activists, though, the campus politics have not been as easy to dismiss. J Street U, the same group’s student wing, issued a lengthy statement saying it was “deeply saddened and angered by attempts to justify, excuse, or ignore Hamas’s horrific crimes against Israeli civilians” by pro-Palestinian student groups.
Nor were these threats treated as merely intellectual in the aftermath of the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust: Around the world, there were concerns about dangers to Hillels, synagogues, and Jewish schools ahead of a planned “Day of Rage” called for by Hamas on Friday. At Columbia University, a longtime incubator of pro-Isrel and pro-Palestinian activism, the school was closed to the public after a Jewish student was physically attacked putting up flyers supportive of Israel.
Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost,who has been critical of Israel’s Gaza response, noted that his Central Florida district had already struggled with a rise in neo-Nazi activity: “Seems like week after week we’ve had Nazis march our streets and now this massacre and terrorist attack by Hamas.”
The 26-year old Frost and other progressives have tried to model a fine line approach of mourning losses in Israel and Gaza; calling out examples of antisemitism at home and abroad while also defending Muslims and Arabs from signs of backlash; and expressing outrage at Hamas’ attacks while challenging the administration to protect Palestinians caught in the crossfire.
On Wednesday evening, IfNotNow co-organized a vigil in Washington Square Park, where its allies commemorated the thousands of lives lost in Israel and Gaza. City comptroller Brad Lander, who had called the Times Square rally “abominable,” led the crowd in a call-and-response prayer.
“If I am for myself only, what am I?” said Lander. “If I can only see my peoples’ pain, how will we ever find those divine sparks, commanded by our tradition?”
Room for Disagreement
Activists whose response to the Hamas attacks have divided the left aren’t walking it back. At the Times Square rally, Eugene Puryear, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation — not DSA — became infamous for joking about a Hamas attack on a music festival that killed at least 260 people. “The resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” he said. Asked if he’d say the same thing again today, Puryear said he would.
“The focus on my comments is just to distract from what’s really happening — nearly 80 years of brutality meted out on Palestinians,” Puryear said. “If I rephrased it, people would be equally as mad about it; the core of my point is that the Palestinians are right to resist.”
BLM Chicago, not affiliated with the national Black Lives Matter organization (but conflated with it in media reports), put out a meme mocking the attack on the festival — a cartoon of a paraglider. “For everyone withdrawing support, saying they stood with us & now they’re removing signs, bye, toodles,” it posted on Thursday morning. “We’ve always been for Palestinian freedom.”
Notable
In N+1, David Klion writes that “emotion and bloodlust” have “overwhelmed” reason, with a clear impact on the left: “The upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground.”
In Politico, Emily Ngo and Nick Reisman see an “internal reckoning” unfolding for DSA, “shining a brighter spotlight on tensions between the often younger, left-leaning DSA-backed politicians and their mainstream Democratic colleagues.”
Hanna Trudo
Thu, October 12, 2023
Progressives face backlash over response to Israel attacks
Progressives are facing backlash over their initial responses to the attacks on Israel by Hamas militants, revealing the degree to which they’re at odds with others in the Democratic caucus over the issue.
Members of the Squad such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) took heat from fellow Democrats this week over statements criticized for being too tepid in the wake of the violent attacks against Israeli civilians.
Meanwhile, after mounting pressure, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned the “bigotry and callousness” at a pro-Palestinian rally aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York City.
The condemnation directed at certain segments of the left underscores the fissures within the Democratic Party when it comes to Israel. It also suggests progressives will have to navigate an increasingly difficult political environment in which they will be expected to unequivocally support Israel’s right to exist while also advocating for Palestinian rights.
“The challenge is to continue to respond, as I think a lot of progressive members have already done … to acknowledge the common humanity of all of us, of both people,” Matt Duss, a former senior foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told The Hill.
“We’re going to be getting to a moment where some people are going to be required to show real courage and take a page from Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the wake of 9/11,” said Duss, referring to the California progressive’s vote against the invasion of Afghanistan.
“To say, let’s think about this a little bit. We could be starting something that we’re not quite ready for, quite sure about,” he said.
Bush and Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, were among the most harshly criticized in the immediate aftermath of the initial wave of attacks in Israel. Tlaib suggested withholding United States support to fund Israel’s “apartheid government,” a comment that infuriated fellow lawmakers who found it offensive as the death toll continued to rise. She also categorized the terrorist attack as part of a “resistance” effort.
Bush, an equally outspoken House progressive, echoed Tlaib’s sentiments.
Some voices on the left saw their public remarks as appropriate calls for de-escalation that recognized the plight of both sides. They argued for an acknowledgment of suffering among civilians in both camps and denounced Hamas as a terrorist organization.
“Rep. Tlaib and Rep. Bush both issued statements that mourned the loss of Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives, and then said we need to address the root causes of violence to get to peace, and they are now being attacked,” said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, a progressive Jewish group.
But others in the party were enraged by the statements. Some of the Democratic caucus’s most pro-Israel members, including Reps. Ritchie Torres (N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), expressed their full disapproval.
“Shame on anyone who glorifies as ‘resistance’ the largest single-day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust,” Torres said, calling the statement “reprehensible and repulsive.”
The mounting pushback came as Israelis publicly mourned the severity of the ambush as videos showing the atrocities — many of them inflicted on women and children — spread across social media.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the attack by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, had left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, starting a war in which more than 2,300 people have been killed in total. The U.S. government said that 22 U.S. citizens had been killed in the conflict, and 17 were still unaccounted for.
In a sign of the growing pressure on progressives, Ocasio-Cortez earlier this week criticized the DSA-aligned rally in New York City’s Times Square, a stance that came after she was chided for supporting a ceasefire.
The rally, which was held in support of Palestinians, drew swift rebukes from leaders across the political spectrum. Ocasio-Cortez, whose district is not far from where the protests were held, eventually released a statement condemning it.
“The bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday were unacceptable and harmful in this devastating moment,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement reported by Politico. “It also did not speak for the thousands of New Yorkers who are capable of rejecting both Hamas’ horrifying attacks against innocent civilians as well as the grave injustices and violence Palestinians face under occupation.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing for the basis of the impeachment inquiry of President Biden on Thursday, September 28, 2023.
The clash between DSA affiliates and its usual allies such as Ocasio-Cortez highlights the delicate nature of the issue and its evolution on the left. While Democrats are reliable allies of Israel, the party has seen cracks in its support, as many on the progressive left have also pushed for Palestinian rights.
Duss said conversations are already happening between progressive lawmakers and outside advocates about addressing the conflict in a constructive and nuanced way — a potential uphill battle given the severity of the situation on the ground.
“This horror is very fresh. We’re still learning more about this hour by hour. It keeps getting more awful,” he said. “I do think people are thinking about ways to talk about this in the most constructive way possible.”
“Even in ‘normal’ times, this is a difficult discussion to have. It is far more difficult now for obvious reasons,” Duss added.
Sanders, who is Jewish and has sometimes clashed with pro-Israel Democrats, released a statement Wednesday addressing the conflict. He said Hamas committed a “terrorist assault on Israel” that could have “horrific short- and long-term consequences.”
His position — which included a reference to “justice for the Palestinian people” and called Israel’s tactics in response to the attack “a serious violation of international law” — went further than others in the Senate.
“Longer term, this attack is a major setback for any hope of peace and reconciliation in the region — and justice for the Palestinian people. For years, people of good will throughout the world, including some brave Israelis, have struggled against the blockade of Gaza, the daily humiliations of occupation in the West Bank, and the horrendous living conditions faced by so many Palestinians,” the Vermont senator wrote.
Some progressive Jewish activists say Capitol Hill Democrats should formally emphasize de-escalation and are looking to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the top body of elected liberals in the House, to lead the way.
“It has never been so important that we fight harder, because it just got a lot steeper,” said Miller, whose group is in regular communication with lawmakers. “And that means we need to be louder.”
Blurring the lines further among the left flank, other progressive officeholders offered staunch support for Israel.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.) went further than other Senate progressives for Israel, with Warren tearing up while discussing the devastating losses and Fetterman making it clear that he is in support of Israel “neutralizing the terrorists responsible for this barbarism.”
Meanwhile, many Democrats applauded President Biden’s speech Tuesday, in which he called the Hamas terrorist attack “pure, unadulterated evil” and reconfirmed his administration’s unwavering support for Israel.
In progressive circles, there is also hope that he and the administration will also acknowledge the struggles of Palestinians and are pushing for a conversation around de-escalation both in Congress and on Pennsylvania Ave. It’s their goal for that discussion to happen sooner than later.
“I understand you want to show complete support and sympathy for the Israelis,” said Duss, who added that the severity of the moment means the president should speak to the full depth of his country’s diversity.
“This is a president who has taken important steps to address issues of racial injustice and equality. I think a lot of progressives just want him to extend that to foreign policy,” he said.
Capitol Police Brief Progressives On Security Measures Amid Rise In Threats Against Them
Marita Vlachou
Fri, October 13, 2023
Marita Vlachou
Fri, October 13, 2023
The U.S. Capitol Police on Thursday briefed several progressive House members about security measures in place following an increase in violent threats against them in the days after Saturday’s surprise attack on Israel, according to a new report.
Politico reported that Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Summer Lee (Pa.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.) were among those to receive the briefings, citing three sources familiar with the matter.
A Capitol Police spokesperson told the outlet the department provided “several briefings” to lawmakers regarding enhanced protections in place.
The lawmakers have become targets over expressing positions critical of Israel as the country has continued bombarding Gaza in retribution for Hamas’ attack over the weekend.
Rep. (Wash.), who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, asked her fellow members during a closed-door meeting to defend their fellow Democratic lawmakers, according to Politico.
Meanwhile, the war in Israel continues to rage with more than 2,800 people confirmed dead on both sides.
The Israeli military on Friday ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza, which includes the densely populated Gaza City, within 24 hours ahead of what some presume will be a ground offensive.
The U.N. has warned the order would be “impossible” without “devastating humanitarian consequences.”
Ocasio-Cortez called the directive “unacceptable” in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Humanity is at stake,” she said. “Nearly half are children. We must halt this.”
U.S. Capitol Police are beefing up security measures throughout the Capitol complex after Hamas called for Friday to be a global “day of rage.”
In a statement shared with HuffPost, the department said while “there are not specific threats toward the Congress at this time, we are not taking any chances.”
“Some of what we are doing will be visible, but for safety reasons we cannot provide the public details about all of the resources that we are putting into protecting the Congress,” a spokesperson said. “Our dedicated teams are working around the clock to coordinate with our law enforcement and intelligence partners across the country to keep everyone safe.”
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