Supporting Palestine Helped the Left Win in France and Britain. Will 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.