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The Fight for Palestine Is the Fight Against Fascism
We must understand that to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, we must also develop a longer-term strategy that contends with the growing power of far-right forces here in the U.S.
Jan 09, 2025
It has been over 450 days since Israel began its genocide and military invasion of Gaza and then Lebanon, Iran, and Syria. With the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president, the American government will continue and increase support for Israel’s all out war against Palestinian people.
For the past year, students have rallied and protested to demand divestment from Israel and its apartheid regime. Heated protests have erupted across the country, including in San Francisco where students planned walk outs and took over quads with encampments and teach-ins.
Alongside these students, parents from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) communities went up against San Francisco’s school board to insist that their children cannot be censored for supporting Palestinian people. Many of these parents are Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) members, so I joined a meeting between these parents and the superintendent. When the superintendent would not bring up pressing issues around how students were being impacted by the ongoing genocide, parents disrupted the meeting and demanded their kids’ rights to speak up.
Through organizing, we build trust and are able to inoculate the harmful disinformation coming from white Christian nationalists and other right-wing forces.
However, not too long ago, I saw these same parents swayed by white Christian nationalists who were mobilizing Arab and Muslim parents around transphobia and homophobia. By circulating hateful rhetoric and drumming up fears about the “influence” of LGBTQ+ acceptance, white Christian nationalists convinced Arab and Muslim parents to pull their children out of public schools in the Bay Area. This is a trend we have seen across the country as Christian nationalist groups like Moms for Liberty recruit conservative Asian faith-based groups to rally against curricula portraying LGBTQ+ families and themes.
What happened? How did these parents go from being swayed by one fascist force to vehemently countering another fascist force? What can we learn as organizers from this moment?
The fight for a free Palestine is deeply ingrained into the many other fights against rising facism in the United States and abroad. We must understand that to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, we must also develop a longer-term strategy that contends with the growing power of far-right forces here in the U.S. We cannot do one without the other.
What does this take? First, we must be clear about who we’re up against and what strategies they are using. After 75 years of occupation and a year of military invasion, Zionism has made clear their strategy: complete annihilation of Palestine and its people. To do this, the Zionist system requires the support of other right-wing forces for monetary, political, and narrative power.
One formidable partnership is between white Christian nationalists and Zionists. Nationally, the largest Zionist organization in the United States is Christians United for Israel, which funnels millions of dollars into the Israel lobby every year. Project 2025, the 900-plus-page policy document spearheaded by the far-right Heritage Foundation, lays out far-right forces’ plan to transform the United States into a Christian nationalist theocracy that would sustain Israel’s military expansion. Locally, in San Francisco, when AROC campaigned with parents and students for the addition of Eid as holidays on the school calendar, Christian nationalists and Zionists allied to threaten the school board and halt the decision.
This issue of transphobia is a longer-term struggle that we will continue to face. We have not resolved it with our members, and there is no success story. However, we are helping our members to understand the contradictions of right-wing forces in order to move our communities on various contentious issues.
For years, Christian nationalists have made inroads into organizing Muslim and Arab parents in the Bay Area by manufacturing fear and outrage around queer and trans “influences” in schools. In the past year, as AROC has mobilized thousands of people to call for a permanent cease-fire and an arms embargo on Israel, we have also been engaging in deep political education and long conversations with our communities to point out the connections between various right-wing, fascist forces.
This past year has politicized many to call for Palestinian liberation. It has especially mobilized the SWANA families in AROC’s membership, many of whom have direct connections to the region that Israel is devastating. This past year has reemphasized that we need to deeply invest in grassroots organizing and basebuilding. This allows organizers and working-class people to work together to protect our communities from right-wing disinformation and come up with real solutions that can transform lives.
When the attacks on Gaza began last October, AROC was able to provide the space and container for our parents, youth, and activists to identify key issues and leverage our power locally. We got the cities of San Francisco and Oakland to adopt resolutions for an immediate and sustained cease-fire. Through those processes, we saw our community really engage with democratic processes and understand the power of civic engagement. Through organizing, we build trust and are able to inoculate the harmful disinformation coming from white Christian nationalists and other right-wing forces. This is key to winning our communities away from right-wing influences and building a stronger anti-fascist movement.
Grassroots organizing is how we build the power of our movement! Power means we can shift conditions in society and in our own lives. Power means we can end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and block the rise of far-right fascism.
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Dems Shouldn’t Throw Trans Americans Under Trump’s Bus
The normalization of transphobia in American politics, and the signs of looming government repression, poses a major moral test for the political leaders for the nearly 77 million Americans, and counting, who voted against Trump’s MAGA movement.
Nov 25, 2024
Like most people in the community she fights for on a daily basis, Philadelphia’s Naiymah Sanchez didn’t sleep at all on the night of November 5. It wasn’t only because Donald Trump’s second election would intensify her work as trans justice coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. It was also the personal anguish that the 41-year-old transgender woman felt knowing Trump had been elected, in part, by spending millions of dollars on TV ads that dehumanized her and people like her in shocking ways American voters had never seen before.
“I took it very personally,” Sanchez—who spent years as an activist around tough issues like combating prison rape before joining the ACLU-PA in 2017, right after Trump’s first election—told me this week. “They voted against me. They wanted to harm me.” She noted how many voters seemed to respond positively to the GOP’s openly anti-trans rhetoric, before adding: “We rest, and then we fight again.”
While Trump’s narrow but decisive win over Democrat Kamala Harris is still Topic A, the early fights over the president-elect’s off-the-wall cabinet picks and TV debates over just how anti-democratically the Trump regime might govern are still an abstraction to most Americans. It’s very different in the transgender community. There, leaders like Sanchez are having gut-wrenching conversations with people wondering if they need to accelerate major life moves, like gender-affirming surgery or a legal name change, before an openly hostile government arrives on January 20.
Selling out more than 1 million transgender Americans would wreck that brand, permanently—telling voters Democrats don’t stand for anything beyond surviving the next election.
Indeed, fears of what life might be like under Trump 47 for at least 1 million transgender Americans already began to hit home this week when the community’s one bright star on Election Day—avictory for the first-ever transgender member of Congress, Delaware’s Rep.-elect Sarah McBride—quickly became a symbol of the GOP’s determination to turn ugly campaign rhetoric into harsh governing reality.
It felt all too fitting that the Christian fundamentalist House Speaker Mike Johnson chose the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance—a day intendedto both memorialize past victims of violence, including at least 30 and perhaps far more murder victims every year, and to fight this scourge—to side with South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace’s vocal and bigoted efforts to prevent transgender people from using Capitol restrooms or other single-sex facilities of their chosen identity. Johnson claimed to be solving a problem that didn’t seem to exist for Capitol visitors or staffers before McBride’s arrival. More importantly, advocates like Sanchez know how such high-profile moves give license to everyday people to more openly voice anti-trans hatred.
This normalization of transphobia in American politics, and the signs of looming government repression, poses a major moral test—the first of many to come—for how the political leaders for the nearly 77 million Americans, and counting, who voted against Trump’s MAGA movement (for Harris or third-party candidates) are planning to respond.
Arguably, this is a real challenge for all of us. Can those of us not in the transgender community fully embrace the humanity of our friends, family members, or neighbors who are? Or, in the more meaningful than ever words of Sen. Bernie Sanders, be “willing to fight for a person you don’t know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself”? How many will instead succumb to a focus-grouped temptation of blaming the anti-trans TV ads for Trump’s win and keep silent as demagogues like Trump and his attention-crazed acolyte Mace step up their attacks?
The early indications are not hopeful. Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts—one of many seeking scapegoats for Harris’ electoral defeat and his party’s losses on Capitol Hill—threw down the gauntlet by saying Democrats are too worried about offending people before declaring: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton’s campaign manager did resign in protest over those remarks, but more broadly Democrats have struggled to respond—to Moulton but also to the Trump TV ads that seemed to utterly flummox Team Harris, which turned to polling and focus groups before deciding there was no good way to aggressively respond.
And the hard data suggest that, yes, unfortunately, a transphobic message does influence some swing voters—not a huge number, but not many were needed in an election that was arguably decided by fewer than 300,000 ballots in three battleground states. Republicans spent at least $65 million and probably much more on anti-transgender ads in a dozen key states, including here in Pennsylvania, where the spot with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” aired constantly during the Phillies’ late-season push or the evening news.
One polling group, Blueprint, reported that the third most-cited reason by voters for opposing Harris—after inflation and immigration—was this: “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” Blueprint added that this was the No. 1 reason for last-minute deciders rejecting Harris, while other polling groups argued that opposing transgender rights was far down their lists of voter concerns.
Still, the early data suggest why transgender activists fear too many Democrats think privately what Moulton voiced publicly. Thus, how hard will party leaders fight Republicans like Mace, who has already introduced a bill that would extend the Capitol bathroom restrictions endorsed by Johnson to all federal facilities across the United States?
The stakes couldn’t be higher as Trump prepares to take office. History has shown that the transgender community is often an early target of authoritarian strongmen. In the 1930s, for example, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis revoked “transvestite permits” that had been issued by the relatively liberal Weimar Republic, and shut down a transgender-friendly nightclub and research institute almost immediately upon taking power.
Today, in another fraught moment, it seems counterintuitive but the most effective voices for the idea of broadly embracing the humanity of transgender Americans seem to be Democrats who’ve also broken through in areas considered deep-red Trump country. Most famously, Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed bills that banned gender-affirming surgery for minors and barred trans girls from cisgender sports, and—although his vetoes were overridden by GOP lawmakers—still won reelection in his heavily pro-Trump state.
“Number one: I talked about why,” Beshear told CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday. “That’s my faith, where I’m taught that all children are children of God, and I wanted to stick up for children [who] were being picked on.” Voters—enough of them, anyway—respected Beshear for sticking to his values rather than doing what a consultant might have advised him to do.
Last week in the Capitol controversy, the maddeningly complicated Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who won in 2022 after campaigning extensively in Pennsylvania’s reddest rural counties, responded to the attack on McBride not with platitudes but with a gesture: Telling the incoming House member she could use the bathroom in his office any time, and adding: “There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone.” (I’m going to skip the obvious diatribe about how Fetterman might want to apply that thinking to Gaza.)
It seems to me that if Democrats want to have any hope of staying relevant over the next four years, let alone regaining power in the anti-small-”d”-democratic climate of the Trump regime, they need to embrace their inner Andy Beshear, and reject the shortsightedness of the Seth Moultons out there. Again, think back to history. In 1964, just months after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74% of Americans said mass demonstrations were detrimental to racial equality. President Lyndon B. Johnson knew that signing civil-rights legislation would probably mean near-future political pain for the Democratic Party, and he was right.
But think bigger picture. During that era, Democrats and their liberal base did build—however imperfectly—a brand that they were the party that had fought for civil rights and equality, not only for Black Americans but for Latinos, women, the LGBTQ community, and other groups that felt marginalized by conservatives. That brand—built around a moral belief and not the polling data—is how Democrats won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, even including the disappointment of Nov. 5. Selling out more than 1 million transgender Americans would wreck that brand, permanently—telling voters Democrats don’t stand for anything beyond surviving the next election.
I might be naive, but I think matters like addressing the needs of literally a handful of athletes or making everyone comfortable at a rest stop aren’t so complicated that America can’t work them out by starting at the simple place where Beshear starts: That we are all God’s children, with some basic human rights.
And if Democrats, as well as all of us still dreaming of a better world than Donald Trump’s dark vision for America, instead choose to say nothing because we are not transgender, people shouldn’t be surprised when their group is targeted next.
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The Inauguration Speech Trump Should Give (But Won’t)
I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in global warming that any of the words that follow will ever come out of his mouth, but I needed to write them down anyway.
Nov 22, 2024
My inbox is full of lament (and encouragement).
My Instagram feed is full of anger and “the arc of the moral universe bends slow but…”
My Facebook brims with exhortations to focus on the positive, on what we can control, on the next fight.
I live in a poor Democratic stronghold in southeastern Connecticut. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris won our state by more than 200,000 votes. Our seven paltry electoral votes went blue. Here, Jill Stein got a lot more votes than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but nowhere near enough to swing the Nutmeg State red.
43,000 dead in Gaza didn’t spark joy.
I didn’t plant a Harris/Walz sign on my front walk. I didn’t knock on doors in Pennsylvania. I didn’t give any money in response to the desperate and constant text messages I received from Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and dozens of other Democratic pen pals. I also never figured out how to stop those texts from crowding onto my phone.
Now that the election—the longest for Donald Trump (he started campaigning and fomenting insurrection even before the White House door whacked him on the bottom in 2021) and the shortest (just 107 days) for Kamala Harris—is over, there’s a small voice in my head asking why I didn’t go in hard for Kamala’s politics of JOY.
I love joy! I love her laugh! But I also know the answer: 43,000 dead in Gaza didn’t spark joy. Continued shipments of U.S. weapons to Israel didn’t make me happy. For all their good vibes alchemy, the Harris/Walz campaign failed to depart from the Biden administration’s blank check for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s version of saturation bombing.
There’s a lot her campaign should have/could have/might have done differently (if they had more time, if they had listened to different strategists) in terms of their ground game, how they spent their money, and who they focused on. There’s already a cottage industry of podcasters, pundits, and policy wonks at work figuring out just how and where the Harris/Walz campaign went wrong. But at the end of the day, of course, she lost because Trump won, because white men, atheist men, born-again men, Catholic men, rich men, poor men, men of all colors voted for him. They embraced his misogyny; his nativism; his racism; his Teflon-Don persona; his tall walls and barbed wire; his hatred of trans kids and gender as a spectrum; and his well-financed, loudly declared, legislatively-wired hatred of just about anyone who isn’t like him. Or maybe, just maybe, they held their noses against that foul hate-fest and voted for him because of some small, single, shining promise that rang out for them amid the cacophony of his raucous, roadshowing campaign. Who knows?
I’m not a pundit, a podcaster, or a policy wonk. I’m not a Democratic Party insider. In fact, I’ve often (but not in 2024) voted Green. I’m a mother of three bright, opinionated kids, two of whom don’t fit neatly into the rigid gender-presentation box now mandated by the Republican leadership. All three of those gorgeous human beings love peace and kindness. They’re friendly and trusting, as well as sharp and capable of sniffing out hypocrisy and equivocation. The day after the election, I sent them off to school with a warm lecture on staying true to our values of kindness and recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person—even those who voted for Trump. “No one we know would vote for him,” my son asserted with the confidence of the young. He is incorrect. More than 75 million people in this country voted for him. We certainly know some of them… Some of them are our friends.
I have to keep explaining to my kids why Donald Trump won and what having him at the helm of our government (again) will mean—for the next four years (or forever). It’s not an easy task. But I have to try because I’ve got three reasons not to luxuriate in despair and nihilism. Instead, I have to tap into the power of my imagination to get me through the rough days ahead.
Imagining Our Way Through the Nightmare
They say that we have to imagine a thing before we can make it a reality. The moon shot, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (first imagined almost 20 years before it took place in 1963), robots, nuclear weapons and the anti-nuclear movement (both imagined, however inadequately, before they became realities), solar panels: all were ideas, dreams, or even nightmares first.
Amid my own fracturing in this post-election moment, all the shards of sadness and disappointment, I’ve been seeking out friends and strangers in a structured but informal way. In one community conversation, someone suggested we hold an inauguration un-watch party where we would share our vision for the next four years. I immediately latched onto that bit of wisdom, hoping we might indeed organize such an event with a booming sound system, poetry, pomp, and a podium.
Since that idea was shared, I’ve also been crafting the 47th president’s inauguration speech in my head—not the one he’ll give, of course, but the speech I wish he would make. I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in global warming that any of the words that follow will ever come out of his mouth, but I needed to write them down anyway. Maybe getting them out into the world will give me the energy I need to do my part in bringing such words to life in spite of him. So, here goes:
A Speech for the Ages (All of Them)
My fellow Americans, and all those of you who still look to the United States as a land of opportunity, I, Donald J. Trump, am inaugurating a new era today. I’m stepping down from this post, which I barely won. My whole political career started out as a gag, a gig, a side project in my vast empire of hustle and hucksterism, and here I stand again on Inauguration Day. How wild is that?
Even crazier, this very day, the nation also honors the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And maybe it’s the ghost of that great justice-seeker that’s led me to make a very different speech than I planned or you expected.
I wanted to drain the swamp, but I’m the one who feels drained right now. Ditch diggers the world over will tell you that it’s hard work. I’m exhausted and so, later today, I’m headed home to Mar-a-Lago (or to jail). Before I go, I want to share a few thoughts—one last weave—with all of you. So here are some of the mistakes and missteps I’ve made and the new thoughts I’ve recently been having.
The Environment: I’m a city guy, a golf-course guy. Nature makes me uncomfortable. It’s too big and I don’t understand it. Once in office, I wanted to smash it, drill it for its riches, and make it smaller. But I’ve rethought that. We should, I now think, protect nature. The United States is such a big country, and we’re lucky to still have any nature at all, or maybe it’s less luck and more the hard work of environmentalists, but that’s a story for another day.
I made a lot of political hay demonizing immigrants in the grossest imaginable way. I couldn’t believe how much my crowds enjoyed it. You people are terrible.
Racism: How loud can a dog whistle be and still be a dog whistle? Kamala Harris had a little more than 107 days to run against me. The missteps, delays, and infighting in the Democratic Party establishment were delightful to watch, but my campaign made it all about misogynoir—that’s a new word for me and one I had to practice saying for this speech. Throughout my career as a real-estate developer, a man about New York, a TV personality, and a politician, I have been a racist. I still am a racist.
I only have a short time to unlearn a lifetime of prejudice, and I might not get all the way there. Of course, this is a fantasy speech, but even in such a situation people don’t transform overnight. I have a lot to atone for, but Black women deserve a special apology from me. I am sorry. If I have any money after this election campaign and all my lawsuits, I will gift some of it to Howard University in Kamala Harris’ name and more to support whatever Stacey Abrams is up to right now.
Women: There’s no excuse, no apology I can make for how I’ve treated you. So, I’m not even going to try. I’m just going to make this suggestion to other men: Don’t follow my lead. Don’t become a Trump. Being a man shouldn’t mean using your strength to hurt or denigrate others. I’m a misogynist and don’t deserve to be president.
This election demonstrated that, as issues, reproductive rights cut deep. I’ve stood on both sides of that chasm (even in the same speech or at least on the same day), promising the Christian right abortion bans, telling awful lies about late-term abortions, and then backing away from all of that in a word salad of vagueness.
About babies, uteruses, fetuses, and choice, I have nothing to say. I have no authority when it comes to them and should do nothing but listen.
War: I tapped into something fundamental in my speeches on the campaign trail, didn’t I? Besides surfacing the hatred, homophobia, and misogyny that so many Americans have, I also struck an odd note about militarism. As you know, I’m no pacifist, but I did pick up just how dismayed and angry so many Americans are by the money this country spends globally fighting wars, donating weapons, and offering military aid. I then turned that discomfort into a gross nativism to serve my ego, fitting it into my narrative of American exceptionalism—keeping people out, while keeping our money and weaponry in, and leaving the otherwise shut border door slightly ajar for the cheap goods of the world. It hardly matters that none of that will work, since it played so well in Peoria.
This was a ridiculously expensive election. I love expensive things, but this was absurd.
I will say, though, that the United States should not be supporting Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, a war that’s killing so many civilians, destroying so much infrastructure, and seeding future grievances and conflicts you’ll be dealing with for generations. Good luck with all that. I’ll be over here working on my golf handicap (and it honestly does need work).
Beyond the Middle East, the United States clearly needs to rethink its relationship with the rest of the world and, believe you me, I’m not the guy to do that kind of hard work.
Immigrants: I made a lot of political hay demonizing immigrants in the grossest imaginable way. I couldn’t believe how much my crowds enjoyed it. You people are terrible. Did you know that your lifestyles wouldn’t last 20 minutes without all those illegally employed at low wages doing dangerous, difficult jobs for major corporations? When was the last time you slaughtered and dressed a chicken, changed the sheets on king-sized beds and cleaned rooms in a big hotel, took care of a whole nursing home full of elderly people, or worked in an industrial laundry? Everyone loves going apple-picking in the fall, but have you ever picked apples for a 12-hour shift? Of course, I should talk, given that I employed lots of undocumented workers across my many businesses.
In truth, for all the storm and fury I created over illegal immigrants, our economy needs workers. That same economy creates enduring inequities and spews out enough climate-changing greenhouse gasses to propel people in the Global South off their lands and out of their communities, searching for better prospects here in the U.S. The last time I was in office, I separated kids from their families and made a traumatizing mess that people still haven’t recovered from. I don’t want to do it again!
Trans People’s Rights: If you haven’t watched the ads that my campaign put out about trans people, you’re lucky. They’re unconscionable and show that I’ll stop at nothing to get elected, not even demonizing a small, vulnerable group of Americans. It was like scapegoating Shakers or Zoroastrians! Instead of spending $400 million on ads that vilified trans people, I literally could have given each trans person more than $1,000, because they represent about under 2% of the U.S. population. So, here’s what I’m going to say now from this huge platform you’ve given me: Trans people are people. They deserve freedom, have the right to make a living, stay personally safe, play sports, go to the bathroom, and be left alone. The Republican Party writ large should stop being so transphobic, a word I just learned that feels weird in my mouth.
Electoral Reform: This was a ridiculously expensive election. I love expensive things, but this was absurd. We worked harder and spoke louder to fewer people on more divisive and fear-pitched issues. Some were literally drowning in text ads, mailbox stuffers, emails, and phone calls. Others barely knew there was an election coming. This has to change. Our electoral system is broken, not because of phantom ballot-box stuffers or other gross lies I told, but because of the Electoral College and the outsized influence of corporate interests. There are smart people out there with reasonable ideas about how to change that. We should listen to them—and I should stop talking!
The Economy: They say, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and they’re right. I flogged that horse hard on the campaign trail. What does it say about us that cheap gas, cheap eggs, and cheap consumer goods all come at the expense of the damage I’ve promised to do to this world? Imagine for a moment the real expense, environmental and otherwise, of cheap and plentiful gas and groceries, and the havoc my economic policies will wreak internationally.
Being an American is expensive. Being a Hegemon is climate destroying. Living a First World lifestyle exacts a huge toll on the environment. Nationally and individually, we should be paying massive reparations, indemnities, and fines for the damage our domestic and foreign economic policies have caused. That money could buy a heck of a lot of sea walls, windmills, and electric mass transit systems as we make meaningful changes to mitigate the coming climate disaster and build resiliency. Of course, I’m too old to do anything except to get out of the way so that the work that I held at bay for too long can start in earnest.
And One Last Thing, America: I am the Great Disrupter and I almost broke America. There are those who would say it’s been broken for a long time. Those who would say that it was broken from day one. You can debate that to your heart’s content. For me, this all started as a big scam, an ego-boosting game, another hustle. Still, as you can see, I learned a thing or two along the way. Now, I plan to get out of the way and only hope that all of you who voted for me can learn something, too.
(If only!)
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