Kamala Harris – a dilemma for Liberals in the USA
JVL Introduction
What should citizens of the USA, who are horrified by what Israel is doing in Palestine, do in the forthcoming presidential election? Here Benjamin Moser outlines that dilemma and also that Palestine is a domestic policy issue at least as much as a foreign policy one. As Moser says: “We know that Palestine is an American problem. It’s not like Rwanda, say, or Bosnia. You can say that the United States could have stopped those genocides, but not that the United States caused or supported them. We were not actually sending billions of dollars to the Hutus or the Serbs. We were not handing out machetes in Kigali as we are handing out 2000-pound bombs to Israel. Slobodan Milosevic was not, like Benjamin Netanyahu, getting standing ovations in the United States Congress.”
While the UK’s level of arms sales to Israel is much smaller, morally – and potentially politically – the issue is the same. The ICJ has called on all governments to stop trading with Israel because of its decades long illegal occupation or be complicit in these illegal acts. The UK is reviewing whether the arms it sends are used defensively (and so, presumably OK) or offensively. This is a nonsensical distinction. All arms sales and all normalisation of Israel needs to end now.
This article was originally published by The Nation on Fri 30 Aug 2024. Read the original here.
I’m Still Hoping to Vote for Kamala Harris
But the hope I felt when she became the nominee has been curdling into despair over her refusal to allow a Palestinian to address the convention—and her continuing silence on Gaza.
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An excellent analysis. Even someone like Kamala Harris who is trying to promote the principles of freedom, equality, morality and legality as the cornerstones of her campaign seems unable to apply these to Palestinian people. Like so many leaders of supposedly progressive western democracies, she is willing to support human rights for only some people and/or is terrified of the power of the Zionist lobby which quickly attaches the anti-semitist label to anyone opposing the atrocities of Israel: Probably the reason why our own Labour Government is also still giving a blank check (and regular supplies of arms) to Israel regardless of its crimes against humanity. A very difficult choice for American voters. I guess you just have to grit your teeth and hope that once in office, Harris does not follow Biden in his slavish devotion to Israel and complicity in its crimes. We all hope for better times!
It’s high time that the American left stopped its ‘lesser evilism’. As far as the Palestinians are concerned the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They are both vicious imperialist parties and committed to capitalism. The only way is to form a socialist party based on the working class. Trump is horrific but at least people see him for what he is. Kamala Harris just a continuation of Genocide Joe.
The Democrats are the graveyard of all left-wing movements and the sooner the American left wakes up the better. The fact is of course is that the American capitalist system is fundamentally undemocratic and beneath the sugar coating of democratic rights is the mailed fist of repression. It is high time that a broad socialist coalition began exposing this fact and laying bare the ‘democratic’ pretension of US capitalism before we are all engulfed in a nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.
In short it is time for the left to say goodbye to the Democrats and started to take up class politics not the ethnic multi-culturalism combined with feminist imperialism that sees abortion rights as the only form of rights
I sympathise with Benjamin Moser’s predicament. But I also go some of the way with Tony Greenstein’s case, that there is little to hope for from either the American Democratic Party or its main political opponent.
I have to object against Tony, however, that there is really only a very marginal left left in the USA—the left is weak enough in the UK but it’s in a worse condition here. There are, to be sure, quite a lot of what I’ll term socio-cultural progressives. But their ambitions extend no further, really, than to extract benefits from the system for themselves or their favoured cause, and so they cannot be relied upon, in my view, as people ready, willing, and able to pursue anything more genuinely left domestically. And they’re even less likely to pursue any sort of left internationalist approach.
Domestically, I have no doubt that Harris and the Democrats are much more preferable than Trump and the Republicans. Yet what happens domestically will have larger consequences, unfortunate consequences.
Internationally, the choice is much less clear: on the one hand, an attempt to buttress by any means necessary that “rules-based international order”—recall Harris’s espousal of lethality in her acceptance speech; and on the other hand, a vigorous and no doubt often brutal nationalism led by Trump and others who observe no limits. There’s no American left coming along any time soon to constitute another alternative.
Link to recent ad from the Jewish Democratic Council of America saying, ‘Donald Trump praises dictators and follows their playbook, while he politicizes religion and incites hatred toward Jews. The time to stand up to hate and fascism is now.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vXdEHnOJVc
Hat-tip Ha’aretz ‘The Stakes Could Not Be Higher’: Jewish Democrats’ Ad Blitz in Swing States Links Trump to Dictators. Jewish Democratic Council of America plans to spend more than a million dollars on targeted ads in this election cycle to drive the Jewish vote for Democrats
https://archive.ph/ZfmpJ#selection-523.0-543.157
Rationally there are few grounds for hope that Israel’s extermination of the Palestinians will be brought to an early end. However…
Tim Waltz seems to “get” the change in US policy needed towards Israel and statehood for the Palestinians more than Kamala Harris does (and much more than Biden does).
Waltz is a historian, coach and an effective leader who’s delivered (at local / regional level) radical, unconventional policies he’s had to fight for. If Harris wins the Presidency, Waltz MAY be able to coax the new administration into more rational, more US centric policies towards the Middle East and global South.