Whoever Wins in November, Our Movement Must Make Palestine Nonnegotiable

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

While the world has become transfixed by the unfolding political crisis in the U.S. presidential election, Israel continues to lay waste to Gaza, expand settlements in the West Bank and massacre Palestinians in skyrocketing numbers.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Eman Abdelhadi — an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics — discusses the ceasefire negotiations, Israel’s ongoing genocidal war, the Palestinian resistance, the upcoming U.S. presidential elections and the tasks of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Abdelhadi is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.

Much has been made about the current negotiations for a ceasefire. What is actually going on? Is Israel just posturing? What does Hamas hope to achieve in the negotiations? What are the aims of the U.S. in these talks?

Eman Abdelhadi: We have limited information about the negotiations. But it’s clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not want this war to end and has done everything in his power to keep it going. His political career rests on it. Once it ends, he has to face his opponents, criminal corruption charges and the fallout for the war crimes he’s committed over the last 10 months.

So, he has repeatedly blocked ceasefire agreements, refusing to agree to Hamas’s demand for a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. He has done this in opposition to his emergency war cabinet, which broke up over his obstructionism. Now Israel is ruled by his coalition government that depends on fascists dedicated to the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The U.S. is engaged in mass gaslighting of Palestinians and our allies by dangling a two-state solution that was never actually on the table.

Hamas wanted a ceasefire from the beginning. They were willing to release Israeli hostages in exchange for Israel freeing thousands of Palestinian political prisoners whom it has held in its jails without charges under administrative detention, some for decades. These Palestinians are hostages. But the U.S. has not condemned Israel’s blatant violation of their rights and has refused to demand their release. Instead, it treats them as guilty by default.

If Israel had agreed to Hamas’s proposal, we could have had a ceasefire as early as October and certainly by November and January. But Netanyahu doesn’t want one. That’s why he’s facing so much opposition from within Israel including from the families of Israeli hostages, whom he’s sacrificed to save his political career.

The U.S. and its allies are in a different position. They underestimated the degree of opposition they would face in support of Palestine from Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and their allies. The “uncommitted” vote in the Democratic Party’s primary, especially in Michigan, undermined Joe Biden’s electability. Biden couldn’t use the threat of Donald Trump to bully us into ignoring his support for genocide.

So, the Biden administration had no choice but to call for a ceasefire, although the president did nothing to force Israel to comply with his call. Why? Because he and the rest of the political establishment remain committed to supporting Israel, even as it carries out genocide.

Israel has continued to rain terror down on Gaza and is expanding settlements in the West Bank. Is it trying to complete the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine? How are the various forces in the Palestinian resistance responding?

Netanyahu is the logical conclusion of the entire Zionist project. I don’t believe for one second that a liberal or Labour prime minister would have acted any differently.

Israel’s ruling coalition has repeatedly declared in statements and in their charter that it intends to conquer and colonize all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea. So, its aim in this war is to destroy Gaza, create an enormous humanitarian crisis and drive people into Washington’s two client states, Jordan and Egypt.

Most governments, experts and people throughout the world know that Israel’s aim is the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Genocide experts the world over have declared this a project of extermination. So has the UN special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, and the International Court of Justice.

Only the American ruling elite and its allies deny Israel’s genocidal aims. The U.S. continues to peddle the fantasy that it can get Israel to accept a two-state solution that would grant Palestinians a state. But Israel will never agree to that, and the Knesset just proved it, passing a resolution against the creation of any Palestinian state. The U.S. is engaged in mass gaslighting of Palestinians and our allies by dangling a two-state solution that was never actually on the table.

Faced with total war, Palestinians and their organizations have supported the resistance, except for the Palestinian Authority (PA), the client pseudo government created by the U.S. and Israel. The PA rules the West Bank and has done what every other Arab autocratic state has done on behalf of the U.S. and Israel. It has repressed internal dissent and blocked resistance to Israel.

The U.S. and its allies constantly invoke Israel’s so-called right to self-defense. In reality, a colonial occupier — which has carried out decades of war, dispossession and ethnic cleansing — does not have a right to self-defense against the people it occupies. But as an occupied people, Palestinians have an internationally recognized right to armed self-defense. Palestinian resistance fighters have defended Gaza against Israel’s genocidal invasion, as is their legal and ethical right.

It’s inhumane and unethical to ask Palestinians to simply just lie down and die. But that is the official position of the U.S. government, its two main parties, intellectual elites, leaders of major institutions, and the news media. Everyone should just pause and ask themselves, what would you do if you were in the position of Palestinians? Anyone who’s honest would answer that they would resist and fight for their liberation.

Zionism as a Jewish supremacist and white supremacist project will fail. The question is how many people this dying beast will kill before it finally gives out its last breath?

In a decade or so, after all the fights on Twitter and in American newspapers over minutiae like this tweet or that phrase are long forgotten, history will recognize that a people were set aside for extermination by a nuclear armed settler colonial apartheid state supported by the world’s largest empire and several ex-empires. But they stood up for themselves and resisted.

At an enormous cost, the Palestinian resistance and the international solidarity movement has precipitated a crisis for Israel. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has argued that this is a terminal crisis for Zionism. Do you agree with that?

Pappé is right. Zionism is a failed project. When it will collapse is a question of time, resistance and solidarity. But it will fail. Israel’s genocidal war has triggered a political, ideological and economic crisis for itself and for the U.S., the dying empire Israel depends on for its very survival.

Vietnam should have taught Israel and the U.S. a lesson. Just because you exact the biggest death toll doesn’t mean you win. But they have refused to learn that lesson. Even though it massacred untold numbers of people, the U.S. didn’t win in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The same is true of Israel. It suffered a devastating military defeat on October 7. Its war has not overcome that defeat but has instead exacerbated the crisis. Israel is now locked in counterinsurgency warfare against a Palestinian resistance in Gaza that it cannot defeat.

As a result, Israeli society is at risk of collapse. Let’s start with its economy. Forty-six thousand Israeli businesses have closed since October. That’s in part because of the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). It’s also because companies now find Israel a toxic asset, and not a very profitable one. It’s a war-torn, genocidal rogue state, and that’s not an appealing business opportunity.

Our strategy should be to build a mass movement around the demand for BDS. We have to develop and use whatever tactics advance that strategy.

Next, let’s look at what’s happening to Israel’s Jewish population. Over half a million Israelis, who have passports in other countries, have left the country. The colonial settler state has proved itself unsafe for Zionist settlers.

Then look at the ideological defeat Israel has suffered. It is becoming a pariah state for most of the world. The fascist wing of Zionism is thoroughly discredited globally. But so is Liberal Zionism, which is breaking apart under its own contradictions. It must abandon any shred of liberalism in order to uphold Zionism’s Jewish supremacist logic of colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

This is really important to flesh out for liberals in the U.S. They blame Netanyahu as the problem. In reality, Netanyahu is the logical conclusion of the entire Zionist project. I don’t believe for one second that a liberal or Labour prime minister would have acted any differently. Remember, the whole spectrum of Israel’s political class had been united in the war cabinet, carrying out the genocide together.

As this war has undermined their own state, they’re now at each other’s throats in a spiraling internal political conflict, which is another dimension of Israel’s crisis. Meanwhile, Israelis are marching in the streets against Netanyahu, denouncing him as a criminal and threat to their democratic rights. So, the entire Zionist project is crumbling.

Like most supremacist projects that have failed, Zionism as a Jewish supremacist and white supremacist project will fail. The question is how many people this dying beast will kill before it finally gives out its last breath?

The Biden administration’s lockstep collaboration with Israel has precipitated a crisis for U.S. imperialism. Having lost consent from a large minority for its support of Israel, the U.S. establishment has turned to McCarthyite repression of the solidarity movement. How should the movement respond?

There’s nothing we can do except persevere, soldier on in the struggle and keep spreading our message. We have to remember that even in the face of a vicious backlash, we are scoring important victories. We have opened huge cracks in Zionism, galvanized support among young people, and importantly, won over a large number of Jews to opposing Israel.

The government, institutions and companies have turned to coercion because they are losing consent for their support of Israel. But there’s only so many people you can fire, so many people you can deny promotion to, and so many students you can expel before such McCarthyism backfires and triggers even more opposition.

We must become impossible to ignore and impose a high cost on continuing business as usual.

People always ask: Why do people care about Palestine so much? They say there’s so much oppression around the world, why single out Palestine for special support? The Zionists of course answer that by claiming that those who support Palestine are antisemitic. But that argument is no longer working, especially as growing numbers of Jews participate in the struggle against Zionism.

In reality, we single out Israel because the U.S. singles out Israel. The U.S. government calls Israel its most important ally in the Middle East and spends billions each year funding and arming the Israeli state. The U.S. government is thus complicit in Israel’s settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide. That is the reason why people in the U.S. organize to oppose Israel, support Palestinian liberation and see it as part of the long struggle against settler colonialism.

Palestine has always exposed Washington’s false claim that the third world is now free of imperialism. Zionism established its settler colonial state in 1948, right at the height of post-war decolonization, when the U.S. was establishing itself as an empire that claimed to be against colonialism. So, Palestine reveals the hypocrisy of not just Israel but also of the U.S.

That’s why Washington views solidarity with Palestine as such a threat. It threatens to unravel domestic support for U.S. imperialism abroad. They are genuinely frightened by the fact that the majority of Americans want a ceasefire, and a large minority want to cut off economic and military aid to Israel.

The establishment, like a cornered beast, has responded by running roughshod over our democratic right to dissent, organize and protest. They have cancelled public speeches, violated academic freedom, unleashed cops on peaceful encampments and arrested students for defending themselves against fascist thugs.

For an enormous number of people, this repression has shattered the myth of the U.S. as a beacon of freedom and liberty. This ideological awakening is irreversible, and while I welcome it and think that it opens up new horizons of solidarity, it has come at an enormous price in Palestinian life.

Historian Rashid Khalidi has argued that solidarity with Palestine within the imperialist powers is of decisive importance, because Israel has depended on them from its foundation right down to today. Amid the unprecedented outpouring of solidarity in the U.S., what demands should the movement raise and what strategies and tactics should we use to advance them?

First and foremost, we have to focus on the economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. That is the demand for BDS. We have to cut off economic support for the settler colonial regime, politically isolate it, and make the state socially and culturally unacceptable to support. We must do to Israel what the solidarity movement did to apartheid South Africa.

We cannot let Democrats ignore and repress one of the biggest movements in the last 10 years, take our votes for granted, and continue the genocide with no consequences.

Right now, we have an urgent task. The establishment is pushing Palestine off the front pages, TV screens and news feeds. We have to counter that and make Palestine impossible to ignore; we must make it an issue in every dimension of life in the U.S. and throughout the world.

One central way to do that is by exposing how Washington diverts billions of tax dollars to support Israel’s genocidal war that could go to meeting people’s need here in the U.S. Such revelations open people up to radical questions about the priorities of the U.S. state and society. Why does the U.S. government support genocide? Do we want to live in an empire? What kind of world do we want to live in?

Our strategy should be to build a mass movement around the demand for BDS. We have to develop and use whatever tactics advance that strategy. In all of this work, we must become impossible to ignore and impose a high cost on continuing business as usual.

Finally, let’s turn to the upcoming elections. Liberals are putting enormous pressure on Palestine solidarity activists to put Palestine to the side and get out the vote for Kamala Harris — or whomever the Democratic Party nominee ends up being — to stop Trump. How should the Palestine solidarity movement respond?

Our campaigns against Biden forced him to cancel his reelection bid. The mainstream media and elites are saying it was his disastrous debate with [Trump]. But reporting on backroom conversations has shown that Democrats have been looking at his poll numbers as evidence he can’t win.

Biden’s popularity didn’t dip with the debate, it dipped starting in the fall with his decision to enact a genocide. Biden would still be the candidate if it weren’t for Palestine, that is very clear in my mind. We would not allow him to cosponsor genocide and win.

We cannot let Democrats ignore and repress one of the biggest movements in the last 10 years, take our votes for granted, and continue the genocide with no consequences.

How many times do we have to go through the cycle of suspending our struggle, choosing the lesser evil, and then watch that lesser evil adopt policies almost identical to the greater evil? It is time to put an end to this cycle. We can only do so by building power. We must continue organizing, protesting and campaigning for a free Palestine.