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From the River to the Sea: How Progressives F*ck Up Everything [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-17
If there’s one thing Progressives love more than painting protest posters, it’s getting coopted by the far right. They’ve practically built an entire wing of a political party dedicated to taking grassroot calls for political reform and equality and turning them into weapons the far right can and successfully do use against people calling for justice.
Take for example, the “defund the police” movement. Generations of anti-police brutality activists had been fighting for real structural reform with the blood and sweat taken from their own communities when George Floyd was brutally murdered in front of the nation. This devastating and nationally traumatic act opened the doors for change in ways that we have not seen in generations. Millions of people were banded together to acknowledge for the first time since Rodney King that police brutality was not a myth and that we needed to confront it structurally. We had legislators championing real reform and we saw companies, organizations and communities calling for change together. This was a once in a generation opportunity to make lasting change to protect Black people, BIPOC people and any community or individual being targeted by police brutality from meeting the same fate as George Floyd, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, and Breonna Taylor. And who fucked that up? Was it the Fraternal Order of Police? No. Was it MAGA? No again. It was the same progressive assholes that were shouting at the sky that Black Lives Mattered to them.
Black Lives didn’t matter to progressives. What mattered more to them? A slogan. A fucking slogan.
Activists that have been fighting police brutality for decades have been demanding federal legislation to protect their children, families, friends and communities. They’ve been demanding changes to qualified immunity laws, police training and hiring practices, and increased control of safety and security in their own communities. And they, we, were about to achieve that. Until the Progressive movement decided that it was more important to back the slogan to “defund the police” than it was to actually make the structural reforms needed to protect communities from them.
The progressives' insistence on defending that stupid fucking slogan enabled the GOP to slam the window of opportunity shut on legislative efforts to stop police brutality and opened the door for the entire movement to be coopted and dismantled. Now they’re doing the same shit with the war between Israel and Hamas.
It is imperative that we as a nation call out the war crimes being committed by Israel with the same depth of effort that we call out the terrorism being inflicted by Hamas. We need to defend our brothers and sisters from antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab actors and actions equally. We need to recognize the traumas that Palestinians have been through at the hands of the Israeli government for decades and we need to denounce terrorism as a response to those crimes. We are fighting a multifront war against terrorism and fascism and we must defend civilians from both.
What we don’t need to do is adopt, amplify and defend a slogan that has been coopted by Hamas and that’s being used by the far right to dismember calls to end war crimes against the Palestinian people.
“From the river to the sea” means different things to different people. For some it means that Palestinians can live free from fear on any land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For others, it is taken to mean that Jerusalem will be no more. The later is definitely the case for Hamas, while the former is the definition being applied by most pro-Palestinian protestors. Etymology is a moot point, though.
It doesn’t matter where the slogan comes from or how it’s used by different factions. What matters is how it’s being used on the political battlefield.
On the political battlefield, this slogan is being used to frame pro-Palestinian activists and legislators as anti-Semitic. It’s being used to silence the calls for an end to the war crimes against Palestinian civilians. And it’s being used to drive a wedge between leftists that might otherwise be allies. It’s the “defund the police” of global warfare.
Whether or not progressives truly believe that this saying is not anti-Semitic is besides the point. The point is that if Progressives don’t stop using it, the truly anti-Semitic members of the far right will successfully use it to destroy any chance the left has to make the changes necessary to benefit the Palestinian people. The far right will coopt it as their own to increase hate crimes against Jewish people here in the United States and to turn pro-Palestinian protests into anti-Jewish Nazi rallies. The cooptation we saw between “Antifa” and Black Lives Matter was child’s play compared to what white nationalists have planned under the cover of the progressive pro-Palestinian movement.
We need to be smarter about this.
We need to stop putting shitty slogans ahead of people’s lives. We need to stop threatening to hand the nation over to MAGA. We need to differentiate between actual activists and people coopting pro-Palestinian movements to advance anti-Jewish hatred. And we need to defend civilians from fascism and terrorism alike. If we can’t fight this war on all fronts, we need to get off the battlefield.
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