New York Times Guest Essay: Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party

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Last edited Fri Nov 29, 2024, 07:06 PM - Edit history (1)

https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/11/06/129321_1_07Beinart_wg_1080p.mp4

Below is a copyrighted work first published in The New York Times by Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart), a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. He’s also a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York, an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. His book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” is forthcoming.

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.

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Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/opinion/democrats-israel-gaza-war.html

https://archive.is/9QlFW

Footnote: A few weeks I wrote about the parallels between the 1968 and 2024 elections.
DU-ers can politely agree or disagree with Mr. Beinart's analysis (or mine, which are similar). The BLUF is helping the American Democratic Party to defeat the GOP in 2028 and all the races in-between and afterwards.