Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party by Peter Beinart

 

Nov. 7, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET

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CreditCredit...Illustration by Shoshana Schultz/The New York Times

By Peter Beinart

Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. His book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” is forthcoming.

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During the presidential campaign, journalists trying to assess the electoral impact of Israel's war in Gaza often focused on Arab and Muslim voters, particularly in Michigan. That’s understandable. In the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, Mich., which supported Joe Biden in 2020, results show that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by about six percentage points.

But viewing Gaza’s political repercussions merely through the lens of identity misses something fundamental. Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.

The outrage has been particularly intense among Black Americans and the young. This spring, encampments expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people rose on more than 100 college campuses. In February, the Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the nation’s most prominent Black congregations, called the war in Gaza a “mass genocide” and demanded that the Biden-Harris administration stop funding it. In June, the NAACP urged an end to weapons shipments as well. A June CBS News poll found that while most voters over the age of 65 supported arms sales to Israel, voters under the age of 30 opposed them by a ratio of more than three to one. And while only 56 percent of white voters favored cutting off weapons, among Black voters the figure was 75 percent.

Those pre-election polling numbers may explain some of what we saw Tuesday night. Kamala Harris is far more youthful than Joe Biden. Yet, early exit polls — from CNN, The Washington Post and Fox News and The Associated Press — suggest she suffered a sharp decline among voters under the age of 29 compared with Mr. Biden’s result in 2020. Ms. Harris is Black, yet according to CNN and The Washington Post, she did slightly worse than Mr. Biden among Black voters. One exit poll, from Fox News and The Associated Press, suggests she did significantly worse.

Surely, many young and Black voters were dissatisfied with the economy. Some may have been attracted to Mr. Trump’s message on immigration. Others may have been reluctant to vote for a woman.

But these broader dynamics do not fully explain Ms. Harris’s underperformance, because she appears to have lost far less ground among voters who are older and white. Her share of white voters equaled Mr. Biden’s. Among voters over age 65, she actually gained ground.

Which brings us back to Ms. Harris’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party’s most devoted constituents wanted to end sales of weapons to Israel, the Biden administration kept sending them, even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel expanded the war into Lebanon. And not only did Ms. Harris not break with Mr. Biden’s policy, she went out of her way to make voters who care about Palestinian rights feel unwelcome. When antiwar activists interrupted a speech of hers in August, Ms. Harris snapped, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.” At the Democratic National Convention, her campaign rebuffed a plea from activists to let a Palestinian American speak from the main stage. And just days before the election, the Harris surrogate Bill Clinton told a Michigan crowd that Hamas had “force[d]” Israel to kill Palestinian civilians by using them as human shields.

All this provided Mr. Trump an opportunity. According to The Times, his campaign found that undecided voters in swing states were about six times as likely as other swing-state voters to be motivated by the war in Gaza. Mr. Trump wooed them. He pledged to help “the Middle East return to real peace” and lambasted former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican with whom Ms. Harris had chosen to campaign, as a “radical war hawk.” Like Richard Nixon, who in 1968 appealed to antiwar voters by promising “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” Mr. Trump portrayed himself — however insincerely — as the candidate of peace.

For months now, commentators close to the Palestinian rights movement have feared exactly this scenario. In August, the Palestinian American analyst Yousef Munayyer warned that “Unless Harris takes some steps to break from Biden’s Israel policy, the same issue that helped tank an already vulnerable Joe Biden with his base could put major obstacles in her path to victory.”

But people who are passionate about Palestinian rights rarely occupy influential positions in Democratic campaigns. For decades, the party’s politicians and operatives have treated the struggle for Palestinian freedom as a taboo. They’ve grown so accustomed to sequestering it from their stated commitment to human rights that, even amid what prominent scholars call a genocide, Ms. Harris thought it wiser to campaign with Ms. Cheney than, say, Representative Rashida Tlaib. Despite overwhelming evidence, her campaign could not see that among progressive voters, the Palestine exception no longer applies.

There is only one path forward. Although it will require a fierce intraparty brawl, Democrats — who claim to respect human equality and international law — must begin to align their policies on Israel and Palestine with these broader principles. In this new era, in which supporting Palestinian freedom has become central to what it means to be progressive, the Palestinian exception is not just immoral. It’s politically disastrous.

For a long time, Palestinians in Gaza and beyond have been paying for that exception with their lives. Now Americans are paying too. It may cost us our freedom.