Kamala Harris has earned an eleventh-hour show of support from Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim community leaders.

More than 100 Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders have signed a letter making the case for those reluctant to support Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.

“We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter, published Thursday night, reads.

“Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones,” the letter continued. “As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities.”

  • TheOubliette@lemmy.ml
    12·
    6 days ago

    And here is the problem with your argument. This is what I wanted you to say.

    I had already implied it. I did not say, “there are no Palestinian signatories”, did I? I said it was a conspicuous subset of people, namely the heads if NGOs and party insiders. This necessitates diversity of positions taken and of class dynamics. I am not tokenizing Palestinians or treating them as a monolith to throw around like a cudgrl, saying “this is what Palestinians want so you should to”. Solidarity requires that you become informed and work in solidarity with the oppressed, not seek out tokens. People throughout this thread are trying to use Palestinians in this way to justify their complicity.

    Almost none of the Palestinians around here, or anyone they know, is in the camp that they won’t vote, because they know that Trump being in office means things, like a lot of the Palestinians in the US, will be sent back to Palestine, to be part of the genocide, they are trying to save people from.

    How did you get a read on what all of the Palestinians in your area are doing wrt supporting Harris? I am very active among my local community and I would never say “almost none” about basically anything. But I can tell you that I can turn out the vast majority who attend community events to anti-Harris actions where they change the slogans and have conversations to that effect.

    Maybe, like the bias within those who signed this letter, where you go, creates an oppositional bubble.

    I spend most of my time reading: Palestine in community centers and appropriate religious gatherings. I don’t think it is particularly biased towards radical or left action. The wider group has to press local imams to be less defeatist, even.

    Maybe the ones here are in a less privileged position, one that makes them significantly more vulnerable to the GOP’s bigotry?

    My community is poor and vulnerable.

    Simply living in a state that will harbor immigrants against the Feds, type of privilege.

    ICE constantly raids. They tend to focus on the Latino community, though not exclusively. My compatriots do direct action to delay or prevent arrest at suspected raid targets.

    There are ~47,000 christian Palestinians, ~15 million Palestinians. So this isn’t the caveat you are trying to create, in this informal space.

    It is the caveat I am trying to create. I know Christian Palestinians. The entirety of my point was about not assuming uniformity.

    The Palestinians, and the greater muslim population here, remember when Trump was in office. When many of them were arrested, caged, and deported, on the flimsiest of bullshit, and had their property, businesses, and families stripped from them, in the anti-muslim fervor.

    Deportations were around the same as under Obama and Biden-Harris. They have increased over the last year, targeting student protesters and political organizers. The primary impact of Trump’s policies are: basically anyone brown from the Middle East was to make reentry after travel extremely difficult, forcing people here to suffer because they could not visit dying relatives or weddings or family with new children. I was active across several states during this period, including dramatically racist red states, and do not know what you are talking about. To be clear, Palestinian immigrants have been under constant and extreme and unfair scrutiny for decades, facing exactly the flimsy excuses for deportation that you describe. This is why one of the things we focus on in our work is protecting Palestinian immigrants from risk and doing whatever can to get them full citizenship. It is usually then that they feel comfortable taking risks for some kinds of solidarity actions. Many lament their inability to participate for years because they are worried they will be deported and/or separated from their families if they do so much as attend a rally. Some do so anyways.

    The examples you give are the kinds of things that happened before and after Trump as well. But despite being across several communities and doing direct work among them, there was never a sentiment that this had changed.

    The Latino community faced a dramatic increase in such deportations and arrests, particularly due to Trump’s targeting of DREAMers (who Obama made vulnerable via incomplete legalization).