Victories by the left in France and Britain offer powerful examples for U.S. progressives — but will mainstream Democrats learn from it?
France’s far-right National Rally party, alongside conservative centrists, had spent weeks painting the left’s support of Palestine as an electoral poisoned pill. In attacks all too familiar in the U.S., they conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, slamming Israel’s critics as antisemites. Israeli officials explicitly backed the far-right party. In this last election, at least, it didn’t work to prevent left-wing success.
In Britain, too, the centrist Labour Party’s landslide victory was tempered in five constituencies, where independent candidates with pro-Palestinian platforms defeated Labour candidates. Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, won his North Islington, London, seat with ease; Corbyn was famously ousted from Labour when the party’s conservative wing and British media weaponized charges of antisemitism against the party’s left flank.
If there’s a lesson to be learned in the U.S. from the success of pro-Palestinian candidates in France and Britain, we can be grimly sure that no Democrat in November’s presidential election will learn it. President Joe Biden’s unfettered support of Israel and its genocidal Gaza war is not only a gross moral failure but also an electoral risk, particularly in crucial swing-state Michigan and for young voters in general. But his campaign refuses to change course on the issue. Even if the senescent president is replaced as the Democratic nominee, there’s scant chance that any successor will embrace a platform of Palestinian solidarity or even robust ceasefire demands. This, despite the fact that 77 percent of Democratic voters and two-thirds of voters in the U.S. support a permanent ceasefire.
There is no threat from an electoral left third party in the US, and the Democrats would rather lose to the Republicans than stop the genocide, so no, there is nothing to be learned.
DNC is too reliant on single sources of big money, so AIPAC will be high on their donor list. The AIPAC is why America is too rigid about a specific flavor of fascism and genocide.
France’s far-right National Rally party, alongside conservative centrists, had spent weeks painting the left’s support of Palestine as an electoral poisoned pill.
President Joe Biden’s unfettered support of Israel and its genocidal Gaza war is not only a gross moral failure but also an electoral risk, particularly in crucial swing-state Michigan and for young voters in general.
The French and British results should, or at least could, however, be a lesson for left-wing Democrats to continue to fight against the vicious efforts of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, to crush Palestine-supportive candidates.
Yet Democrats face a similar challenge: Win the trust of vast numbers of Muslim and Arab voters and young people, or stand with AIPAC — a lobby that has no problem raising millions for the Republican extreme right.
Since the need to stop Israel’s intolerable war remains as urgent as ever, however, the fact that support for Palestine can be shown as helpful, rather than harmful, to electoral success is worth stressing.
At the very least, leftist candidates and leaders in France and Britain like Mélenchon and Corbyn have modeled powerful examples for U.S. progressives: In the face of bad-faith attacks, and even party expulsions, aimed a quashing support for Palestine, they remained steadfast on the right side of history.
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