The Wretched of the Earth

We begin with a message from the secretary of state.

You’ll search in vain for that post today on The App Formerly Known as Twitter. It vanished on Sunday. In its place is this:

That wasn’t the only official U.S. government statement to disappear mysteriously this weekend. This post from Saturday, published while the pogrom in southern Israel was still in motion, also evaporated into the ether:

Calls for ceasefires and restraint are standard diplo-babble during a crisis, normally tolerated as well-meaning nonsense of the “violence never solved anything” variety. But no one—or almost no one—was in the mood for it as videos of Hamas Einsatzgruppen on the hunt circulated on social media.

As I write this, more than 260 bodies have been recovered from that music festival. One victim’s corpse was stripped, displayed in the back of a pick-up, then beaten by cheering bystanders in the streets of Gaza. (In life she was a peace activist and conscientious objector to military service.) “Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends’ bodies, dead bodies,” one festival survivor told Liel Leibovitz of Tablet. He reports seeing photos of kidnapped women paraded through Gaza, bleeding from between their legs.

The Nazis tried to hide the extent of their atrocities against Jews. Hamas isn’t so bashful. Many videos that ended up being shared on Saturday and Sunday were plainly recorded by the perpetrators as trophies for the world to admire.

There are reports of terrorists seizing the smartphones of Israelis, filming their murders, then uploading the footage to the victims’ social media pages so that their families would see it.

It was depraved psychopathy on a scale the Jewish people haven’t suffered since the Holocaust. At least 11 Americans are dead as I write this, along with hundreds of Israelis. And yet, somehow, the first instinct of more than one American diplomat as it played out was … to urge Israel not to punish the villains behind it. Only after a ferocious outcry online did Antony Blinken and the Office of Palestinian Affairs think better and quietly delete their statements.

Democrats have a problem.

This newsletter typically concerns itself with divisions on the American right, mainly the one between the base of the Republican Party and its leadership in Washington. On issues from Trump, to Ukraine, to defaulting on the national debt just to prove that you have the nerve to do it, a classically liberal-ish governing class in Congress struggles to reconcile itself to the desires of an increasingly post-liberal base. It’s two parties under one banner.

Democrats aren’t as divided. Whether because the left has grown accustomed to compromise in the name of managing a sprawling coalition or because the party’s leadership has delivered more for its constituents than the GOP’s has, grassroots liberals aren’t as hostile to their own representatives. Nancy Pelosi had the same slender majority as Kevin McCarthy did during her last stint as speaker and there was never a hint of a progressive-led coup against her. It’s still recognizably one party, albeit with real ideological distance between its progressive and neoliberal poles.

War between Israel and Hamas will test that.

The Democratic leadership supports Israel. That’s been true for years with respect to graybeards like Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden, who issued a solid statement on Saturday after initially being slow to respond. But it was a pleasant surprise when new House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries uncorked one of the strongest condemnations of Hamas by any American politician this weekend, vouching for Israel’s right of self-defense and calling for the terrorist invasion to be “crushed.” Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, all of 35 years old, also spoke with admirable moral clarity: “Israel is the victim of a terrorist attack. Hamas is the perpetrator. It’s as simple as that. There are no ‘both sides.’”

The next generation of Democratic leaders may be better than any of us expect. The next generation of Democratic voters is another matter.

In March, Gallup published a poll tracking American sentiment about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over time. Republican support for Israel has been broadly consistent; independent support has fallen off but still tilts decisively toward the Israeli side. There’s been a sea change, however, in Democratic support.

That’s a swing of 41 net points on the left toward the Palestinians in just seven years. What’s driving it is an age gap: Whereas the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X have barely budged in their levels of support since 2001, the share of young voters born between 1980 and 2000 who favor Israel in the conflict has slid 36 net points since 2016.

Young voters also skew Democratic. Which means the mismatch between a party leadership that favors Western democracies and a party base that sympathizes with illiberal regimes—or people led by illiberal regimes—for its own ideological reasons is no longer a strictly Republican phenomenon.

Grassroots left-wing apologetics for Hamas’ barbarity began while the bodies in Israel were still warm. HuffPost, for instance, published a story on Sunday warning its readers not to fall for the spin that the massacre was “unprovoked.” Clips like the one below that aired on the left’s favorite news network eventually led the head of the Anti-Defamation League to wonder who, precisely, is writing MSNBC’s scripts:

At Harvard, as news of mass murder and kidnappings raced around the world, a coalition of student groups released a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Former university president Lawrence Summers was mortified by the statement, then doubly mortified when the school’s administration failed to denounce it.

On Sunday afternoon, in the heart of America’s biggest city, a group of activists gathered to march and—there’s no other word—celebrate the atrocities perpetrated the day before. 

There were reports of demonstrators chanting “From the river to the sea,” a reference to Hamas’ ambitions to “liberate” the Holy Land by rendering it Judenrein. A number of Democratic officials scrambled to condemn the gathering, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs, and the aforementioned Richie Torres.

Then there was the Squad.

The Squad is very populist, very progressive, and conspicuously young by congressional standards. (All members are under 50.) Demographically, in the modern Democratic Party, they’re all but obliged to side with the Palestinians against Israel.

The moral dilemma for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues in the small but noisy democratic socialist wing of the House Democratic caucus is this: As public officials, they have a civic duty not to condone violence, especially violence as depraved and wanton as Israelis suffered over the weekend. And as Palestinian sympathizers with a basic grasp of public relations, they understand that celebrating gang rape and murder porn won’t serve the cause—or the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects—well.

But as socialists, they’re bound to an ideological framework that views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a matter of “colonialism.” And the colonized, the wretched of the Earth, are as morally entitled to use violence to secure their liberation as a slave would be to use violence against his master. Or against his master’s wife, I guess. Or his master’s infant children. Or his master’s friends attending a music festival.

As the attack played out on social media, some progressives made clear that the ends of “decolonization” should justify any means, presumably up to and including livestreaming murders to torment the victims’ families.

“Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop,” one commentator wrote. If you’re really serious about the Palestinian cause, if you truly believe it’s unfair that their efforts over the years to exterminate Israeli Jews ended up costing them land, you should be prepared to countenance any manner of “resistance.” Kidnapping, rape, televised executions, Final Solution 2.0: When it comes to liberation, anything goes.

Just as a riot is the language of the unheard, a pogrom is the language of the dispossessed.

The Squad needed to pander to that moral intuition within their bloc while not sounding completely depraved. The results were mixed. Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar managed to condemn Hamas’ attack but inanely called for Israel not to react, urging a ceasefire. Cori Bush both-sides-ed the matter by equating the “attacks by Hamas militants” with the “Israeli military bombardment of Gaza.” And Rashida Tlaib made only the smallest pretense of caring, seizing the attack as an opportunity to call for rewarding Hamas by lifting all restrictions on Gaza.

Bush and Tlaib got an earful afterward from Democratic colleagues like Josh Gottheimer and Torres (again), but for the Squad, the hardest political hour of the crisis has already likely passed. The degeneracy Hamas showed on Saturday was so outrageous and indefensible that it caught most of the group’s Western progressive apologists momentarily flat-footed. But as Israel responds in Gaza and civilian casualties there mount—by Hamas’ design, seeking a propaganda windfall—the left will regain its political footing. Soon AOC and her colleagues will be laser-focused on “proportionality,” the duration of the conflict, the rising cost of U.S. aid, the risk of a wider war, and so on. Many of the arguments that the post-liberal, pro-Putin right has made to justify abandoning Ukraine, the post-liberal, pro-Hamas left will make to justify abandoning Israel.

That’s an easy message for progressives in Congress to carry and it’ll place them back in the good graces of their most bloodthirsty constituents—and not a moment too soon for some like Sen. John Fetterman, who sounded a bit too Israel-friendly in his statement on the attack to suit his leftist admirers. The uglier the war gets, the greater the odds that the Squad and other progressive officials will end up on the right side of Democratic voter opinion more so than the party’s pro-Israel leaders will.

Which is one reason why this is apt to become a political nightmare for Joe Biden. But not the only reason.

A long, destabilizing war between Israel and one of Iran’s deadliest proxies strikes me as something like a worst-case scenario for the president.

For starters, it’s apt to quash the peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that the White House had been trying to broker. The Saudi government won’t risk a ferocious backlash across the Arab world by normalizing relations with the Jewish state during a hot war against the Palestinians. The fact that Hamas’ attack was reportedly masterminded by the Saudis’ archenemy precisely because they hoped to foil an alliance between the Kingdom and Israel won’t matter.

The conflict is also destined to remind American voters that Biden’s administration has spent the better part of three years trying to midwife a rapprochement with Tehran that now looks like the height of peacenik liberal folly given reports that the Iranian high command helped plan Hamas’ attack. Practically every statement from a Republican official this weekend mentioned the $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds that the White House is planning to release as part of a prisoner swap with the regime. That money hasn’t been spent yet and it’s supposed to be earmarked for humanitarian relief only (as if money isn’t fungible), but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that cash under U.S. control will soon be handed over to the perpetrators of one of the worst terrorist atrocities in modern history.

And not for the first time during Biden’s presidency.

Team Joe made a fiasco out of what was supposed to be an orderly withdrawal in Afghanistan. Their incompetence may or may not have induced Putin to follow through on his dream of reconquering Ukraine; either way, we’re approaching year three of that war. Now the U.S. has been taken completely (and I do mean completely) by surprise by a Hamas sneak attack that risks involving Hezbollah and potentially Iran itself in a regional war. If you’re an American voter who backed Biden in 2020 because you wanted less chaos on the news and thought putting the grown-ups back in charge would get you that, you’re apt to find yourself … disappointed.

And if you’re disappointed by all the chaos, you might find yourself considering reelecting a strongman whose unpredictability, for all of its downsides, at least had the virtue of keeping the bad guys off-balance.

The hardest part of this politically for Biden, though, will be having to disappoint the pro-Palestinian Democratic base while he works with the pro-Israel Democratic leadership to help the IDF win the war.

Perhaps the sheer savagery of Saturday’s display will push some young progressives back toward the Israeli side in this dispute. Not every leftist has swallowed dogma about colonization so totally that they find themselves high-fiving over dead children, after all. And liberals too young to remember the intifadas or Israel’s many wars for survival may sober up about the justness of the two sides’ respective causes as they get a crash course in history these next few weeks. But even so, most of the left-wing sympathy Israel might enjoy right now will surely erode as the IDF goes on offense in Gaza and world media does what it always does in such cases, treating the Palestinian civilians used as human shields by Hamas as victims of Israeli rather than Iranian aggression.

The prospect of a backlash in an election year among already disaffected young progressives will make Democratic leaders anxious. So will having to ally themselves with Benjamin Netanyahu, a figure whom leftists despise for condoning settlements in the West Bank, for his chummy relations with Trump during the last presidency, and for his authoritarian ambitions to limit the power of Israel’s judiciary more recently. The collapse in Democratic support for Israel against the Palestinians since 2016 is as much a reaction to Netanyahu—a perennial hawkish thorn in the left’s side as it’s gone about trying to reach a detente with Iran—as it is to the balance of equities of the conflict.

Lastly, the uncomfortable racial and religious divides between the two sides of the war will be harder for Biden to navigate in a party that’s come to view politics through more of an “identity” lens. The progressive narrative about colonialism inescapably imagines Israel as a “white” country—wealthy, Western-aligned, Judeo-Christian—preying on a poor nonwhite Muslim population. In the same way that Biden cracking down on the southern border would antagonize the left by aligning him with the interests of a white majority against an impoverished nonwhite cohort, helping Israel crack down on Gaza will do the same. It’s the right move morally and probably the right move politically inasmuch as most American voters are destined to support Israel in the conflict (I hope), but low-information progressives who follow the war through their lazy identitarian frame are apt to end up furious.

And a furious progressive base makes the prospect of a second Trump presidency much more real.

Nothing would be more ironic than a massive Iranian-backed terror attack helping to reelect the man who ordered the death of Qassem Soleimani—except, I guess, watching progressives redefine “progress” to include taunting innocent people with video of the wholesale human slaughter of their relatives. This past weekend delivered one of those ironies. Why would we think next November won’t deliver the other?