ArchPhantom

I want everyone to pay attention to what's happening here, because this is a prime example of how a political establishment can take a change brought about through years of actual work, credit that change to politicians who are now benefiting from it, and then use their success to lecture the very people who helped make it possible about the importance of working within the system. Where exactly do you think the political environment that allows someone to win the mayoralty of NYC while openly condemning Israel's actions as genocide came from? Do you think it just happened? Did Americans suddenly wake up one morning and decide that Palestinian lives mattered, that Israel's actions deserved scrutiny, and that politicians who challenged the longstanding consensus on Palestine were finally worth listening to? For years, Palestinians and their supporters were protesting, organizing, challenging politicians, confronting the media, and paying a very real price for doing so. They were smeared as extremists, accused of antisemitism, arrested, suspended, fired, and told that their demands were politically unrealistic. And much of that was happening while the Democratic establishment was actively working to marginalize them. The political environment that makes these conversations possible today was shaped in no small part by the people who spent 2024 organizing to make the Democratic Party pay an electoral price for facilitating the genocide in Gaza. Neither Abdul nor Zohran joined that effort to defeat Harris (no, Uncommitted doesn't count), yet both have benefited from the political shift it helped bring about. And now, the very people who were willing to pay the political price for challenging the Democratic Party are being treated as obstacles to progress, while those who declined to join that fight are being celebrated as the architects of the change. None of this is to deny that Zohran and Abdul have made contributions of their own, but there's a considerable difference between contributing to a political transformation and being credited with creating the conditions that made it possible. Their political success didn't occur in a vacuum, and acknowledging their contributions shouldn't require rewriting the history of the movement that helped make their success possible. Then there's this business about purity tests. What exactly makes holding Mamdani accountable for decisions made by his administration a purity test? Which of the protesters' specific grievances are unreasonable, and why? If your objection is to people chanting “traitor” or disrupting a vigil, then make that argument, but neither objection establishes that the separate political grievances against his administration are illegitimate. And your distinction between winning arguments and winning people is particularly strange. Since when did those become mutually exclusive? More importantly, what exactly is the point of winning people, organizing communities, mobilizing voters, and building political power if we're subsequently expected to refrain from exercising that power over the very politicians who benefited from it? The movement didn't spend years confronting the political establishment merely to produce Arab and Muslim politicians who could speak eloquently about Palestine while remaining acceptable to mainstream American audiences. Political representation matters, but it was never supposed to be the end goal. You say we're missing the bigger picture, but I'd argue you're trying to narrow the focus because the bigger picture is that these politicians didn't simply make the movement politically relevant; the movement helped create the conditions that made their political success possible. And now that some of those politicians have attained power, the people who spent years fighting to create those conditions are being lectured about the importance of knowing their place. That's a rather strange understanding of how political movements are supposed to work.

The “vote for them now, hold them accountable later” crowd when the “hold them accountable” part actually happens:

Really can’t stand these tone-deaf “Merry October 7” posts from Westerners who’ve fetishized the resistance, consumed it like entertainment, and now talk about October 7 as if it were the pilot episode of some show they’ve become emotionally invested in. There are Palestinians, both inside Gaza and across the diaspora, who’ve spent their entire lives supporting the resistance and who still support it today, yet when October 7 comes around, they speak about it with a tinge of sadness. Not because they suddenly regret resistance, but because for many of them, it marks the last moment they remember feeling any real sense of joy, hope, or possibility before the entire world betrayed them and abandoned Gaza to the horrors that followed. This day should serve as a reminder of our collective failure, our impotence, and our weakness, and as motivation to be better and do better instead of leading lives where we’re constantly looking for the next compromise that’ll placate us. You can be unapologetic about it without sounding so gleeful and oblivious to the fact that countless futures were absolutely eviscerated in the horrors that followed while you cosplay as a revolutionary in the relative safety of the West. You’re watching this from thousands of miles away; they’ve had to live it, so have a little shame and show some decorum.

A liberal anti-Zionist Jew is only anti-Zionist so long as that anti-Zionism remains symbolic, rhetorical, and ultimately harmless to the continued existence of Israel. The minute they realize you’re 100% serious about dismantling that order, reversing Palestinian dispossession, and refusing to accept a century of colonization as an irreversible fact that Palestinians simply have to make peace with, they tap out. My great-grandfather fought against Allenby. His younger brother participated in the 1936 rebellion. My grandfather fought in 1948. My uncles fought against Israel and died during the Second Intifada. Generation after generation of my family did not sacrifice, fight, bleed, and die so that I could arrive at this moment and start bargaining away Palestinian rights because somebody who discovered anti-Zionism yesterday suddenly gets nervous about where its logic actually leads. The trolley of liberation is moving. So let the liberal “anti-Zionist Jewish ally” who tied himself to the tracks because he thought his own comfort would determine how far it was permitted to go understand one thing: we were never asking his permission in the first place, and when we spot him on the horizon, the only change he’ll notice is that the trolley is moving faster.