How and why did this pro-Palestine, anti-genocide, anti-imperialist internationalist movement get so giant in the way that it has — after many years of many of us being frustrated with, but maybe resigned to, the US left being stuck in a somewhat narrowly domestic agenda?

Because it does kind of feel like this is a massive movement that came out of nowhere, it’s important to recognize that a lot of the groundwork for it has been laid over the past generation of organizing in the Palestine solidarity movement. The end of the Second Intifada and the emergence of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a movement demand, a paradigm or framework of struggle — that kicked off a lot of organizing. A lot on college campuses, but also in communities across the country.

The period between then and now has been relatively stagnant in terms of geopolitics. There’s the mini–civil war in Gaza; by the end of it, the siege had begun. Hamas was in power, explicitly treated not as a legitimate government by the Americans and the Israelis — who were not expecting them to win an election — but as a terrorist organization. The policy had been to keep the Strip in a state of poverty and isolation from the outside world.

Between 2006 or 2007 and now, that’s been the status quo. What’s happened has been a series of wars, if you can call them that — assaults on Gaza from Israel — to keep Hamas’s military infrastructure in check, to keep Palestinians divided, and to prevent any semblance of progress toward Palestinian unity.

Against that backdrop, there has been a growing movement in the United States and around the world to break that status quo, to move beyond that and actually advance the cause of Palestinian liberation. It has been a very slow process to contest the interests of American institutions in upholding the status quo, upholding Zionism, and upholding American foreign policy more broadly.

But it has made progress. It has spread and developed through many cycles of violence and mobilized many people and led to the development of many organizations. While the movement victories have not always been easy, there have been victories over the past fifteen years or so as various institutions adopt BDS programs: churches, unions, and so on.

All of that groundwork was laid, and when October 7 happened, it obviously brought the Palestinian issue to the forefront of American global politics. The genocide in Gaza that we’re witnessing now started hours after the October 7 attack by Hamas.

Very soon, there were a lot of people who were exposed to a lot of devastation, a lot of violence. There was a landscape of movement actors who were prepared to receive them and turn them out into the streets, to provide them with political education and a vocabulary for talking about not just what’s happening in the present, but also the history — and not just the history of the past fifteen years, but history going back to 1948 and before.

What we saw was a movement that was able not just to mobilize in a short time period like we saw in 2020 with the George Floyd uprisings. That mobilization could also be plugged into a repertoire of tactics, a set of demands, and a body of political knowledge. That’s how I understand that kind of explosion of organizing and actions and dedications on Palestine that we’ve seen over the past several months.

Waleed, what’s your take? Thinking back to the US invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, the United States frequently perpetuates horrible deeds, invades other countries, and starts wars. Yet we have not had sustained mass movements, and definitely not mass movements with this sort of internationalist bent, for my entire time on the Left, since the late 1990s. What’s different now?

There are three main origin points I see for this current movement. I think September 11 is the place that I would start.

I grew up in Northern Virginia during the September 11 attacks, and mosques were heavily surveilled by the FBI in Northern Virginia. There’s a famous thing about black parents talking to their kids about how to talk to the police; my family always told me never to talk about politics in school because I could get in trouble.

There were many stories about undercover FBI agents at mosques trying to entrap people. This was the days of the Patriot Act. Many of us from the Muslim community, or the Arab community, grew up with parents who were terrified of FBI surveillance, racial harassment, the threat of racial violence. You might remember how many Muslim and Arab and South Asian cab drivers put American flags up as bumper stickers or outside their house — not only as an expression of solidarity, but also as a shield against potential racial harassment or violence.

For a lot of the children of that generation, and for the adults too, we feel like we were politically silenced or scared to organize or protest the “wars on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two decades later, we are part of the country’s fabric — we are part of this country’s democracy — and are civically engaged and feel like we have just as much of a right and have cast away the fear of the post-9/11 era to really bring the politics we may have felt at that time, or the politics of Third Worldism or anti-imperialism that some immigrants come with to this country, to American politics and to the Democratic Party.
You see that a lot in states like Michigan, where in Dearborn and Detroit, in so many cities across the country, the party is essentially a political vehicle for minority communities and communities of people of color. We typically hear in the media about the Latino Democratic Party, or the black Democratic Party. In a state like Michigan, the Arab American community and the Muslim American community are a huge part of the Democratic Party. It’s a different Democratic Party than what it looked like in 2001–2.

The mayor of Dearborn is an Arab American. Rashida Tlaib is a member of Congress representing that community; the Michigan House majority floor leader is Abraham Aiyash, who’s Yemeni. There is some sort of political power that is able to mainstream some of these views in a way that there were very few voices speaking out in mainstream political or media spaces after the September 11 attacks.

How 9/11 shapes Muslim and Arab Americans also shapes millennials and Gen Z even if you’re not Muslim and Arab — because you grew up in a time when you were sold two wars on terror that didn’t make much sense or have any sort of outcomes or guaranteed safety for Americans. With the recent withdrawal by President Joe Biden from the war in Afghanistan, I think many people are left wondering, what was the point of all this money and all this bloodshed? Like you saw with Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama in 2008, and with Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary in 2016, this opposition to the Iraq War shapes that generation.

The other two things that I think are key here: Bernie and the Squad begin to mainstream some of the anti-occupation, anti-apartheid organizing. Even the small ways Bernie brought it up in 2016 contributed to his victory in Michigan over Hillary Clinton. There was a big moment where Vox had a headline at the time, “Bernie uses the ‘P-word’ on a debate stage” — and near New York, of all places.

The Squad gets elected, and very soon their biggest adversaries are AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), especially against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. When you have political actors who represent to some extent the voices of Palestinian human rights, that allows more people to feel like they can also contribute that voice to their values and the way they think about politics.

The third piece is the Jewish community. In 2014, with Operation Protective Edge, that’s when you had a lot of this emerging infrastructure from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow, to protest the horrific invasion of Gaza. A lot of those leaders have been building membership organizations across country to provide, typically, a younger Jewish voice critical of Zionism, and a lot of those leaders have now come of political age, become political operatives, started new institutions, and provided a home for Jewish millennials and Jewish Zoomers to do organizing from a Jewish perspective against the occupation, against apartheid, in Israel/Palestine. They have given young Jews a political home that maybe didn’t exist in the same way a decade ago.

The last thing I’ll say is that social media matters. People are getting their news from TikTok, Instagram, and other outlets and not letting just CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times dictate the frames of this debate. If you look at the generational divide of public opinion on this issue, it tracks whether you are getting your news from newspapers and television or if you are getting your news from online sources. Just the proliferation of voices on Instagram and TikTok that are coming directly from journalists in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza — that [has made it] very hard to deny the reality of how horrifying the war is.

One thing I want to add to the context that you laid out there, Waleed, is that Black Lives Matter, and in particular the George Floyd mass movement of the summer of 2020 — I feel that it taught an entire generation of people what basic oppression looks like. So when they learned about Palestine, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, you did not need a PhD in history to understand what was going on; it was obvious.

Putting the Palestine solidarity movement and its explosive growth into this longer historical context, I always tend to date it back to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, or maybe the Wisconsin state capitol occupation that began earlier that year. Both of which, interestingly enough, were inspired by the so-called Arab Spring uprisings. From where I’m sitting each of those struggles emerged and then layered on top of one another, developing a new American left in a way that we did not have a Left in decades prior.

What do you two see in terms of thinking about this left that’s been emerging over the past decade and a half as this sort of layered construction, under-construction project? What does it mean for the Left finally to be taking this anti-imperial or internationalist turn?

I agree with a lot of Waleed’s explanation in terms of the factors that allowed the mobilization to happen, but I tell a bit of a different story about why internationalism, and why there’s this kind of Third Worldist tenor to the movement that we’re seeing.

A lot of that is because this centers Palestine, and those are the left tendencies prominent within the Palestine movement for historical reasons. But one important thing to reckon with, especially in comparison to the 9/11 moment, is where liberalism is at. September 11 happened at a time when liberalism and an idea of liberal internationalism was at a much higher point than it is now. There was much more to believe in, in the aftermath of the post–Cold War period.

Also, I was a kid during the onset of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War, and I remember very much thinking about George W. Bush as an illiberal politician — that neoconservatism shares some kind of common ground with liberal internationalism, but is fundamentally illiberal. And I held on to the idea that there is an ideological alternative here that could prevent this bloodshed, that could prevent this war.

I think that the experience of history from then to now is one of the decline of liberalism. It has culminated in this moment now, where we are seeing probably not just the worst violence that we’ve seen in history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but one of the most egregious atrocities in modern times and maybe this millennium under supposedly liberal leadership. There’s not the foil of, “If this had happened under a Democrat, you know things would be different.” Everyone who’s horrified by this has to reckon with the fact that this is what liberal policy produced, and that’s a pretty radicalizing set of conditions for people who are in no way persuaded by Donald Trump’s project or right-wing fascism that’s also now ascendant in the United States.

So by default, the set of ideas that people are naturally inclined to are more left-wing ones at this moment. And then, why Third Worldism, why internationalism in particular, has to do with historical circumstances. It has to do with the fact that it was the Palestinian resistance that initiated this historical change in this historical moment.

I think you’re right to suggest that Palestine, both in terms of Palestinians in historic Palestine and also those especially on the diasporic Palestinian left, have kept the flame of the certain kind of Third World internationalism alive in a sense. That was really prevalent in a much broader way maybe like half a century ago, but it mostly disappeared.

When it comes to people like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, Jamaal Bowman, and Jessica Cisneros, a congressional district is about one million people. The constituents of that district realize that [AIPAC is] the number-one spender to stop you from having a black principal [like Jamaal Bowman] as your representative, or a Ferguson organizer in the case of Cori Bush, or Summer Lee, a racial-justice organizer. Why is this pro-Israel organization, AIPAC, spending millions of dollars to prevent you from having more working-class, more progressive representation?

You can build coalitions [because of] your adversary. For most people who vote for Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee in those districts, I don’t think internationalism or Palestinian rights are a top-three issue for them. But they like their member of Congress for a million other reasons. In my personal experience of working on those campaigns, I’ve seen people getting more politically educated through being like, “I’m confused as to why AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby hates my congressman so much because he called for cease-fire.”

I spend a lot of my time talking with mainstream media journalists, liberal journalists. For a lot of the past six months, what they’ve been saying to me is, “With the Biden campaign, do you think Muslims and Arabs are going to sit out [the election] when the man who called for a Muslim ban is running for president?” What I have noticed from the congregationalists, like people who attend mosque and maybe are religious — which I think is a very large constituency in this country — their Democratic Party brand loyalty, or partisanship, is very thin, compared to black Democrats.

Since 2016, we’ve had so much discussion about whether black men are becoming Republican or leaving the Democratic Party; whether Latinos are leaving the Democratic Party; whether Asian Americans are leaving the Democratic Party. For various different reasons, what’s happening with the Arab community is very complicated. But the idea that most Arab Americans are very committed to the Democratic Party is just not there on a partisan level, and they do want something in exchange for their votes. They want to see some recognition of their humanity and their policy aspirations.

When it comes to partisan loyalty, Jewish Zionists in the Democratic Party are likely more loyal Democrats than Arab and Muslim voters, just because there’s a longer history there. My understanding of the polling is Jewish Democrats who are Zionists often don’t even think of Israel as a top-three issue. They care about reproductive rights, or democracy, or climate change, or things like this.

So there is a little bit of antiestablishment energy that doesn’t actively map onto a totally left-right political spectrum happening among more religious Muslims and Arabs, or older Muslims and Arabs.

That’s a really interesting point. By many accounts, the majority of Muslims voted for George W. Bush in 2000. Obviously things changed pretty radically after September 11 and with the onset of the war on terror, but it was a constituency at the time that was portrayed as oriented toward socially conservative family values, brimming with businesspeople and professionals. Grover Norquist, after the 2000 election said, “George W. Bush was elected president of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.”

What does this moment mean for American politics? What does it mean for the political alignment of American Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, for this remarkable alliance around Palestine between left-movement forces and these heavily immigrant communities? And where might it all be heading?

The best frame to understand some of this stuff is antiestablishment politics. Because pro-Palestinian speech is so criminalized and ostracized — and because in so many political spaces, workplaces that dissent is crushed in this country — that tends to lend itself to antiestablishment views. And even if Muslim American or Arab Americans might not agree with Donald Trump on a lot of things, Trump is a genius at playing with people’s antiestablishment views and confusing categories. Trump makes very conflicting statements about this war, either because he is a master at confusing people, or because he doesn’t know much about the issue. And Trump has a knee-jerk antiwar sentiment.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw the Muslim and Arab vote for Trump go up based on some of the confusing things. Some people think that; they only see Trump statements that are antiwar, and they don’t see the ones that are pro-war as much.

I think the third-party vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein or Robert Kennedy is likely to increase. There was a poll conducted by Biden’s former pollster, Celinda Lake, in November of Michigan Democrats, and Robert Kennedy was doing really well. Not because, I think, anyone has researched his platform, but because he represents an antiestablishment voice.

There is an impression that these people are loyal Democrats because Trump is a white supremacist who campaigned on the Muslim ban. They have their heads in the sand a little bit, and they’re used to dealing with a certain crowd of Washington, DC, Arab and Muslim operatives who are committed to racial and economic justice as college-educated liberals.

One of the reasons we started the Uncommitted campaign was to visualize this anger and upset, especially from Michigan, from Muslim registered Democrats. There’s a whole history we can get into about how so many Arabs and Muslims in the Michigan area were part of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which also brings people into the Democratic Party. But I can tell you that on the phone banks that we did for that campaign, people would hang up on us when they heard we were calling about a Democratic primary. Because a lot of people are disaffiliating from the Democratic Party altogether — not necessarily going anywhere, but just being stuck.

Dylan, what’s your take? Both in terms of the disaffiliation from the Democratic establishment that we’re seeing, but also an emerging alliance between Arab and Muslim communities and the broader anti-imperialist US left.

What we were saying very much tracks with my experience from before October. I was hearing a lot of frustration in the Palestinian community about the Democratic Party and folks suggesting all the time that maybe we should try the Right, basically. It’s just a reaction to disappointment and feeling ignored by the Democratic Party, and it makes a lot of sense.

I don’t know why the Democrats would take at least the Palestinian vote for granted, and maybe the Arab vote more broadly. For trivial class reasons, Palestinians do relatively well in the United States. So I think that’s a factor as well. But one of the longest-standing tropes about US policy with respect to Palestine is the issue doesn’t make that much of a difference. If the thinking is, they could never vote for Trump because of the Muslim ban — if Palestine is your number-one issue, you’ve seen Republican presidents and Democratic presidents, and especially in recent history, there hasn’t been that much of a difference. So you’re not risking all that much.

If you feel like you are being ignored by the party — that your voices are being taken for granted — wanting to leverage your power of exit is very sensible. I haven’t had a lot of these conversations since October 7, but I can only imagine that that has been exacerbated.

At the same time, you have a Left that also has felt taken for granted and treated as a partner that’s dragged along kicking and screaming in the left-liberal coalition. There is a degree of condescension from the more [policy-oriented], more center side of that coalition, [a sense] that the Left is always complaining; they’re always criticizing; nothing is ever good enough for them; they’re looking for perfection. But the adults in the room have accomplished something — you got the climate bill.

There was a broad dismissal. Since October 7 and the unmasking of the Biden administration’s total disregard, even contempt, for Palestinian life, and its total disregard or contempt for international institutions that exist to prevent the horrendous atrocities and crimes we’re seeing unfold on a daily basis . . . the Left is now saying “Fuck this. I am not going to be dragged kicking and screaming through this election while this is happening.”

The mistake of the Biden administration is to treat these as isolated phenomena and not things that can compound. If you can say, “The Left is always pissed off, and we’re not going to cave to them. Maybe we’ll throw them some marijuana deregistration and student debt relief or something, and they’ll be fine.” Or, “Enough of them will vote for us. The Muslims are scared of Trump; they don’t want to get deported.” That kind of dismissive attitude across the board [shows that] the Biden administration election campaign has [not] been very sophisticated or very savvy.

Now Biden is at a point where there’s a real problem, where they have not managed the geopolitics of the war itself, so that they’ve been able to end the war on a timeline such that it will go away before the election. [The administration has] let these electoral issues get out of control.

I want to respond to something Waleed said earlier. You were describing talking to voters who were radicalized by the experience of the blowback [from the Israel lobby] — having the experience of being represented by someone that you like, who’s making pretty sensible demands about an issue that’s ongoing and that resonates with you, and then watching as they are called antisemites and smeared as lobby money pours into their district to try to unseat them. Understandably, that is a very radicalizing experience: that very sensible demand is being treated as an institutional threat.

That’s exactly what I see happening on college campuses all across the country, and why I believe that we’ve seen radicalization of the student movement tactically and politically. Likewise, these students are making relatively basic demands, and from a moral standpoint, commonsense demands: demanding a cease-fire, demanding that institutions disaffiliate from Israeli apartheid, and so on. And like these politicians, they are then immediately being called antisemites, being targeted, being called terrorist sympathizers, being suspended, being silenced, being censored, being doxed.

I’ve watched as students go through that process and realize that they, on some level, are an institutional threat. What does that mean about the institution if a demand for an end to the slaughter of Palestinian civilians is a threat to it? You start to question what the institution is built on and what it does. That’s a shortcut to some pretty radical left-wing ideas.

The student movement is becoming a big part of the larger Palestine movement. And it became such a big part of it at a point when the rest of the moment felt like it was entering into a bit of a wall, in the face of so much protest effectuating no substantial change from the administration vis-a-vis support for Israel’s ongoing genocide.

What’s the significance of it being undergraduate students who escalated the movement to this explosive next level? How should we assess the role of students as protagonists of social struggle?

A lot of it is what Dylan was talking about, which is that the deep criminalization and ostracization and attacks on antiwar students on campus, with SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] or JVP or whoever — the criminalization of their speech and their inability to publicly gather at places like Columbia and Barnard increasingly put them into a corner where they were getting mad. They needed to figure out how to escalate and organize to express their dissent.

My understanding of what happened at Barnard is that the college said you couldn’t put any political signs on your dorm-room doors. So students just started doing graffiti, putting signs on every bathroom, and at the partner campus. The idea that, as a student, you are not allowed to put any political signage on your dorm-room door . . . as a young person, l would be deeply offended by that. I would think it was extraordinary. What is it about this particular issue that now I’m not allowed to express myself politically? It wasn’t just about Israel and Palestine; you couldn’t put anything political on your door.

At Columbia, they banned SJP and JVP from being official campus organizations. They called JVP an antisemitic organization. These university presidents were brought forward in a McCarthyist show trial in Washington.

None of this makes sense to a young person who grows up with values of racial and economic justice, grows up with values of pluralism, grows up with [the idea] that student activism is a way to deal with these things. I remember my orientation at college: they really emphasize values of social justice and pluralism, how great the school is, and how there are so many different views on campus. To experience such backlash, and from the highest levels of government and media in this country, I think, activated these students to escalate their tactics.

When I was a student, I was in SJP. There were two main things we did: One, there was a campaign to get Sabra hummus removed from the cafeteria. Two, people would talk about divestment, but because we weren’t well organized and didn’t have a student council very interested in taking this up, most of the effort went into political education around Sabra hummus.

I’m glad that we moved away from the Sabra hummus stage of this campaign, but I was in college in 2009–2010. The movement has changed a lot from the small demands that were very symbolic and not going to get mainstream media attention, that were barely going to get campus media attention, to bringing this politics straight to the front page of the New York Times. I think it’s progress.

Because of working in electoral politics, I am in some liberal philanthropic spaces. There are liberal donors who are confused about this moment, especially people who aren’t Muslim or who don’t know much about this issue. They all say they’re afraid of a 1968 repeat, and [they ask], are students actually helping or hurting the anti-Trump coalition? My response to them is: I imagine SJP’s annual budget is less than $200,000, and if you’ve never invested in Palestinian organizing or youth organizing on this issue, you don’t get to really criticize what they’ve done. I don’t think the students have done things 100 percent in the right way or whatever, but they’re also young and learning and not professional organizers.

Compared to pro-Israel student activists or even climate activists, who get so much funding from philanthropy — the budgets for student organizing for pro-Israel activism and the budget for climate organizing on campus are in the millions of dollars. So I hope that, if you are a liberal donor listening to this, who maybe is like, “I don’t really agree with all the messaging or the tactics,” I wouldn’t take that as a [reason to say], “Fuck these students, I’m out.” [The response should be something like], “I think there’s something here to nurture — and this is something that’s been criminally underinvested in, Palestinian youth organizing.”

Second, young people have shown that they’re willing to sacrifice a lot of their academic careers, their political careers. And I don’t think they want to work at McKinsey or Deloitte. They want to dedicate their careers and jobs to organizing. In the same way that the racial justice movement or climate justice movement or even Occupy really shook up liberal philanthropy, this is a place where young people are activated — let’s invest in organizing around this.

It would be easy to overlearn the lesson of, why the students, why now? I work with the student movement all the time, and I am tremendously impressed with what they’ve been able to do on both an organizational level and a tactical level.

But these are very young people, and they’re not particularly sophisticated in movement strategy or in political messaging. The way that I would explain their role in this historic moment has to do with the conjuncture on a kind of micro level and on a bigger level. But it also has to do with like the way that the media cycle works in the United States and the relationship between elite media and campus life. [There’s this] bizarre fetish about what the kids are up to, and that filters through the liberal end of culture-war panic and pearl clutching that’s produced by media for consumption.

Which then converges with the far-right Republican, MAGA, anti-DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] culture-war fixations on education.

I was recently telling someone that it used to be that the right wing only had one joke with respect to gender identity, which is, “Actually, I identify as an attack helicopter.” And right now, the one joke that is being leveraged against student Palestine organizers is, “You all are gay, and Hamas hates gay people.”

Why don’t you go there and see how long you survive?

That’s the joke: you blue-haired person of confusing sexual identity to me, you would be despised by the people you are sympathizing with. To me, that’s a perfect encapsulation of the right-wing and the left-wing culture-war panic. There’s liberal panic that naive students are getting seduced by left-wing radicalisms that pose a threat to the American-led world order, and right-wing panic about people doing scary things with their gender and gender presentation and stuff like that. They are really fused into that one quip, and that’s why we’re seeing it everywhere.

You have that media panic, and at the same time at many of the elite universities, often the leadership is in a role where their primary duty is protecting the image of the institution. There are reasons for that that have to do with the rule of endowments and the neoliberalization of the university. At the end of the day, a lot of times the role of the presidents is to keep the trustees happy, keep the donors happy, keep the image of the university spic and span. I’m always telling students this — that’s what they need to be thinking about, the image of the university, and how that’s affecting the administration’s willingness to crack down on them, and how they can leverage that against the administration.

The administration doesn’t want the investment grade of the university to go down. It doesn’t want donors to pull funding or threaten to pull funding. It doesn’t want a congressional inquiry that is accusing them of antisemitism. It doesn’t want administrative complaints or lawsuits from Zionist organizations making all of these claims.

That’s a whole ecosystem that feeds on itself: the kind of media, state action, private action, the administrative decisions of the universities. That’s one cycle that motivates or catalyzes repression, and repression catalyzes radicalization.

One of the most horrifying things about the repression of student activists is when you have mainstream Democrats like Dan Goldman and Eric Adams coming in, essentially standing with Mike Johnson and the MAGA movement and sharing the same positions. One of the things I’ve heard from the Columbia faculty union is that it really wants to make clear that this is not just about Israel-Palestine. It is also about the MAGA movement and the far right’s crackdown on higher education and public education.
It had critical race theory before; it has done attacks on LGBTQ-friendly curricula in public schools. This is another way for them to increase their version of a crackdown on higher education.

The fact that you have so many Democrats allying with some of the most far-right politicians in the country is really scary to me. What would stop [a far-right crackdown] the next time students or faculty are upset about social injustice — whether it’s about unions or racial justice or gender justice? This is setting a precedent that Congress has the ability to cut funding and bring people in for McCarthyist hearings. To me, that is deeply terrifying, particularly if Republicans have control of all three branches of government in the next term.

The same goes for policing, in particular, in terms of legitimating in advance. The fascistic police crackdowns on dissent that liberals purport to be so worried about under Trump . . . the irony is that they are legitimating that sort of practice in advance.

It feels a lot like the sequence laid out in Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, where you have the liberals allying with the party of order, the far right, to repress the Left, and then you get rid of the Left. You know who’s left standing? It’s not the liberals, at the end of the day.

Zionism and Israel advocacy has, since before October 7, been the site of this marriage of education panic, anti-critical-race-theory type movements and arguments. There have been concerted efforts, like for example in California, to make sure that the curriculum is not inclusive of Palestinian frameworks.

The other thing that I wanted to bring in to explain why the students, why now, is the geopolitical context. October 7 was pretty close to the start of the academic year. So you have basically an entire school year of student activism that’s facing a tremendous amount of repression, on the organizational level and on an individual level, at the same time the war effort is just proceeding. There’s a ton of protest, but it’s not preventing the Biden administration from greenlighting Israel’s war effort with very few restrictions — up through to the point where, with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision, many countries are withdrawing support, if they were supporting Israel, and raising all sorts of alarms.

So the war is continuing, and it reaches this important juncture point where you have over a million Palestinians who have been displaced multiple times living in tents in Rafah. In every other place in Gaza where this war has taken place, it’s been street battles between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) trying to avoid ambushes from the Palestinian resistance while they are basically just massacring civilians. And the aerial assaults have been totally devastating and indiscriminate.

I think there [was] a recognition that that’s what [loomed] for Rafah. There [was] a recognition that the Biden administration [did not] have the political will to stop it.

You have students there who are watching all of this, and the thing that’s been anticipated for months now is on the precipice of happening, and no one’s doing anything about it really. Those are the conditions in which you escalate.

The risk calculus that we were referencing before — students being willing to get suspended, to lose job offers, all of that — if you have a heart, if you have a moral compass, that calculation shifts. If the thing to be prevented is that the already unthinkable devastation of this war is about to increase by an order of magnitude, then you’re going to have more people who are willing to take on more risk.

The final piece of explanation [has to do with] the 1968 precedents. Already with the Uncommitted campaign and the Democratic convention in Chicago, everyone is talking about 1968. Is it a ’68 moment? And the most iconic images from 1968 are those of the student protests, of the students taking the buildings.

I think there are some tremendous differences between now and 1968, in terms of the state of capitalism, and what it means in material terms to be a young leftist now, and what demands are now lying around. But I think that students got it in their head, like, “It’s our turn.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the images look pretty similar, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the ’68 thing became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All that’s to say there’re a lot of compelling reasons in terms of understanding why the students, why now. But I don’t [take] any major lessons about what it means for the Left or the role of undergraduate students in the Left, because I root it in the specific moment.

I want to return to the question of the liberal alliances with the Right against the Left over Palestine. How do you make sense of the Democratic political leadership entering these sorts of alliances with the Right in order to oppose the Left at the very same moment that they warned of the danger posed by a second Trump turn? What does it mean that Biden, domestically and internationally, is aligning himself practically materially, discursively, with the far right? Lastly, what does it mean if you only hope to defeat American fascism is some sort of left-liberal coalition?

I think all of us, in various ways, have been involved in these new socialist projects that have involved various forms of coalition and tactical alliance with the center left, and now we’re being blamed for ending that coalition and paving the way to Trump’s presidency. But it probably seems pretty clear to everybody that liberals have declared that coalition impossible. What does that mean?

One of the most influential books in my life is How Movements Anchor Parties by Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins. That book is about how movements ally with political parties and political parties ally with social movements out of self-interest. Does the movement enable the party to have access to voters or donors or networks it would otherwise not have access to? Does it mean the movement receives some sort of policy patronage in exchange?

One thing that I think about is the Democratic Party is essentially a network of interest groups that used to be social movements that anchor the party: principally the labor movement, reproductive rights movement, climate movement, black civil rights, Latino immigrant rights, LGBTQ equality. One of the anchors of the Democratic Party is the pro-Israel community, and it’s a constituency of the party in terms of both voters and donors and network. Ultimately, the Arab and Muslim community, or the antiwar community, is not considered as a loyal part of that coalition.

What’s been interesting for me to figure out is the movements that haven’t gotten through the Democratic Party’s iron gates must now put more of an emphasis on the exact sort of conflict and disruption that all of those other movements had to engage in in order to get a seat at the table at the White House or the Biden campaign, which is through disruption, conflict, primaries, social movement activity.

One of three things would have to happen. First, the pro-Israel community of the Democratic Party fundamentally either becomes Republican or shifts its view on this issue to be more aligned with the pro-Palestinian left. If that doesn’t happen, the second thing that could happen is that Arabs, Muslims, and young people develop the political infrastructure to supplant the influence of the community in the Democrat Party. The third thing that could happen is what happens if Arab, Muslim, and young people decide to withdraw their votes, on a scale significant enough to toss the election.

I think about someone like my dad, who wasn’t excited in 2020 and isn’t that excited now. If you ask him what his number-one issue is, he would say it’s the economy — inflation. My dad’s a moderate Democrat who has antiestablishment views, and he thinks Biden’s too old to be president. On top of that, you’ve put a disastrous war on Gaza as a third mark against Biden, to now make it even more difficult for people to go to the polls enthusiastically to vote for him or even unenthusiastically to go vote for him.

I don’t understand, if his campaign is about restoring the soul of our democracy, why President Biden would put his ideological beliefs about the place of Israel in the Middle East and the place of Israel in American politics, and the place of the pro-Israel community as a constituency of his and the Democratic Party, ahead of his electoral chances — other than that he has his head in the sand, or he’s really an ideologue about this.

I go back and forth between those two things based on what I hear from people close to the campaign; [I hear] that they have all this polling to show that this is a pretty small percentage of people who care about this. But the amount of work they’re doing to assuage any moderate white Democrat who is critical of the president on the border or LGBTQ issues — they spent so much money and time to persuade that voter on coming back to the Democratic Party, but they don’t when it comes to Palestinians or young people who need to be persuaded to come back to the Democratic Party. There’s no investment to bring those people back into the tent.

I’m not so closely tapped in with electoral happenings, and I have a nonelectoral explanation for what caused the fracture in the left-liberal coalition. The way I see it is that what happened on October 7 is that Hamas put the American government in a position where their options were to support the war effort or to support Israel’s defeat in the war. That is just by virtue of the fact that a cease-fire on October 8 would have been a Hamas victory, and that’s been true every day since, for better or worse. That’s not a moral judgment; that’s just the nature of guerrilla war.

That famous Henry Kissinger line: that the stronger party in a conflict like this, to win, has to defeat their enemy. The weaker, guerrilla force simply has to not lose.

The conventional army loses if it doesn’t win; the guerilla army wins if it doesn’t lose. I believe that has been the calculus of the US government since October 7, that we can’t let Israel lose this because we need Israel. Israel is a part of the world order, in which we are the hegemon, and it’s part of our broader vision for the region and for the world. In fact, we’re working on normalizing their relations with our other allies there.

Ultimately what we want to do is basically stamp out the Palestinian issue and quiet down the region so we can pivot and focus on China. That was the overarching principle of foreign policy of the Obama administration, and it has largely continued under Biden.

It’s not a question of whether it’s electorally savvy to do so. It’s that they can’t let Israel fall. I’m making a realpolitik argument here. The argument is that, if the war ended today, Hamas would declare victory, and it would have reason to. The message that that would send to other political actors in the region is that Israel’s weak and that armed struggle is a viable political strategy. And that likely would ultimately lead to the demise of Israel.

That would not be an unreasonable conclusion to draw, and it’s also one that the US government is considering. So I think there’s a sense in which the “blob” and the administration have bought into the ideology of American empire; they really believe this is existential and essential for Israel, but also critical to the project of American imperium.

I think that they think domestic concerns are real and are trying to navigate them in a moment where they represent a real threat to Biden’s reelection, but they’re trying to have everything. They’re trying to avoid the image of Hamas victory. They are trying to remove them from the Strip. They’re trying to do so in such a manner that it does not set off a regional conflagration that puts Israel at greater risk or draws US military into the into the region with boots on the ground; in a way that does not blow up Camp David, the Israel and Egypt security arrangement, which is also critical to US control in the region; in a way that is on to some minimal degree politically sellable in Israel.

What that ends up meaning is that they have to end the war without ending it and allow the Rafah invasion without allowing it. That’s why, I think, what we’re seeing feels like confusion at the top level, mixed signals, stalling. It’s because Israel is in a rough spot and the Biden administration is in a rough spot as well, because they are really trying to [maneuver in] a situation in which they feel they have extremely little room.

I’m not a policy expert; I’m more an electoral politics person. What I was thinking of as Dan was talking is the shadow of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and how so much of the interpretation of the Democratic Party political establishment and the White House was that that was a mistake. You had the Taliban retakeover. There was not a coherent story of what the war was for, whether the outcomes were achieved. You also then had a refugee crisis.

Absolutely. And I don’t know whether that’s really taught the United States any meaningful lessons in how to conduct these kinds of counterinsurgency operations. They don’t. I don’t think that they are equipped to handle this any better, but I do agree that it’s looming, and [Afghanistan is] probably the best model for a drag-down version of this war.

The argument you’re making is premised on Israel being so important to the United States. So my next question is, what is it that makes Israel so important to the United States? Is it Israel’s perceived role in US imperial strategy in some directly functional, materially grounded sense? Or is it instead something more like an ideological surplus of a more materially grounded imperial strategy? Has whatever sort of rational basis for Israel’s role in US imperial strategy has become eclipsed by an extremely fervent ideological attachment to Zionism — an attachment that might not be the United States’ “imperial interests”?

Are there contradictions at work here, within US imperialist strategy between US state actors, between Israel and the United States, or between Israel and other US allies? You mentioned Egypt, and obviously the Camp David Accords from 1978 are the foundation of what the United States has been building up to through the recent attempts to normalize with Saudi Arabia, sidelining Palestine permanently.

What explains this special relationship? What are the contradictions within it? How might movements productively exploit those contradictions to break this interminable status quo?

Like many political questions, I think there are a lot of frameworks and a lot of contradictions. So I would posit that the spectrum of thinking on this question ranges from on the one end things like Israel is the fifty-first state, Israel is our guy on the ground and is essentially an extension of American policy. If you listen to the speeches of a lot of the Persian resistance, that’s the framework. And also the broader Axis of Resistance — people like Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah — will often adopt this kind of rhetoric.

The total other end of the spectrum is the kind of things that are more familiar as antisemitic conspiracy theory — the Jews run everything and have perverted American interests through the Israel lobby and are directing America. So it’s a bit of a tail wagging the dog situation.

I tend to find [more plausible] the frameworks closer to the end of America is Israel’s fifty-first state. The United States is the global hegemon; it’s been a steward of global capitalism for a long century and views as its role and responsibility the policing of threats to that world order, holding open the world for American capital, and asserting military dominance. Israel has a key function in that system.

I don’t think that that is separable from the question of ideology. Why Israel? Why the special relationship? Why the kinship? All of these have historical ideological explanations and they cannot be separated from the racial character of the United States. This is a country that is founded on a frontier logic of a national identity where certain folks are imbued with rights, as against the government and as against the natives and populations around them.

That logic carried us through a century of territorial expansion and had to be reformulated after the Civil War and took on a different character in the last century. But it certainly is recognizable in the Israeli settler project. That ideology of settler nationalism is profoundly resilient and informs why Israel is a central ally in the region.

Maybe you could theorize the world in which Palestinian liberation is consonant with American imperial power. But to do that kind of experiment, you have to undo all of the past practice and the relationships and the power structures that we’ve built up through the actual projects of the decision-makers.

You have Brett McGurk, who’s been the key adviser to Joe Biden through this war, this moment of crisis. He has been in Washington for a number of administrations now and has his pet project, the normalization program that they’re pushing forward. That’s what everyone buys into. So why would you try to rebuild American power in a whole new radical direction if you know you have this option right in front of you?

Aaron David Miller went on Ezra Klein’s podcast a few months ago, and he represents the blob in many ways. He said that he believed President Biden would be the last Democrat aligned with AIPAC to be president. On some level because of the politics of the situation and things I’ve heard from people, I’m not sure that even Kamala Harris would be as committed to this project as President Biden has been.

There’s this kind of zombie liberalism aspect to it. There are so many think pieces about how on his approach to climate, student debt, economic policy, even Afghanistan, Biden broke in fundamental ways with the Democratic Party’s old guard and the [Bill] Clinton and Obama presidencies. But on this issue, he’s doubled down on a set of failed policies and not represented the broad coalition of the Democratic Party that has supported his campaigns. Every poll I’ve seen has shown that over 50 percent of his own voters believe that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Then there’s a piece of it that is: the remnants of empire or the ghosts of empire do come home eventually. It is the ironic fate of the Biden campaign to be in the hands of immigrants in Michigan who have witnessed and experienced — whether themselves or their parents or grandparents — the legacy of US weaponry and Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. These are voters in Michigan who have intimate knowledge, personal experiences; people in their families have been killed either in this war or in any of the series of wars that Israel has led in Israel, Palestine, or Lebanon.

These voters could be the ones who decide Biden’s fate. The decisions abroad do come back home eventually. I wish that that would be a [starting point] to develop solidarity and develop some sort of common humanity.

Dylan, circling back to this landscape that you and then Waleed were laying out — the domestic landscape and the ways that it’s intertwined with the larger geopolitical order and the US role in it — are there contradictions at work that should be informing our strategy?

There are contradictions that are fundamental to the settler-colonial project. The fascistic violence that it takes to sustain it, alongside the liberal-progressive ideological justification for why the settler ought to be able to dispossess — those are obviously in pretty strong tension with one another. That’s the principal contradiction that I think ought to inform critique of Zionism in addition to critique of the United States.

In Israel today, you see a sometimes-fractious relationship between the settler right and the IDF and the state, because those logics are different and no single actor is necessarily thinking from the vantage point of the project as a whole. So you see conflict, and you see also a conflict of the same structure happening between the United States under a liberal regime and Israel under a fascist regime where they may be aligned on policy. The policy may be that Hamas needs to be destroyed because it is an existential threat to Israel, and you have tremendously different explanations for why that is and how it happens.

You have [Benjamin] Netanyahu and [right-wing Israeli defense minister] Yoav Gallant and all these other freaks going on television and saying we need to eradicate Amalek and just being openly genocidal, and you have completely different rhetoric coming from the liberals in the White House. But this is where [the contradiction] is exploitable: the convergence is very obvious and warrants explanation. How is it that progressive ideas can not only support verbally but fund this government entity that is saying it is going to be genocidal and is in practice being genocidal?

What that can do is directly attack the ideological grounding of the liberal here. [The Left can] say, “How can you purport to be a liberal while you’re authorizing this?” This genocide has brought out truly the ugliest possible things that humanity has to offer. For the political reasons that I was saying, it’s put Biden in a position where he feels like he has no choice but to support it. That’s a profound contradiction and an opportunity for the Left to finish the job of American liberalism.

Some of the way I think about it is [in terms of] the campaign to rid the Democratic Party of fossil fuel influence, or the even longer campaign to move the gun lobby and gun manufacturers and the NRA [National Rifle Association] out of the Democratic Party. Any fight that the Democrats wage on health care is a fight against private insurers and the doctors’ lobby. In many ways, what is happening here — whether it’s with donors or voters or simply on a cultural level — the contradictions are not that dissimilar from those in other fights that progressives or Democrats had to wage on other issues.

With fossil fuels, that fight is not complete yet, but it has changed Biden’s approach to it. On the NRA, we’ve seen a completely different story; the NRA is almost nowhere to be seen in the Democratic Party. And the party has, for various cultural reasons, decided that it cannot be a party that tolerates any sort of association with the NRA.
What those contradictions look like playing out has to do with this becoming an increasingly partisan issue. These young people are mostly Democrats. As the generation of young people who care about Palestine and Palestinian rights mature, they will increasingly elect people who agree with them, depending on how [much] they’re able to beat back the AIPAC influence.

Trying to think about how this plays out, not just in the next three to six months, but in the next five to ten years, I imagine that a house divided against itself can’t stand. The Democratic Party has to choose either to be a party in which AIPAC is in the tent or one in which AIPAC is out of the tent. Increasingly, there’s a constituency of Arab and Muslim Democrats and young people who feel deeply — in the same way that they might feel about the NRA or Exxon — that something has to give here.

The party’s already struggling to create a political majority of this country for a variety of reasons. This may be another reason why it can’t construct a political majority. If the Democratic Party becomes the party of liberal values, humanitarian values, multiracial democracy, and pluralism in the face of far-right fascism in the characters of Trump and Netanyahu, it becomes increasingly unstable for them to make a case for their alliance with Israel.

I have a hard time seeing that happening. I have a hard time seeing the Democrats disaffiliate with AIPAC without having a foreign policy that can replace our relationship with Israel. I don’t know that that vision exists — because to hold that Democratic coalition together, you need to hold together people who are on the Left, who have no fidelity to an image of American supremacy, with people who do believe in American hegemony and are fearful of a world without it and believe that America should continue to steward global capitalism and be the hegemon.

I don’t know how you square that; the challenge of squaring that in a way that is anti-Zionist feels like an even more difficult problem to solve. And I frankly just don’t see how it happens. For that reason, I am left cynical about the possibility of a left-liberal electoral coalition that can win elections in the near- or medium-term future.

Part of what Dylan was saying earlier was that the Biden administration’s foreign policy is largely based on containment of China. If you read anything [US national security advisor] Jake Sullivan has written about this, it is not just a foreign policy vision, but a political issue: that one way you can construct a political majority in this country and bring back working-class voters into the Democratic Party is demonizing China and building industrial policy in the United States that is pro-clean energy and in opposition to the threat of the political and economic expansion of China.

There are a million contradictions baked into that foreign policy vision that the current Democratic Party coalition has had. So I agree with Dylan that it’s very hard to see what it would look like to have an anti-Zionist politics, or even an anti-AIPAC politics, within that larger vision that is currently holding the party coalition together. Because all things are related — part of the Abraham Accords and the normalization of Saudi Arabia is also about China.

We could very well just muddle through the next decade or two and maybe toss more elections to the far right and allow Trump to consolidate power. The Left and liberals might together lose the next era of American politics to the far right, which seems more and more likely every day because Biden can’t assemble a political majority.

So I don’t disagree with Dylan’s pessimism on this. But I do think this question will not go away, in terms of how Democrats are able to build a political coalition that can maintain a network of donors and voters and a coherent ideology capable of taking on MAGA and Trumpism.

Does the importance of Zionism to the US ruling class, and to the American capitalist state and its imperialist projects, reveal something about why Palestinian liberation is in turn important for the US left and for an emancipatory political project in general?

The moral value of opposing US-sponsored genocide and supporting human liberation is obvious. But why is it strategically important as well? Is it functionally central to dismantling empire abroad and thus also somehow to transforming politics and social relations at home? Or is it more that it’s a particular struggle that metaphorically stands in for a universal program — that Palestine somehow signals and will help shape other struggles to come? What is it that gives this struggle its universal quality?

There are a lot of ways you can answer this question. The way that I think about the most is that I view the struggle for Palestinian liberation to be a dress rehearsal for many of the larger conflicts that I see coming down the road as climate change continues to worsen, as questions around resource access and migratory flows compound over the next couple of decades.

I think that the questions of nationalist exclusion, of race-based xenophobia, of religious national identity, are all going to be exacerbated, and we’re going to see Palestine ten times over. I’m especially thinking about the southern border of the United States, but also elsewhere around the world; you have rich countries that are the destination for millions of refugees who are fleeing areas devastated by climate change, and the strategies of population control are indicative of probably a century of those struggles. I think that the racial logics are profoundly relevant.

There are many ways in which Palestine feels like an anachronism; it is an explicitly colonial as opposed to a neocolonial situation, in which you have active settler expansion. But also there are many ways in which it’s potentially indicative of our future. So my positive vision of the left political project starts with Palestinian liberation, but builds on that: to win the world we want for the oppressed people of the world who will continue to be its protagonists, far past the end of my lifetime.

I’ve spent a lot of time [talking] with clergy in the last two months on this issue. One thing we’ve been talking a lot about is returning to some first principles that I think animate the Left. Some of the dominant frames and ways to think about this issue are through a postcolonial lens, an intersectional lens, a Marxist lens, a political-strategist lens. A lot of my conversations with clergy have led me to try to [think about] some basic ethical principles of what it means to be human and share the world with people. In the same way that society treats the poor or prisoners or refugees or immigrants, how does it treat people who are stateless?

The House of Representatives and the Senate have yet to hold a single vigil mourning any Palestinian civilian who’s been killed in this war, and they have held several vigils for Israeli civilians who have been killed. Which they should. But the fact that our government is unable to hold a single vigil for any of the children, any of the women, any of the people killed in Palestine, to me, raises profoundly ethical questions of who we are and where the limits of the circle of human solidarity are.

I remember being on consultant calls with Democratic Party strategists. A lot of these elections [involve] big coalitions: there are people on the Left and people who are liberals, whatever. Sometimes we would hear on a conference call that AIPAC may be starting to get involved in this district. Then you would always get a consultant from Washington who would be like, let’s put out a tweet saying we stand with Israel, just to make sure they don’t get involved in this race.

This person hasn’t spent more than three seconds thinking about what they just said. They don’t know anything about the issue. Their whole goal is to try to do what they can to win this race. That is how a lot of Washington operates. You go along to get along, and you try to avoid conflict, and you make things easier for your boss.

I think this movement and this call for the basic equality of all human beings is addressing that normalization of dehumanization. To raise the question of, when you say, let’s put out a tweet saying we stand with Israel . . . like, can you think about it from any more ethical, principled stance that would enable you to have a politics based on some level of human solidarity and some level of solidarity with people who are suffering — and under the worst conditions possible, which are war and ethnic cleansing and genocide?

You can judge a lot from a person, especially in Democratic Party circles, in terms of how they’re willing to navigate this issue, and if they’re not willing to stand up on this issue and stand up to AIPAC. Where else are they going to cave when it gets tough? Are they going to cave on fossil fuels, on policing, on health care? It doesn’t speak well of a person, or a leader, or a staffer, or a strategist if they have no fight in them when the fight gets tough. I think it reveals a lot about a person’s ethical principles.