Electoralism cannot free Palestine

In response to an escalating Israeli genocide, the Palestine solidarity movement has transformed over the past two years, both in the United States and globally.

In the aftermath of the recently announced ceasefire, it is important to recognize that the international movement played a critical role in forcing this reprieve for the people of Gaza. While far from delivering justice to Palestinians, it brought a desperately needed pause to Israel’s bombardment, however temporary and limited. In fact, when Donald Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu on October 9 that he must accept a ceasefire deal and that Israel “cannot fight the world,” he did so in the context of the latest wave of global fightback for Palestine. This included the Sumud Flotilla, general strikes across Italy, and mass protests across Europe. This wave of resistance once again forced global attention back onto Gaza, demonstrated the extent of global solidarity with the Palestinian people, and forced right-wing governments like Italy’s to face their population’s opposition to their complicity. To a lesser extent, this latest wave of upsurge for Palestine included U.S. celebrities, from Ms. Rachel to actors like Hannah Einbinder speaking out at the Emmys, but did not take a mass shape in the United States as it did across Europe.

This is the context in which Eric Blanc’s latest interview with Bashir Abu-Manneh and Hoda Mitwally, “Ultraleftism Can’t Free Palestine,” which ran in Jacobin, should be assessed. The writers speak to the fact that the solidarity movement for Palestine within the United States is not as strong or sizable as it could be, which is true. Especially given its decades serving as Israel’s primary backer, and with the U.S. government acting as Israel’s co-conspirator in the past two years of genocide, an even stronger, mass fighting movement is needed to end Washington’s role in sustaining Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

While the U.S.-based movement has made gains over the past two years—particularly in the encampments across numerous campuses, in forcing the resignations of more than a dozen U.S. officials under Joe Biden, and arguably in forcing Biden to step down from running for office again—the movement also has notable weaknesses. It is far from where it needs to be to effectively challenge the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Discussions of strategy, therefore, should be welcome. We need to assess and learn from both the strengths and weaknesses of our movement to continue collectively organizing over the coming months and years. Organizers and activists within the Palestine solidarity movement should have a common goal of building as broad and politically effective a movement as possible. This means grappling with the challenges of doing so in a time of severe repression and, at the same time, encouraging layers of people who are new to activism to join us.

But if a deeper discussion of strategy is both needed and welcome, the analysis offered in “Ultraleftism Can’t Free Palestine” fails in important ways. The writers focus overwhelmingly on the problems within the Left, suggesting that much of the movement for Palestine is focused on overly narrow goals that do not speak to the wider U.S. working class. They seek to defend Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians from criticism, and in so doing they claim that activists within the movement are taking cues from “middle-class activists,” rather than sticking to class-based demands and focusing on an electoral strategy.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the demands of the movement have been clear and unwavering since October 2023, with the call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. This has been linked to a demand to end U.S. arms sales to Israel and a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions of the Israeli state. These central demands of the movement, put forward consistently by organizations and activists across the movement throughout the course of the genocide, can hardly be described as ultraleft.

While some sections of the movement have put forward additional slogans and points of emphasis, such as a need for anti-Zionism and a rejection of Democratic Party politicians, these have not been advanced as its central demands or requirements for joining the movement.

Second, the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans who make up a large segment of the movement are by and large members of the working class. In fact, it was early on in the genocide when Arab Americans, in particular, generalized slogans about how the U.S. spends money on Israel’s wars rather than on healthcare and education at home. These arguments gained widespread traction, becoming a point of focus for the movement. Arab American activists in the United States, while part of the working class here, also often retain ties to families and communities facing horror back home. These activists are part of a multi-racial Palestine movement.

The implication of the Jacobin interview with Abu-Manneh and Mitwally is that the working class, by which they effectively mean the white working class, is entirely disconnected from demands around Palestine. In reality, the U.S. working class is multi-racial, as is the movement for Palestine. And much of this multi-racial working class can be moved to act for Palestine out of solidarity, not simply out of their own material interests, as the interview claims.

Contrary to what the interview suggests, a strategic focus that goes beyond electoral demands and expediency is not a reflection of middle-class bias. In fact, poor and working-class people vote at much lower levels than those who are middle class or wealthy, given years of betrayal and abandonment by the two-party system.

The approach within “Ultraleftism Can’t Free Palestine” is one broadly shared by Jacobin and much of the more electorally focused sections of the Democratic Socialists of America. The argument goes well beyond how we build the Palestine movement, but claims that the Left has gone too far and must abandon many of its ideas to reach an allegedly rightward-leaning working class. Instead of meeting layers of people who are newly radicalizing in their thousands, coming to sharper conclusions about Palestine, capitalism, and the Democrats, and eager for political discussion and to mobilize, their approach calls for diluting left-wing politics to their lowest common denominator. These politics seek to ensure compatibility with the electoral demands and logic of establishment politics and the Democratic Party.

Last month, I attended the Palestine-focused panel at the Jacobin conference in New York City, which espoused the same perspective. The panel overwhelmingly focused on the shortcomings of the Left, rather than, for example, the challenges of repression and organizing under a Trump presidency, which are severe. This is a significant oversight as the Trump administration has significantly escalated the repression that was pursued by President Biden and prior administrations, against the Palestine solidarity movement. This is a development that Blanc seems to minimize in his interview. ,.

During the conference session, the panel moderator voiced that it was a problem that the Left continues to focus its energies on criticizing politicians such as AOC and Zohran Mamdani, to which the speakers agreed. One of the speakers also insisted that slogans including “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” are too radical and should be abandoned. At a time when Mamdani has bowed to pressure to distance himself from phrases such as “Globalize the Intifada”—a slogan that has been demonized by establishment politicians and been met with racist smears from the Right—the Left should defend the demands of our movement, not jump to censor more of them.

The “Ultraleftism” interview and the Jacobin conference session rest on the illusion that if activists stopped criticizing AOC and other politicians, and stick to the electoral realm, other Democrats will join in cutting off funding to Israel, and that progressives like Bernie Sanders and AOC can create shifts within the Democratic Party on their own, without the pressure of the Palestine solidarity movement.

But politicians like Mamdani—who I hope will become the new mayor of New York City—are on hostile terrain inside the Democratic Party, and are routinely forced to water down their politics to advance. This is already happening, with Mamdani stating that he will bring Zionists into his administration, distancing himself from “Globalize the Intifada,” and going out of his way to meet with and to reassure the Democratic Party leadership.

What we need instead are movements that can fight for their principles and demands, no matter the politicians in office, and that can keep progressive politicians accountable. Subsuming the movement into the Democratic Party would drastically weaken the solidarity movement and neuter its ability to effectively tackle the joint U.S.-Israel war on Palestinians. If tethered to electoral solutions and to working with Democrats, the movement is likely to see continuously watered-down demands, and even the abandonment of basic demands that do not fit with Democratic Party goals. (This was made abundantly clear yet again with the denial of a Palestinian voice at the Democratic National Convention and with AOC’s assertion in her speech that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza.”)

Contrary to what is implied by Abu-Manneh and Mitwally, anti-Zionism is not a barrier to entry to the Palestine solidarity movement. Instead, anti-Zionism is a standpoint that segments of the movement, including many Jewish activists, have adopted as they have become more left-wing and radicalized throughout the course of the genocide. But the authors’ insistence that a commitment to anti-Zionism be dropped threatens the gains of the movement.

We should be working to raise the level of political education about Zionism and the history of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, which includes advancing more radical, left-wing conceptualizations of the struggle as a fight against settler-colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism, rather than seeing the genocide in Gaza as a problem of “human rights” and a rogue Israeli (or U.S.) administration.

The interview also manages to diminish the weight of the student encampment movement. Blanc redirects blame for the repression student activists have faced, claiming that the students had an “excessive focus” on security culture and that the language of the encampments was “inflammatory.” In fact, the student movement brought Gaza back into national attention last spring after coverage had quieted and the need to attend to security was imposed by college administrations and police and politicians who attacked the free speech and assembly rights of the movement, often in league with far right forces seeking to harass, doxx, intimidate, and silence protestors.

The encampments had a range of politics. The activists involved were predominantly young students, who are naturally going to experiment with tactics and different political frameworks. This is also part of a healthy process of movement growth. Bottom-up, student-led activism should be encouraged, not admonished and channeled into electoral-only approaches.

It is true that ultraleftism exists within the movement. We must be sober about the state of the movement and honestly assess the numerous challenges ahead, rather than just pat ourselves on the back. Some of the ultraleftism is inevitable. Tens of thousands of people became active and organized around Palestine for the first time over the past two years. These newly emerging layers of activists have been forced to navigate the challenges of the movement in a country with a Left that has been so weakened that it lacks seasoned, enduring leadership and, at times, even basic organizing know-how. Any criticism of the range of politics, and the strategic debates, within the movement should include our collective reckoning with the Left it inherited as we attempt to overcome these challenges.

The related problem of moralism, we have often seen  in the Palestine movement, is rooted in an understandable outrage and a lack of clear direction on how to broaden and deepen the movement in a period of such devastation.

This has led to illusions among many in the movement,in other capitalist states that claim to offer an alternative to U.S. hegemony. This includes a strategic focus on armed struggle, or more specifically the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” neither of which will lead to liberation.

But the solution to these weaknesses is not to insist that activists focus almost exclusively on electoral struggles (to appease an imaginary, one-dimensional working class), or to decline to criticize politicians like AOC who have continuously waffled on Palestine.

The Palestine solidarity movement does not need to rethink its central demands, relinquish its slogans, backtrack from the gains it has made, or focus on the halls of power to the detriment of its political independence. Many working-class people in the United States understand and are moved by the horrors Palestinians are facing—and more can be won to this understanding through effective organizing.

Instead of watering down our politics, we need more assessments and strategy sessions, more cross-organizational forums, more discussions of how to maintain the movement with the rise of fascism and the far right, more debates and serious thinking about how to hold elected officials accountable, and serious study of lessons from the past.