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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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Pride Month Rainbow-Washing Has Always Been a Scam
Corporate executives must be held accountable for their exploitative behavior, and we need to push lawmakers to incentivize corporate decision-making that aligns with the interests of workers, communities, and the planet.
Jun 29, 2024
As June approached this year, queer people across the U.S. braced for the typical rainbow-washing we have seen corporate America push at all our local retailers in recent years. However, this year, many queer people were surprised to see so many companies pull back on their outward support of the LGBTQ+ community. Popular brands like Target, Nike, and North Face chose not to release or scale back Pride merchandise this year. In fact, several large corporations have stopped changing their logos to rainbow alternatives and instead decided not to make any public acknowledgement of Pride.
This year, Pride Month is a reminder that voluntary initiatives will not save us.
So why does this corporate walkback feel like a bitter disappointment, despite general consensus in the queer community that corporations are just profiting off of the queer community during Pride month rather than making meaningful shifts year-round to dismantle discrimination and exclusion? It could be because this pullback shows yet again that corporations seem to only care about the queer community as far as it benefits their profits. (The same can and should be said for the BIPOC community, as corporations have also been walking back on their DEI commitments since 2021, the year after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.) This trend marks the highly concerning sentiment that it is no longer profitable to support queer people in the U.S.—that the fire against LGBTQ+ people has grown larger than our purchasing power.
Here’s the truth:
Companies like McDonald’s and Amazon profit off the the genocide in Gaza killing thousands of queer people, make massive campaign contributions to homophobic and transphobic politicians, crack down on worker unions, profit from the prison labor of a disproportionate number of BIPOC queer people, and increase homelessness, which also disproportionately affects BIPOC queer people. These large corporations are the same ones paying for Keke Palmer to join the stage of D.C.’s Capital Pride Festival to celebrate the month. Meanwhile, corporations that sponsor Pride events and/or change their logos to be rainbow are at the same time growing the wealth gap with exorbitant executive pay, unfair wages, anti-ESG campaigns—policies that directly contribute to homelessness, mass incarceration, and climate change.
This year, Pride Month is a reminder that voluntary initiatives will not save us. Corporate executives must be held accountable for their exploitative behavior, and we need to push lawmakers to incentivize corporate decision-making that is aligned with the interests of workers, communities, and the planet. Because at the end of the day, campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, restrictions on buying up affordable housing, protecting the right to unionize, and regulating executive pay and stock buybacks, and a progressive tax code directly benefit the queer community made up of working people across the country more than any rainbow logo or product ever could.
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Raging Against White Rural Rage
In their new book, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman write as if economic class no longer exists or matters.
Apr 17, 2024
I don’t like to slam books, especially those ahead of mine on the best seller list. It might seem like petty jealousy. But one recent release, White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, is seriously flawed.
For starters, the authors write as if economic class no longer exists or matters. According to this book, all rural white people, or at least most of them, share similar racist attitudes. Class distinctions between bosses and workers, rich and poor, are meaningless.
Because Schaller and Waldman view the world through their anti-class, whiteness lens, they don’t consider the possibility that working-class voters share common attitudes across geographies. Contrary to their thesis, the research for my book found no discernable differences in attitudes on hot-button social issues between urban, suburban, and rural white working-class voters.
When Democrats, like Sherrod Brown, show the courage to fight against Wall Street’s war on workers they gain working-class support.
As Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux reports, “These voters wouldn’t care all that much about the cultural difference and the woke thing if the Democrats gave more of a damn about the economic challenges they face deeply and daily.”
Where’s the Beef?
Schaller put his cards on the table during an interview on MSNBC, during which he called rural Americans “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.”
The authors also claim it is getting worse. In defending themselves in The New Republic, they write that “as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump [in 2020] rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62% to 71%.”
But voting for Trump is not the same as being a bigot. In fact, the data in my book shows that white working-class voters, rural and otherwise, are growing more liberal, not illiberal on key social issues.
Anti-Immigrant?
“Are you in favor of granting ‘legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and not been convicted of any felony crimes?’” (Cooperative Election Study)
White working-class in favor:
2010: 32.1%
2020: 61.8%
Anti-Gay?
“Should gay or lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children?” (American National Elections Study)
White working-class in favor:
2000: 38.2%
2020: 76.7%
Increasing Racism?
“Agree that most Blacks just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves out of poverty.” (General Social Survey)
1996: 56.8%
2021: 32.8%
Furthermore, our data, which is derived from three large multi-year voter surveys, shows that from 20-50% of white working-class non-Democrats are liberal on social issues.
What About Sherrod Brown?
If white rural racism is the key to all politics, then why do significant numbers of rural voters in Ohio support Sen. Sherrod Brown, who in 2018 ran about 12% ahead of President Joe Biden in 2020? In fact, Brown, who votes liberal on social issues up and down the line, ran significantly ahead of Biden in every rural county.
Brown’s connection to working-class voters might have something to do with his willingness to take on Wall Street for ripping off workers again and again. It works politically because enough of those supposedly bigoted white workers care a lot more about never-ending job instability than they do about wokeness.
In his excellent review (and evisceration) of White Rural Wage, Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist, points out that:
Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them.
It’s not white rural rage. It’s not irrational rage either. Rather it’s very clear-eyed working-class anger as insatiable corporate greed tears up their lives.
When Democrats, like Sherrod Brown, show the courage to fight against Wall Street’s war on workers they gain working-class support.
Maybe it’s time for a little more Democratic Party rage?
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