Progressive Except for Palestine? Fuck off
People say that everything can't be about Gaza, but everything is about everything.
I’ve been struggling to figure out how to express the idea that “Progressive Except for Palestine” is, well, bullshit. It’s like saying, “I’m vegan, except I eat beef.” No, you’re not a vegan, then.
I started this piece about what Mamdani’s winning formula was and my worry that the Democrats would continue to fight it, not embrace it. But as the piece poured out across the keyboard, I realized that Mamdani’s comprehensive platform, that touched not only every political live wire, was also the things New Yorkers were actually struggling with. That fact illustrated that you can’t be “Progressive except…” because our problems, and the issues facing voters are inexorably intertwined.
Ultimately, Mamdani was the antidote to the idea that you can be "progressive except for Palestine." Not because your position on Palestine is a purity test, and not because we all must prioritize that issue above all else (especially in an election with no foreign policy component), but because just like Mamdani’s platform intentionally tied together all the major issues, Palestine is not its own issue, it’s part of his integrated platform.
Behind the piece
A personal note: I know we’re not supposed to get high on our own supply, or fall overly in love with our own writing (Editors across the world just stood up and clapped). But when I was reading through the piece again after the editor made some edits, I got to this paragraph:
It’s women’s rights, because of the dead mothers, the dead children, so many dead children. Girls murdered who will never grow up to become women. Fathers kidnapped off the street, held for decades without formal charges, never getting to meet their unborn daughter before they grow to become mothers themselves, or are vaporized before they can escape childhood. Mothers who must mourn multiple children all at once, after collecting bits and pieces in a bag to bury. And those are the “lucky” ones, because they didn’t die in childbirth because of a blockade on medical supplies, or see their babies killed before they could even get a birth certificate.
I had basically forgotten it since my brain had dumped it to the page, and when I was re-reading it now, it made me cry. I wrote these phrases with that intention, “so many dead children,” “vaporized,” “escape childhood,” but at the same time, these words can’t even begin to capture the atrocities we continue to fund, supply, and, in West Orange, and NJ, fight to keep people from talking about.
We’re all writing to paint a picture, to have an emotional impact. So I guess one benefit of brain dumping and forgetting what you wrote is that you can have that emotional impact on yourself. So I did the writerly thing. I told my editor that paragraph was off limits.
Newsletter image by Hannes Wolf on Unsplash