How can movements advance Palestinian rights this election — and beyond?

This is a crucial inflection point in the movement for recognition of Palestinian rights. A moment of unprecedented opportunity. But, potentially, also a moment of tragically missed opportunity. 

The opportunity is that there is a powerful movement, finally, pushing U.S. foreign policy toward a more just position on Israel-Palestine. The U.S.’s bipartisan consensus for an ironclad relationship with Israel has long relegated claims for basic Palestinian rights to the margins. The Democratic Party side of that previous bipartisan consensus has, however, been slowly cracking over the last decade. Even before Hamas’ unconscionable Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians, Democratic voters were for the first time more sympathetic to Palestinians (49 percent) than to Israelis (38 percent). In the year since Oct. 7, an unprecedented coalition has mobilized to protest Israel’s brutal response of accelerated ethnic cleansing, systemic war crimes and forever war. 

This leads us to where we are on the eve of the 2024 elections: For the first time, voters who want to stop U.S. support for Israel’s war machine have both a base in one major party and the leverage in a few key states to be politically salient.

At the same time, a majority of Americans still sympathize with Israel over Palestinians with 68 percent viewing Israel “very or mostly favorably.” In an Oct. 2024 YouGov poll, 61 percent of Americans felt it very or fairly important for the U.S. to “cooperate closely with Israel,” versus 16 percent who say it is not important (22 percent don’t know). This increasingly fractured but still overall pro-Israel environment has been a conundrum for the Kamala Harris campaign. Despite shifts among Democratic voters, Joe Biden embodied the long-standing consensus in close support of Israel. Harris’ rhetoric is slightly more distant, but she clearly has made a choice to not break with Biden’s policies, at least for the duration of her presidential campaign. 

That has led to the “Abandon Harris” movement — along with some prominent Palestinian figures — endorsing Jill Stein’s presidential campaign. The Green Party presidential candidate earned 0.26 percent of the vote in 2016. Stein is currently polling at roughly 1 percent nationally. By contrast, a recent Michigan poll has Stein at a considerably higher 2 percent in that swing state (with Harris having a 1 percent advantage over Trump). Consequently, while Stein may be a marginal candidate, she is also a serious factor in Michigan. This is evidenced by the attack ads Democrats are running there against Stein, as well as the Republican PAC-funded ads that seek to surreptitiously boost support for her. 

The rage of those driven to support Stein is understandable. Yet, some have posited that it might also be self-defeating. The Green Party is after all a fringe party without national infrastructure (and led by an eternal candidate who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently characterized as “predatory”). Aligning with it might very well lead to a path of political irrelevance, signaling a retreat from an ethical responsibility to engage in the frustrations of power politics in favor of virtue signaling from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, some on Stein’s campaign have openly proclaimed a far more nihilistic purpose, which is to punish Democrats by effectively costing them the election. This comes at a time when Trump has been openly supportive of Israel “finishing the job” in Palestine, saying that “Biden has been holding [Netanyahu] back” — not to mention his simultaneous promise to bring analogous ethnic cleansing/“mass deportation” policies to the United States (as well as the threats he poses to women, LGBTQ+ people, Black people, migrants and all who stand in the way of his White Christian supremacist movement). 

Such a “strategy” runs the risk of fracturing a budding intersectional coalition for Palestinian rights in favor of one-issue politics, effectively ignoring allies who may be balancing their support with other issues they also consider urgent. Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman expressed her disappointment in the fragmenting of this coalition by saying “what Harris does after she is elected is going to be completely and entirely dependent on how well our coalition survives. That is the only way we can push her, whether it’s on Palestine, reproductive rights, housing, FTC regulations or unions.” 

It is not just the spurning of intersectional alliances that is problematic. Absolutist rhetoric in demonizing potential allies can be equally counterproductive — a prime example being Stein’s running mate Butch Ware, who has been demonizing potential allies by suggesting that Muslims who vote for Harris will burn in hell for it. (Ware also commemorated Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks with praise for the operation and denounced Harris as, among other things, “a Nazi … married to a committed Zionist.”)  

There is a political price to be paid for rhetoric that burns bridges with needed partners. These are tactics that can turn a moment of opportunity for positively impacting Palestinian rights into fringe shouting into the wilderness. It is not a path to substantive policy change. Humanizing opponents is key, even if their conversion is not likely. As Mark and Paul Engler put it: Movements don’t win by converting opponents, but rather by “turning neutrals into passive supporters and turning passive sympathizers into active allies and movement participants.” 

The best way to do that is to foster a culture of empathy for the emotions felt by all — something the prominent reproductive rights advocate Lorettta Ross refers to as “calling-in.” Rhetoric that closes off possibilities for mutual recognition is self-defeating. In other words: It is both moral and strategic to think in ways that are nonviolent, inclusive and human.

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Others, such as the Uncommitted National Movement, have taken a more calibrated position that moves at least partly in that direction. Uncommitted has refused to endorse Harris, but in more reasoned language that recognizes the substantial difference between Harris and Trump. Uncommitted rejects Trump for his plans to “accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of antiwar organizing” and also spurns Stein out of fear a vote for her would “inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency.” Indeed, Uncommitted has gone so far as to say that “It’s clear Netanyahu will be doing everything in his power to get Trump elected. And we have to do everything in our power to stop him.” 

This equivocal Uncommitted position is understandable, given both Harris’ formal stances and her rejection of Uncommitted’s request to be represented by a speaker at the Democratic National Convention (a request supported by a broad range of Democratic Party actors, speaking both to the inroads mentioned earlier and their limits up until now). It is also, however, a confused position. It seemingly acknowledges that Harris is the better option and that Trump is an ideological bedfellow with Netanyahu, but doesn’t take that to its logical conclusion. Perhaps they are fenced in by the rhetorical maelstrom of those more eager to criticize Harris than Trump? Whatever the motivation, the mixed messaging might end up being self-defeating.

Uncommitted’s position is part of the difficult conundrum facing those advocating for change in U.S. policy. How do movements turn shifts in public opinion into real policy change? Or, to put the question more specifically: How do movements effectively push the U.S. to take positions that actively advance Palestinian human rights when there is no ideal champion in the race? 

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There is clearly no blueprint for a journey into uncharted territory, but there are both short-term and long-term considerations to take into account. In the short-term, if the Green Party receives enough support — or enough people stay neutral — that could help Trump win, thereby giving Netanyahu what he wants regarding Israel-Palestine. Alternatively, Harris nonetheless may win and Palestinian activists will have thereby shown their political irrelevance — i.e., that the nationwide mobilization on behalf of Palestinian rights can be and should be ignored by Democrats concerned with winning elections. 

A third, more promising scenario for activists concerned with Palestine is that they find themselves in a position to take credit for slim margins of victory in key states like Michigan. That could potentially be leveraged — in the longer term — for further influence with U.S. policymakers, at least within the Democratic Party. 

If the work of connecting the short-term to the long-term is to result in real change — both during and after the U.S. presidential election — there are guiding principles from nonviolent, coalition building movements around the world from which to learn. Here are a few such principles to consider in the hopes that the movement against Israeli war crimes in Gaza can be a powerful political force to change U.S. foreign policy toward Israel-Palestine as a whole.

1. Engage power: Change comes from engaging complicated structures of power rather than assuming they are static. Much of the hesitancy in supporting Kamala Harris comes from assuming change in the Democratic Party is not possible. This is naïve. The Democratic Party moved from being the party of slaveholders and Jim Crow to the party of the civil rights movement and affirmative action to rectify histories of racial discrimination. More recently, the energy behind Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign forced a more progressive Democratic Party platform, one element of which led to the creation and passage of the U.S.’s most meaningful climate legislation. These changes don’t happen without movements engaging power structures.

There are no perfect partners in a two-party system; change in imperfect partners is a more realistic goal. The radical climate change group Climate Defiance, drawing from author Rebecca Solnit, perhaps put it best, saying: “A vote is not a valentine. It is a chess move.” Self-righteous indignation from the fringes may be psychologically satisfying, but change comes from building power in the short and long-term, not being separate from it.

2. Engage morality: Taking power seriously means also taking morality seriously. Human rights scholar author Shadi Mokhtari wrote powerfully in the wake of Oct. 7 on the need to combine moral clarity (plainly calling out gross injustices by any and all parties) and moral complexity (recognizing the validity of multiple emotional frames through which communities see contentious politics). In her words, we need moral clarity to call out the “Israeli state’s deplorable and devastating violence against Palestinians as well as the maddening ways the United States government facilitates and funds it.” At the same time, we need moral complexity to shed light on “Palestinian suffering while also recognizing the immense pain wrought by Hamas’ cruel acts of violence … and within the context of Jewish populations’ historical traumas and suffering.”

In short: condemnation is important but insufficient. It is urgent that we develop a political morality that calls out injustices while also recognizing that, to end such injustices, we must confront the depths of emotion, memory and experience that justify them. If not, we risk being reduced to seeing politics as a futile zero-sum game in which one side must lose for the other to win. Unfortunately, a failure to engage moral complexity has too often characterized discourse around Israel-Palestine. 

3. Engage law (consistently): Prizing a singular narrative over moral complexity results in mutual dehumanization — one side is less than human, hence not worthy of international humanitarian law’s protections. The relentless dehumanization of Palestinians has justified Israeli extermination tactics just as, in a vicious circle, Hamas’ targeting of Israeli civilians is justified by an analogous denial of humanity. The moral failure of mutual dehumanization has real world consequences; it justifies the endless cycles of war crimes that we see playing out on the ground. 

Even if we must have the moral clarity to state the obvious — that the Palestinian side is paying a (far) higher price in these cycles of Israeli-Palestinian war crimes — it lacks integrity to only denounce violations from one side. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “If you lose sight of the value of individual human life you have lost something.” Selective denunciations of war crimes do not just surrender moral integrity, they also sap such denunciations of their political power. A clear position that all targeting of civilians is unacceptable is essential if law is to have moral and political weight, rather than be solely rhetoric evoked when convenient.

4. Engage agency: Activism grounded in all of the above principles helps us move past monolithic conceptions of identity and, instead, engage the agency of complex individuals and communities. One of the frustrations of recent arguments around Israel-Palestine has been how complex groups are reduced to a singular monolith, ignoring the intricate histories of Israel and Palestine. To the contrary, each “side” has a history of internal political divisions, ideological evolutions and battles over positions and tactics.

Monstrous acts are committed, but not all are monsters. It is true that after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the Israeli nationalist frenzy that has followed it is easy to reduce Israel to Netanyahu and Palestine to Hamas. In that context, it is tempting to feel the choice is solidarity with one of those actors against the other. To buy into this binary, however, empowers those most invested in total war without distinction. And it thereby erases the agency of those with a different political imagination of how to address this conflict. 

There is a reason why Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders contributed to Hamas’ birth. It is the same reason that, prior to Oct. 7, Israel was invested in boosting Hamas’ power, diminishing the feckless Palestinian Authority, and focusing its particular ire on those organizing nonviolent resistance — be it through international law and human rights or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Israeli leaders knew the political advantage to their expansionist project of an enemy equally dedicated to total war. Nonviolent opposition is precisely what these leaders feared most. 

Analogously, in the heyday of the post-Oslo peace process — with staged Israeli withdrawals from Palestinian territories underway and Hamas deeply unpopular among Palestinians — Hamas engaged in a series of suicide bombings to kill civilians in public places. The purpose was not a military victory but rather a rational political calculation on how to best undermine momentum behind implementing Oslo. Then, as after Oct. 7, Israel responded to Hamas’ bait with unrestrained collective punishments, unleashing a fresh cycle of violence which empowered Hamas.
 
In essence, those extremes got what they wanted: the marginalization of peaceful political possibilities in favor of the myth that violence is the only way to deal with the savage other. It is essential that activists not take the same bait. Israel is not simply Netanyahu and his extremist allies, and Palestinians should not be reduced to Hamas.

One can better and more honestly advocate both for an end to Israeli war crimes and Palestinian self-determination by embracing pluralism and agency on all sides. Forgetting this pluralism — and the agency of different Palestinian political actors — undermines the sort of political imagination needed not only to effectively resist Israeli war crimes in the immediate, but to also build a just Palestine in the future.

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More than anything, what is needed is a movement informed by principles that effectively advocates in the immediate — but is also sustained by a vision of the future. The throughline in all of the principles listed above is that forms of resistance are not just tactics, they are how we constitute what such struggles hope to achieve in the future. 

As feminist and gender studies scholar Judith Butler writes, “Liberation struggles that practice nonviolence help to create the nonviolent world in which we all want to live. I deplore the violence [in Israel-Palestine] unequivocally at the same time as I, like so many others, want to be part of imagining and struggling for true equality and justice in the region, the kind that would compel groups like Hamas to disappear, the occupation to end, and new forms of political freedom and justice to flourish.” 

Activism that lacks such a vision of the future, contenting itself with immediate outrage, blinds itself to the world of political possibilities that human agency can bring. Without dismissing the righteousness of such outrage, we cannot be imprisoned by it. There is an urgent necessity to build power in ways that are grounded in self-conscious political practice. A practice that is informed by pluralist agency and engages power via principles of moral clarity, complexity and consistency is the path to movements that create real change.