As I wrote my piece about Mamdani after he won the Primary, Palestine is not outside of our local politics. Instead it represents all of our issues, in a single package. It is this universality that makes it deeply unserious and disrespectful for elected officials to claim it doesn’t affect their constituents, even if that locality doesn’t have a large Muslim or Arab population.

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. 

It’s healthcare, as hospitals are intentionally and systematically destroyed, and ambulances, their crews, and the doctors who meet them at the hospital doors are all intentionally targeted for trying to do their job, saving lives.

It’s education, as bombed schools become refugee shelters, become raging infernos, become piles of rubble and ash, not because of what they taught, but who they taught.

It’s immigration, as the checkpoints and immigration sweeps that have consumed Stephen Miller’s dreams for years, are plainly visible, not just in the “borders” between Gaza, the West Bank, and the rest of Palestine, but in the internal checkpoints within Gaza and the West Bank, where settlers are waved through, and Arabs are delayed for hours just because.

It’s LGBTQIA+ rights, because as much as Israel loves to pinkwash it’s apartheid and genocide, they actively entrap LGBTQIA+ Palestinians to be report on their families and neighbors, threatening to out them if they refuse. 

A pride flag on a f--king tank doing donuts on someone’s tent in an occupied territory isn’t something to be celebrated.

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.

Could Mamdani be the generational candidate that transforms the DNC? by me - June 2025

(Side note: The women’s rights paragraph in this piece was the last time my writing made me cry, it’s been almost a year, I need to step up my game)

It didn’t hurt that Mamdani’s main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, was also an intersectional candidate: sexual harasser, nepobaby, genocide supporter, carpetbagger, out of touch boomer, AI adopter, corruption magnet, etc.

This isn’t new, many people know the famous poem, which was actually adapted from a speech by Martin Niemöller, a German Pastor. But the less popularized, more accurate, translation actually hits even harder in the context of our current struggles:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.

When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.

When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to protest

It’s a go to move on the right to declare anything they have no legitimate argument against as communist. China being a communist country and our racism play oversized roles in the hawkish US stance toward China. If a Viktor Orbán-esque authoritarian was running China, I guarantee you Republicans and Democrats alike would be talking about dialog and mutual benefit, not economic destruction and war.

Trade unionists represent both the worker power that actually creates value and wealth (for owners and capital to steal) and the bodies that build our weapons, without with we can’t threaten the world, both internationally through our military overreach, and at home through police occupation of our neighborhoods.

We’ve returned to the term social democrat in the the US, about 70 years after this was originally written. Which is a damning indictment of the Democratic Party if we have to specify that a subgroup is actually interested in helping and protecting regular people.

And of course, antisemitism, at least the portion that isn’t labeled as such in bad faith to suppress free speech and support for Palestine, is a growing problem. Only in so much as we have elected antisemites and their supporters. But that threat is from the right, despite all the noise about horseshoe theory, and trying to demonize those who speak for international law, and against crimes against humanity.

But there is no basis for antisemitism in the values and principals of the left. The issues of Palestine are not unique, and don’t require blaming a religion or its individual followers to explain what is happening. Nor does it make sense to do so.

The result of folks being unhoused is the same whether it’s due to corporate greed, failed governance, short sighted austerity, defunding mental health supports, or a 2,000 pound bomb, dropped in the furtherance of genocide.

Women dying while pregnant are still dead, whether they are murdered by intimate partners or shot by police in the US, die from USAID cuts in Africa, are starved to death in Gaza, or are shot by “security forces” in the West Bank.

ICE and CBP, and municipal police forces, occupying neighborhoods and stopping, harassing, arresting, beating, and killing residents just trying to go about their day, is no different that the occupied West Bank, and the apartheid mistreatment of Arab residents of Al-Quds(Jerusalem).

There is no room in our big tent for exceptions for Palestine. The tent has no walls, anyone may enter. But you have to agree to come under the tent. We don’t need to bring the tent to folks like Candice Owens, Tucker Carlson, or Liz Cheney. Or here in NJ, including candidates like Sue Altman, Justin Goldsman, Susan McCartney, and Adam Kraemer, who have leveraged disgusting, racist, and dehumanizing disinformation against our Muslim, Arab, and Black neighbors, doesn’t expand our tent, it destroys it.

We are not just fighting for our existing democracy, which honestly may not be worth saving, but against the fascism and racism that underlies every bomb, every bullet, every dead Palestinian child. That’s why there’s no room in the tent for candidates that can’t affirm the humanity of Palestinians, immigrants, our Black neighbors, our LGBTQIA+ community, Muslims, and all of our children, no matter where they happen to be born.

Acting

NJ folks, tell your elected representatives to pass the NJ Voting Rights Act.

New Jersey Institute for Social Justie | Action Center

We Must Protect Democracy!

With the specter of ICE/CBP raids or intimidation on Election Day we need to do everything we can to protect voters. That means working within the Legislature and our communities.

Our country has a long history of people dying for demanding or daring to try to exercise their right to vote. Congressional Democrats clearly have no plan to stop ICE from committing whatever violence they choose, wherever they choose to inflict it. 

So it will require the rest of us, the regular folks, to stand up, just as we have in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minnesota. State and County Democratic Party Democratic Committees should be game planning with local officials, their members, and their communities. It’s not a question of if ICE and CBP will try to interfere on Election Day. It’s a question of whether communities can out-organize them.

ICE-ing the 2026 Election — PUBLIC SQUARE

So what can we do? We must apply the lessons of Minnesota citizen ICE patrols to our voting infrastructure. We need regular citizens monitoring for ICE presence outside polling sites. Costumes, whistles, brass bands, the whole Minnesota treatment. Those neighbors can post the actual situation outsid

Reading

“The Children,” James Baldwin Wrote, “Are Always Ours, Every Single One of Them" by Saqib Bhatti

This is from October, 2024, but I just came across it and I think it captures the emotions so well. Unfortunately, it also connects to the news just in the past few days: "One Palestinian man was killed and four others seriously wounded during an Israeli military raid in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Sunday, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said the man’s wife was in labor at a local hospital when she was informed of his death."

Back at the hospital, my son’s overnight nurse in the ICU took great care of all three of us. She checked in on our baby at least every hour. Every time she came into our room, she answered all our questions, no matter how frivolous or redundant. She knew we were scared, and she went above and beyond to try to calm our fears and make us feel comfortable. She even sat with us and kept us company late at night.

The next morning, towards the end of her 12-hour shift, my wife asked the nurse if she was Arab because she noticed the necklace she was wearing had her name written in Arabic. She told us she was Palestinian.

That took my breath away. Images of the genocide raced through my mind and I felt both sad and ashamed at once. While this woman was treating some of the sickest children in the United States, our government was using her tax dollars to supply the weapons that had destroyed nearly every hospital in Gaza. The juxtaposition was jarring. She was pulling out all the stops to comfort us and assure us our baby was in safe hands, while we were paying for the weapons used to kill doctors and nurses — just like her — in her homeland.

…

As parents of some of the most privileged children in the history of the world, we have a responsibility to do the impossible: value the lives of Palestinian children as much as our own. While we’re struggling to get by over here and juggling our jobs and childcare, we must fight like hell for the children of Palestine and the world that is collapsing around them. Their parents, families and friends. Their homes, schools and hospitals. Their parks, playgrounds and soccer fields. We have to fight for a Palestine in which they can find joy, dream big and thrive. Just like we fight for our own children — day in and day out.

“The Children,” James Baldwin Wrote, “Are Always Ours, Every Single One of Them" - In These Times

Saqib Bhatti laments the unbearable task of parenting during genocide—from the United States to Gaza.

‘The night guards’: Inside the grassroots network fighting back against Israeli settler attacks by Majd Jawad

“Since the beginning of last year, and as a result of the escalating attacks on Sinjil, we found it necessary to form a committee primarily of volunteers,” says R.M., a regular participant from the village. “We needed to organize the guard duty more effectively and move from a faz’a model to a more organized system.” 

What R.M. calls “faz’a” is a Palestinian colloquialism denoting when a collective of people rushes to the aid of other members of the community, representing the organic and spontaneous expression of mutual aid among Palestinians. In the context of escalating settler pogroms, fellow members of the community are about the only protection that Palestinians have from violent Jewish Israeli settlers, who continue to kill Palestinians across West Bank towns.

Since the start of the year, over 260 Palestinians have been injured in attacks by Israeli settlers, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a threefold increase compared to the monthly average of 30 to 105 injuries per month during 2023.

…

“Despite the different political context, our historical experience in the First Intifada is similar to the experience of the committees today,”  R.S., a female member of a popular committee from Jenin refugee camp, told Mondoweiss. She now lives in the al-Jabriyat neighborhood in Jenin, after the refugee camp’s residents were forcibly expelled and have not been allowed back.

Between 1987 and 1993, the First Intifada was fought in everyday life. Under curfews, closures, and the constant threat of arrest, Palestinians built their own systems to survive. Local committees emerged in neighborhoods, villages, and refugee camps, organizing food distribution, running underground classes when schools were shut down, and providing basic medical support when access to care was blocked.

R.S expanded on the memory. “It provided many models of community work and steadfastness. No one was hungry then; anyone in need would find someone to help and lend a hand. Many residents offered their homes, mosques, and clubs to those displaced from the camp. No one slept in the open.” 

‘The night guards’: Inside the grassroots network fighting back against Israeli settler attacks – Mondoweiss

Meet the grassroots network of Palestinian volunteers who spend their nights defending their West Bank villages from escalating Israeli settler violence.

What's Political Violence? by Peter Shamshiri

It’s absolutely bananas that Republicans who were all in on the idea that a military training exercise was the start of martial law along the Texas border under Obama, are now 25 points stronger on martial law along the Texas border compared to not saying nice things when assholes die.

What they mean when they talk about “political violence” is violence directed at political figures by members of the public. Violence that goes in the other direction does not count. That’s important, because “political violence” as they define it makes up just a tiny fraction of the political violence we all experience. When Trump deploys federal agents to cities he doesn’t like, and some of those agents murder civilians, and investigations into the incidents are blocked, that’s not political violence. Blowing up schools and targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran isn’t political violence. Nor is cutting funding for cancer research or foreign aid. That’s all just politics.

(This reminds me, by the way, of how politicians and the media deploy the term “terrorism,” a word with an amorphous meaning that, in practice, tends to refer exclusively to violence committed by Muslims and never to violence by anyone else.)

https://stringinamaze.net/p/what-s-political-violence

I’d love to be wrong more often…

The Republican vision for our country is violence across the entirety of our society, in all its forms, and all its manifestations. One mentally ill shooter didn’t hand Trump the election. But the Democrats’ feeble reactions will.

There are no both sides to our political violence by me - July 2024

What Liberals Can Learn from Charlie Kirk by Nathan Goldwag

Charlie Kirk wanted to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He wanted to strip Americans of abortion rights, and criminalize the existence of transgender people, and he certainly implied that he wanted to have gay people publicly executed. He wanted to massively restrict immigration, and to destroy the concept of separation of church and state. These were, for most of his life, not popular ideas. But he, and those who agreed with him, kept advocating for them, and fighting for them, and when he died, he was part of a movement that was politically ascendant.

An attempt by liberals to imitate the success of Charlie Kirk would not be going to evangelical megachurches to debate abortion policy with their pastors; it would be organizing chapters of militant liberals within Christian communities and then intervening with national attention and state power every time they didn’t get their own way. It would be threatening Hillsdale College and Liberty University with lawsuits and investigations, and demanding that they establish an affirmative action program for liberal students. It would be setting up ideologically-pure networks of patronage, so that liberal activists could get rewarded for informing on their colleagues and undermining any institution they don’t control.

What Liberals Can Learn from Charlie Kirk | Goldwag's Journal on Civilization

Over the last few days, if you’re active on political media, you have probably seen references to the “controversy” over a student’s failing grade on an essay at Oklahoma Un…