On the Liberal "Left," Political Purity, and Palestine.

Every now and then it hits home just how abstract the lives of Arabs are for many people in the West. Oh, they know we exist, but not it seems, as fully fledged humans but more like humanoid animations who, without real emotions or thoughts of our own, can be manoeuvred and manipulated at will.

In my book White Tears/Brown Scars, I put like this:

The Middle East remains, forever trapped in a kind of nonexistence, suspended in time and space, and only coming into view and relevance when the West deigns to pay it some attention, with usually disastrous consequences.

I was reminded of this yet again, following Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not be accepting his party’s nomination for the presidential election. As expected, the Democratic Party soon after indicated that the nomination would go to his vice president, Kamala Harris.

Within days of Biden’s announcement, two Australian white feminist progressive commentators posted video commentary on social media in which they chastised any progressives objecting to Harris or the Democrats in general.

Both of them – Hannah Ferguson and Abbie Chatfield (whose TikTok video has since been removed) – are well known in Australian media circles and both had hitherto being supportive of Palestine. In the wake of Harris’ promotion, however, it appeared that their empathy for Palestinians had to take a back seat now that the prospect of a female president was again on the horizon.

Before I continue, I want to be clear I am not singling them out to suggest that their comments were particularly egregious or because they deserve to be cancelled. In fact, it’s partly because their comments are so typical and commonplace that they provide a good example, and mostly because they both inspired a lot of commentary and intense debate on social media in the days following their publication.

Both Ferguson and Chatfield appeared incredulous that any left-leaning person would even entertain the possibility of not supporting Kamala Harris. That some may have been traumatised by the assault on Gaza and are conscientiously objecting was rendered moot and any and all criticism of Harris and her party interpreted as merely the American left “eating itself.”

Sure, they said, Harris is “not perfect” but voting for her is the only real option, and failing to do so was tantamount to betrayal of the left and of women. That it was, in short, political purity and moral perfectionism run rampant.

Ferguson did acknowledge the genocide but mostly to warn that Trump would “aggravate” it. Now, I’m not sure how you can aggravate a genocide. Like making someone more pregnant, perhaps?

There is a very real subtext to this thinking that is becoming increasingly explicit: “Suck it up Arabs. You are going to die either way so you may as well accept your fate and let us prosper.”

The liberal “left” talks a big game about community care and sacrificing privilege for the greater good. But whenever they get presented with an opportunity to do just that, they instead resort to jealously guarding their privilege and defending the status quo.

One of the liberal fears, for instance, is the prospect of Trump stacking the Supreme Court with ultra conservative justices. In other words, Arab-Americans are being told in no uncertain terms that the very real murder of tens of thousands of their friends, families, and community is less real than the prospect that the rights of white Americans might be further impacted.

But let’s leave that aside for a moment and focus on the threat of the stacking of the Court. This is a hollow threat because the Court was already stacked after liberal sitting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) passed away in 2020 at the age of 87.

Bader Ginsburg could have retired years earlier, before Obama approached the end of his second term – in fact he attempted to convince her to – but she refused. Every time this topic is raised, however, white liberal feminists get defensive and bristle that a woman could be asked to sacrifice anything for the greater good. I’m not sure what RBG would have been sacrificing at her age and in her position; really what was there left to achieve after 27 years on the Supreme Court? Perhaps she thought a Hillary Rodham Clinton victory was a sure thing in 2020 and was holding on for that.

In any case, this is the situation: RBG’s decision not to step down knowing full well that in the event of her death during a Republican presidency, her replacement would be an ultra-conservative, which of course, is exactly what happened, is considered beyond criticism. Now, four years later, any objection to Kamala Harris’s role in the Gaza genocide is merely “moral perfectionism” and “political purity” that must be cast aside so that Trump does not further attack the Supreme Court.

How can the rights of one woman to stay in a position in which she was frankly no longer needed be considered sacrosanct but the rights of Palestinians to life itself be negotiable, expendable, and forgettable?

How can the lives of Arabs be treated as such an abstraction? How can our objections, and those of our supporters, be dismissed as coming from a place of nit picking “perfectionism” and not from, say, a refusal to be complicit in these tens of thousands of murders of our people?

At some point, surely we must take stock of the many elections in which we have been told that first we simply must win, and then we can demand all the changes we seek. So we do as we are told, and somehow our rights get further eroded anyway and the world gets worse.

Obama spoke of the audacity of hope and promised the closure of Guantanamo. He went on to drop bombs on more Arabs than his predecessor George W(eapons of mass destruction) Bush. Guantanamo is still there.

Biden warned of the danger of a second Trump term. He then went on to drop more bombs on Arabs than either Trump or Obama.

This is my fear for this election. I fear that voting for the Democrats – and, in Australia, for the current Labor government come election time – comes with three certainties.

First, it will spell a public endorsement of genocide as official foreign policy. Second, this public endorsement will provide tacit permission for Israel to expand its assault on Gaza into a full-scale war on neighbouring countries, Lebanon and Syria (which it has been itching to do from the start).

Third, it will keep us firmly trapped in this electoral purgatory in which we are all suspended. A purgatory in which the same words on endless rotation ring in our heads. Just this election. Just this one. We have to win this one. Then we can hold our leaders accountable.

Hold our leaders accountable. What does that mean exactly?

In her video, Hannah Ferguson said that the American left had to both vote for Kamala Harris and hold her accountable. But surely the first action precludes the other? In what universe is accountability sought let alone won by handing someone the presidency of the most powerful nation in history?

According to Ferguson, this accountability takes the form of … criticism. Is that all? Forgive me for thinking that accountability might just look like finally showing our alleged representatives that they cannot keep taking our votes for granted and expect victory based on nothing but being not quite as terrible as the other guy.

Accountability involves loss. As long as our political leaders don’t think they have anything to lose, they will never change.

The Democrat-Republican relationship is symbiotic. Republicans need Democrats to scare their base into believing America is on the precipice of cultural collapse, and Democrats need Republicans – more specifically they need someone like Trump – to terrify their base into believing that the Democrats are all that stand between them and fascism.

As if this fascism is going to arrive with a bang and not the slow creep we have all seen coming for years now.

Pushed to the side is what is happening in Palestine and the broader region. For decades both Democrats and Republicans have told Americans and Western populations in general that the chaos and conflict in the Middle East is entirely the fault of its residents, particularly the Arabs. That we do this to ourselves, you see, and America is only trying to help.

One would think that Gaza has laid that deception bare, but if this recent commentary is any indication, it appears the reality is still not sinking in.

American voters have an opportunity that I don’t know will come again in our lifetime: to show the Democrats that there is a red line and that they cannot keep coasting on “vote blue no matter who.” Australia, our time to do the same with Labor is also on its way.

They say that our physical health today is the embodiment of choices we made – or were made for us – yesterday and the day before. We don’t suddenly get sick, the symptoms may seem to appear suddenly but they build up as a result of what we put into our bodies, what chemicals or environmental pollutants we are exposed to, how we are treated by others, whether we get enough sleep and exercise, and so on over the course of many years.

The same can be said of our collective societal health. The world didn’t become like this overnight; what we are experiencing now is the cumulative effect of choices made by people long before we were born.

So please ask yourself, what are the future implications for us as humans – what are we going to implant in future generations if enough of us decide everything we have seen come out of Gaza with our own eyes is not only tolerable or acceptable but rewardable? Do we want our future society to be sicker than we are now, or healthier?

There is no going back. Those dead children you have seen on your screen are not abstractions. They are not hypothetical. And they are not pawns. Once voters endorse this unparalleled massacre of children we are now witnessing, they will send a clear message that it is acceptable foreign policy. Whether or not Trump “aggravates” it is immaterial: it is the Democrats who instituted it and it will be the voting public who endorsed it and rewarded it.

And it will be consolidated as part of what it means to be an American. And as an Australian. And as a human.