As the 2024 Democratic National Convention opens Monday in Chicago, we look at the protests planned throughout the week to pressure Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party on key policies, including the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza. Meanwhile, at least 36 delegates are also inside the convention as official delegates representing the “uncommitted” movement and are advocating an antiwar agenda to push for an end to U.S. arms sales to Israel. Although protesters this week come from a range of communities advocating on various issues, from economic injustice to reproductive rights, “Palestine is at the center,” says Hatem Abudayyeh, spokesperson for the Coalition to March on the Democratic National Convention and national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. “All of those communities are standing up very publicly and very proudly, saying, 'Free Palestine. End U.S. aid to Israel.'”
They serve his interests for now.
I’m low key cautiously optimistic that Harris is going to start shifting away from just giving Israel shitloads of bombs. She knows it’s a bad look, and she knows a lot of her supporters are pretty fucking pissed at Biden over his handling of the situation. She has a chance, once she takes office, to make a meaningful change to policy in that area, and I hope she does.
I think that may be why AIPAC is being so bold in this election cycle: they can see the writing on the wall, and they know they’ve pissed off a significant portion of one entire side of our political establishment… and the other side - the one that doesn’t mind that they’re carpet-bombing brown people - has neo-Nazis in it. So that’s a bit of a quandary they’ve put themselves in. It’s really incredible, in a geopolitical sense (because it’s not just America in which this shift is happening), because they’ve basically just thrown the vast majority of international sympathy and goodwill they previously had onto a bonfire and lit the fucker up.
I see no evidence at all of any interest whatsoever in stopping.
By all means, ignore everything besides the first sentence I wrote. Feeling pithy today, aren’t we?
The first paragraph I ignored is rank speculation about what might happen once no pressure to stop selling weapons can be exerted.
The second paragraph is predicated on the guy who is already committing genocide suddenly caring about what the international community thinks instead of just trying to maintain his hold on power with the unconditional assistance of a servile US government.
Neither is evidence of any interest in ceasing support for Netanyahu’s genocide.