More than 100 Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders have signed a letter making the case for those reluctant to support Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.
“We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter, published Thursday night, reads.
“Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones,” the letter continued. “As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities.”
Please do your best to not tokeize marginalized communities. I have mobilized more Palestinians for actions than there are Palestinians on this list. They do not speak for Palestinians. These are party insiders and the heads of NGOs. And, oer the letter itself, which you obviously did not read, it is signed not just by Palestinians, but by “Arabs, Progressive Democrats, and Community Leaders”.
Democrats do this tokenizing bullshit all the time. Their favorite target is black people where they use the same subclass of people and claim thev speak for " the black community" itself a racist statement, as black people are not a monolith, just like Palestinians are not a monolith.
Imagine if you saw a headline and letter that read, “Latinos sign letter urging lower wages for Latinos” and it was just signed by a bunch of CEOs. Would you go around telling people that if they want higher wages for Latinos, they know better than Latinos? Would you pretend this is a representative group? Would you go around demanding lower pay?
Thank goodness those backward people have you as their savior!
I work in solidarity, not saviorism. Please do your best to act in good faith and not make things up. It is particularly disgusting when I am opposing a genocide for you to attempt dishonest zingers.
The point I was making was that this letter is not representative despite the various commenters here attempting to tokenize Palestinians.
In solidarity with the Palestinians who agree with you but not the Palestinians who don’t, apparently. Their opinions are irrelevant.
I work in solidarity with all Palestinians, but that does not mean I agree with or do work in agreement with the opinions of every Palestinian. That is the tokenizing logic I am referring to.
Palestinians are not a monolith. Please stop treating them as one. They are real, actual people.
And the Palestinians who signed this letter - which was not just signed by Palestinians - are relevant. Unfortunately their relevance in this instance is in a display of party loyalty and in favor of a candidate doing genocide, and it is not coincidental that they drew from NGOs and party insiders to curate the signatories.
I thought acknowledging their opinion was participating tokenism that gives a green light to genocide.
Interesting how you’ve suddenly changed your tune. Especially after that absolutely pathetic attempt to imply that I’m a racist for considering their opinion to be valid with your Latino comparison.
You are very confused. My critique of the letter and the class character of its signatories is already a recognition of it.
You have offered nothing but a series of bad faith attacks and lies. And in service of trying to undermine someone telling you to oppose genocide and not support genociders. Please do some introspection.
I have been consistent.
You are very confused and clearly did not understand that. I don’t think it was confusjnglu written, though. Feel free to ask questions.
Sure. Confused. Didn’t understand this:
This totally wasn’t you saying I’m taking a bigoted view of Palestinians and demonstrating it by showing me what it would look like if I was talking about Latinos.
I may be an idiot, but I’m not that stupid.
You’re just a troll and this conversation is over.
I know what I said with my Latino Ceos for Lower Latino Wages toy example but I still have trouble understanding how this is calling you racist.
The point of the example is that this letter is tokenizing PR. It does not represent Palestinians. One reason for this is the absurdity of trying to treat Palestinians are a homogenous group, which is implicit in the responses to this. The purpose of this letter is for Dem campaigns to be able to weaponize Palestinian identity to say, “look Palestinians support us!” Nevermind that it is a handful and they are basically all party insiders and the heads of NGOs.
The example of Latino CEOs is for you to focus on the tokenization and how you would spot it in a different context. Tokenization of an ethnicity is inherently racist, sure, the only conclusion here is that if you think the Latino CEO actions I provided questions for were racist, you should also think that tokenizing Palestinians in service of a genocidal candidate is racist.
Okay well your interpretation was incorrect or at least there is nothing unfair in what I said.
Well bye then, I guess.
There is a Palestinian owned grocery store here, with attached restaurant, that acts as a hub for their community here. Some are not going to vote, but the great majority are Kamala is not good for Palestine, but Trump is completely unacceptable to Palestine, every Muslim outside of the richest oil producers, and every Muslim in the US. So they are begrudgingly voting for Kamala. These people are not politically well connected, most are laborers, a handful are business owners, and white collar workers. Why do they do this if they aren’t politically connected, not in NGOs, etc.?
This is the opposite of my experience in Palestinian spaces in the US, including at community centers and community organizations. There have been some people attempting to organize support for Harris, but they have been shut down and signs against Harris put up. Of course among very politically engaged left groups of Palestinians the sentiment is 100% anti-Harris, but that is not representative. Both of these sentiments are things from across several states, including cities with large Palestinian populations. Also, to be clear, not all Palestinians are Muslim. These spaces are also not exclusively muslim. There are Palestinian Christians with this same trend.
Palestinians are not a monolith, of course. They will have diverse opinions.
And here is the problem with your argument. This is what I wanted you to say. Almost none of the Palestinians around here, or anyone they know, is in the camp that they won’t vote, because they know that Trump being in office means things, like a lot of the Palestinians in the US, will be sent back to Palestine, to be part of the genocide, they are trying to save people from. Maybe, like the bias within those who signed this letter, where you go, creates an oppositional bubble. Maybe the ones here are in a less privileged position, one that makes them significantly more vulnerable to the GOP’s bigotry? Simply living in a state that will harbor immigrants against the Feds, type of privilege.
There are ~47,000 christian Palestinians, ~15 million Palestinians. So this isn’t the caveat you are trying to create, in this informal space. The Palestinians, and the greater muslim population here, remember when Trump was in office. When many of them were arrested, caged, and deported, on the flimsiest of bullshit, and had their property, businesses, and families stripped from them, in the anti-muslim fervor. Things like getting deported because you divorced your wife, of over 10 years, with whom you have kids, after being remarried, with more kids, for almost 20 years, for “abusing” IR-1 marriage visas. There is also the cases of blew 0.00% BAC, got arrested, blood sent out, and the person was gone before the results of the test was reviewed by the courts. The ones where records errors ended up in a lot of people getting deported, or, at least, held in ICE camps, for months. Records errors that suddenly spiked several hundred percent after Trump’s muslim targeting policies went into affect. Oopsie, sorry we destroyed your life for literally no reason, but don’t worry, we take accountability, and admit that was our bad. Good thing we have immunity, otherwise we might be in trouble.
I had already implied it. I did not say, “there are no Palestinian signatories”, did I? I said it was a conspicuous subset of people, namely the heads if NGOs and party insiders. This necessitates diversity of positions taken and of class dynamics. I am not tokenizing Palestinians or treating them as a monolith to throw around like a cudgrl, saying “this is what Palestinians want so you should to”. Solidarity requires that you become informed and work in solidarity with the oppressed, not seek out tokens. People throughout this thread are trying to use Palestinians in this way to justify their complicity.
How did you get a read on what all of the Palestinians in your area are doing wrt supporting Harris? I am very active among my local community and I would never say “almost none” about basically anything. But I can tell you that I can turn out the vast majority who attend community events to anti-Harris actions where they change the slogans and have conversations to that effect.
I spend most of my time reading: Palestine in community centers and appropriate religious gatherings. I don’t think it is particularly biased towards radical or left action. The wider group has to press local imams to be less defeatist, even.
My community is poor and vulnerable.
ICE constantly raids. They tend to focus on the Latino community, though not exclusively. My compatriots do direct action to delay or prevent arrest at suspected raid targets.
It is the caveat I am trying to create. I know Christian Palestinians. The entirety of my point was about not assuming uniformity.
Deportations were around the same as under Obama and Biden-Harris. They have increased over the last year, targeting student protesters and political organizers. The primary impact of Trump’s policies are: basically anyone brown from the Middle East was to make reentry after travel extremely difficult, forcing people here to suffer because they could not visit dying relatives or weddings or family with new children. I was active across several states during this period, including dramatically racist red states, and do not know what you are talking about. To be clear, Palestinian immigrants have been under constant and extreme and unfair scrutiny for decades, facing exactly the flimsy excuses for deportation that you describe. This is why one of the things we focus on in our work is protecting Palestinian immigrants from risk and doing whatever can to get them full citizenship. It is usually then that they feel comfortable taking risks for some kinds of solidarity actions. Many lament their inability to participate for years because they are worried they will be deported and/or separated from their families if they do so much as attend a rally. Some do so anyways.
The examples you give are the kinds of things that happened before and after Trump as well. But despite being across several communities and doing direct work among them, there was never a sentiment that this had changed.
The Latino community faced a dramatic increase in such deportations and arrests, particularly due to Trump’s targeting of DREAMers (who Obama made vulnerable via incomplete legalization).