Supporting Palestine Helped the Left Win in France and Britain. Will Democrats Learn From It?
Supporting Palestine Helped the Left Win in France and Britain. Will Democrats Learn From It?
Victories by the left in France and Britain offer powerful examples for U.S. progressives — but will mainstream Democrats learn from it?
Nope, cause dems are centrist at best
Nope, because those recent gains were in spite of positions on Gaza & in any case there are few positions which the US could take which would be more grimly anti-Palestinian than that of the GOP.
It is a very long time since I've read as ahistorical writing as this article. We all wish that support for Palestine were there, but it very demonstrably is not.
What makes you say that those gains were in spite of support for Gaza? I presume you're talking about France?
UK Labour's position on Gaza is no different to that of the Tories (or to the DNC in the US). In Scotland, the SNP is strongly pro-Gaza, but were wiped out. That's likely to have been in matters besides Palestine, but voters had the option to prioritise it and roundly rejected it. In NI & Wales, pro-Gazan candidates did less considerably less well than predicted 18 months ago. A few pro-Gazan candidates ran for the Workers' Party - a handful of them won seats, but others, including their party head lost theirs. Meantime far-right Reform loathe Israel & loathe Palestine more, but made massive gains.
In France, pro-Gazan FI is a major component of NFP, the alliance which got the biggest vote share, but they only scraped that by working strategically with the rest of the left & with the neolibs to see off the far-right, and even this alliance did not win a majority. Within this there's little to no agreement on Palestine, and FI's position drew in some voters and alienated others.
and Britain
In no way did British Labour support Gaza. At best they were no worse then the past gov. But no viable candidate under fptp suoported gaza.
Labour actually lost 2 seats to independents due to not supporting gaza.