In Washington’s streets, a new popular consensus on Palestine

I took an early train into Washington, D.C. on July 24. As I stepped out of Union Station, I found myself in the company of hundreds of police officers, armed men with heavy brows and assault rifles. Around me, protesters with Palestinian flags and keffiyehs oriented themselves in the heat, all arriving from out of town.

The presence of the police — some of whom were bussed in from New York, 240 miles to the north — was for the benefit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was set to speak to Congress that day. The capital pulsed with the threat of violence.

I walked southwest to Pennsylvania Avenue toward the National Gallery of Art, where demonstrators had begun to gather. Several large tour buses had pulled in, each carrying more protesters. A large stage had been erected at one intersection and people walked around as speakers remonstrated from the podium.

Many wore red t-shirts, representing the “red line” that President Joe Biden claimed to have set for Netanyahu and the Israeli army in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip. At various points the crowd erupted in chants: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Netanyahu, you can’t hide — we charge you with genocide.”

The previous day had seen seven major U.S. labor unions call for an end to the war on Gaza, which many experts now agree constitutes a genocide. The unions represent seven million Americans and are stalwarts of Democratic Party politics, with critical mobilizing power ahead of the November elections.  They issued a public letter to Biden insisting that “immediately cutting U.S. military aid to the Israeli government is necessary to bring about a peaceful resolution to this conflict.”

That same day, Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization, staged a mass protest in the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building, where many Congressional representatives maintain their offices. The protesters there also wore red shirts, many of them proclaiming, “Not in my Name.”

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Washington demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech to the U.S. Congress, July 24, 2024. (Kerem Gencer)

These coordinated mobilizations represent a stark break from the logic that underpins the Democratic Party’s support for Israel. The various groups that comprise the Shut It Down coalition, which organized the demonstration in Washington, have never aligned with the Israel lobby that the Democrats, like the Republicans, have embraced for decades. In fact, the coalition’s success in turning out huge numbers of people on the streets magnifies the perception that the grip of the lobby, and its ability to marginalize dissenting voices, is breaking. 

Brandon Mancilla, Regional Director and member of the United Auto Workers’ International Executive Board, said to me, “The fate of our country is in the balance and voters have made it very clear that a majority of Americans support an end to the war,” noting that 83 percent of Democrats back a ceasefire.

“We’re here also because we have great concern for the future and workers rights in our country and that’s intimately tied to the fate of the Palestinian people and the continuation of this war,” he said. “If we’re serious about protecting democracy and the labor movement, we can’t have the return of Donald Trump. In order to do that, we need to have a different course on Gaza.”

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Washington demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech to the U.S. Congress, July 24, 2024. (Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)

Israel’s Guardian

The Democratic Party has been slow to acknowledge the chasm between the views of the overwhelming majority of its base and its leadership’s unwavering support for an apartheid state. But change is in the air.

Many took note in March, for example, when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explicitly called for a new government in Israel on the Senate floor. For liberal Zionists like Schumer, the genocide in Gaza is a source of alarm primarily because of its impact on Israel’s international reputation — but that has not undermined his commitment to the Israeli state project.

Schumer once described himself in the following way: “My name … comes from the [Hebrew] word ‘shomer,’ which means ‘guardian.’ My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov and I believe [God], actually, gave [my] name as one of my roles that is very important in the United States Senate, to be a shomer for Israel, and I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.”

Senator Chuck Schumer speaks to the 2018 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington DC, March 5, 2018. (Courtesy of AIPAC)

Memorably, he also sought to undermine the Barack Obama administration’s efforts to engineer a nuclear deal with Iran. Schumer’s break with Netanyahu was thus consistent with his longstanding efforts to put Israel first — ahead of any single Israeli leader, and even ahead of his own party and president.

The Senate majority leader’s denunciation was notable for another reason: it was further evidence that the “bipartisan consensus” on Israel —  the hegemonic view among American politicians that Israel is democratic, enlightened, strategically vital, and not an apartheid state — was breaking.

Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was, in part, a result of these developments in American domestic politics. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the house, sought to exploit the apparent breach in the bipartisan consensus by inviting the prime minister, a widely acknowledged war criminal, to speak. Yet perhaps to Johnson’s surprise, the invitation was supported by both Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House.

Johnson may have mistaken mild disagreements between liberal Zionists like Schumer and Netanyahu, for actual disagreements on substance. While Schumer and Netanyahu may diverge on whether road signs in Israel should carry both Hebrew and Arabic lettering, they do not fundamentally disagree that Israel must remain a “Jewish state” by working zealously to secure and maintain superior rights for Jewish citizens.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Washington demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech to the U.S. Congress, July 24, 2024. (Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)

Nor do they disagree on America’s essential commitment to protecting Israel in every forum. Schumer explained his support for Netanyahu’s invitation by saying that “America’s relationship with Israel is ironclad and transcends one person or prime minister.” In a sense, they represent the poles on the narrow spectrum of opinion among members of the Israel lobby, represented institutionally by center-right JStreet and far right AIPAC in America.

Jeffries’ support, meanwhile, likely springs in great part from the fact that he cannot afford to alienate the Israel lobby; he undoubtedly took note of AIPAC’s success in unseating Jamaal Bowman, a congressman Jeffries personally endorsed.

Smash-mouth politics

Jeffries is in many ways a lagging indicator of the Israel lobby’s power in America. But there is reason to believe an opening is developing, one that may herald generational change.

Schumer, Biden, and other politicians of their generation represent the tail end of a vanguard in Washington. Today, there appears to be less uncritical support for Israel among elected public officials and their voters. Among Democrats, there is growing outrage at AIPAC’s funneling of money to Republicans in competitive primaries, which is driving the perception that the organization is fundamentally a Republican organ. More than 100 Democrats — half of the party’s representation in Congress — boycotted Netanyahu’s speech, compared to 50 abstentions in 2015, when he last issued a bipartisan address.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Washington demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech to the U.S. Congress, July 24, 2024. (Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)

As Chris Habiby, the National Government Affairs and Advocacy Director for the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said to me on Wednesday in Washington, “We’re putting together a comprehensive list of who attended and who didn’t to identify allies.” The goal, he said, is “to identify and expand our coalition of allies,” including people who may support an embargo on U.S. arms shipments to the Israeli army, and to “empower Arab American [and other] voters to organize and use their voices to have a real impact on elections,” and consequently, on policy.

Amid the genocide in Gaza, the fragmentation of the Israel lobby’s power has only accelerated. The campus protests which spread across the United States this past spring highlight a generational change which may lead, in time, to a bottom-up change in policy. As Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, said to me, “Israel has lost the war for uncritical acceptance, especially among people under 40. The battle for the moral high ground has been lost. What’s left is power politics — the naked political power of groups like AIPAC.”

The “smash-mouth politics” which was showcased with Netanyahu’s appearance in Washington is also drawing the ire of some on the American right, too. Thomas Massie, a Republican in the House of Representatives, spoke openly and derisively with the conservative media commentator Tucker Carlson about the “AIPAC babysitters” who attend his fellow Republicans.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the AIPAC Conference in Washington, D.C. on March 6, 2018 (Haim Zach/GPO)

But it is on the left that the change is most visible. Columns in The New Republic and the New York Times have voiced opposition to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as Kamala Harris’s possible vice presidential pick, primarily because of his record comparing anti-war students for Palestine to the Ku Klux Klan. As one opinion writer at the New York Times put it bluntly, “by not putting Shapiro on the ticket, Harris avoids splits in the party over the war in Gaza.”

‘This is where the people are’

By noon of July 24, the protesters in Washington had succeeded in shutting down six intersections in the capital. They soon began marching toward the Capitol building, where the police used pepper spray against them. I had ducked into a nearby building to watch a livestream of Netanyahu’s speech, which ran alongside clips from the march: a policewoman wielding a baton, and a protester burning an effigy of Netanyahu.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein addresses protesters in Washington, July 24, 2024. (Kerem Gencer)

Before I left Washington, however, I spoke with Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President. I asked her why she was participating in the demonstration. “I’m here because the genocide has to stop,” she said. “This is where the power is. This is where the people are.”

“I’m also here because I’m a Jew,” she added. “I was raised just after the Holocaust, in a Jewish community, attending a Jewish synagogue where we were coming to terms with a genocide. And coming to terms with a genocide had everything to do with not allowing it to ever happen again.”

Her views were strongly resonant all around me. Many of the young people who are turned off by the Democratic establishment have witnessed the Gaza genocide in real time on their phones or computer screens. They watched videos of Palestinian children beheaded by Israeli bombs, or of far-right Israelis rioting in support of alleged rapists in the army, and they understandably recoil.

And while they may not be able to stop the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza today, they are tomorrow’s voters. And horror is not easily forgotten.