Ann Arbor – Presumptive Democratic Party standard-bearer Kamala Harris’ pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate has widely been implied to have something to do with his stance on the Gaza genocide. That proposition is likely almost entirely untrue. Governors of states don’t usually have much to say about international politics, so Walz’s record is slim. Moreover, where his stances are better than those of some other Democratic Party politicians, it is mainly a matter of rhetorical style rather than policy. In politics, however, that matters.
On March 5, Super Tuesday, Abby Phillip at CNN asked Walz about the Gaza protest vote: “We’re seeing a fairly sizable, about 40,000 votes right now, 20 percent of the vote going to uncommitted. And we’ve seen that already in this primary in Michigan. What message are voters in your state trying to send to President Biden? And what do you want to see President Biden do in response?”
Walz replied, “Yeah, look, they’re engaged. We’re really proud of Minnesota civic responsibility. We have some of the highest voter turnouts. These are voters that are deeply concerned as we all are. The situation in Gaza is intolerable. And I think trying to find a solution, a lasting two-state solution, certainly the President’s move towards humanitarian aid and asking us to get to a ceasefire, that’s what they’re asking to be heard. And that’s what they should be doing. We’ve gone through this before. And we know that now we make sure we’ve got eight months. We start bringing these folks back in. We listen to what they’re saying.”
The important thing here is that Walz did not simply dismiss the Uncommitted movement or condemn it. He heard their concern and said it mirrored his own. “The situation in Gaza is intolerable.” He approved of getting “to a ceasefire” and humanitarian aid.
Asked by Jen Psaki at MSNBC on March 10 if a third-party candidate could spell trouble for Joe Biden’s reelection, Walz replied, “I think they should be worried, even in my state, where we had folks that were expressing a deep desire and a dissatisfaction with the situation in Gaza.”
Note the positive diction for the protest vote. They had “a deep desire.” Note too that he perceived the Uncommitted movement to boycott Biden in the Democratic primaries as a real danger signal for the president’s prospects.
Walz is said to have called for a “working ceasefire” in Gaza to allow humanitarian aid this spring. He appears to have been trying to support President Joe Biden’s (tepid) attempts to do something about the Israeli total war on Palestinian civilians. He was enthusiastic about the now-defunct US Navy floating pier built off the Gaza coast, which broke up in heavy waves and appears to have been wholly impractical.
Walz is being contrasted to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the nation’s most prominent Jewish politician. Most U.S. commentary on Shapiro seems skittish about using the term “Zionism,” but that is ridiculous. Shapiro is a Zionist. In his youth he was such a hard-line Zionist, i.e. Jewish nationalist with a belief that Jews have a right to make their state in Palestine, that he opposed Bill Clinton’s Oslo Peace Accords and dismissed Palestinians as savages too wedded to conflict ever to responsibly direct their own state.
It is Shapiro’s brand of Zionism that made him controversial, not his Judaism. The Democratic left, myself included, supported Bernie Sanders over Joe Biden and we were crushed when the South Carolina primary gave the nomination to Biden. Nobody came out against Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for veep. It has nothing to do with Judaism.
Shapiro now says he is in favor of a two-state solution and has spoken out against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (This criticism of Netanyahu came only in the past couple of years, however; Shapiro had waxed eloquent about Netanyahu a decade ago). We all know, in any case, that a “two-state solution” is a chimera and this phrase is a mantra used by American politicians to avoid having to deal with the far right Israeli government’s determined colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. There is no longer a place to put a Palestinian state, with Gaza in rubble and hundreds of thousands of Israelis squatting on the West Bank. Nor does Shapiro really mean a state with sovereignty. Walz uses the diction, as well.
The hard line of Shapiro’s Zionism comes out when he declines to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, or to condemn the massive and deliberate civilian toll — in the tens of thousands — of the Israeli total war.
It comes out when he complains about students wearing kuffiyehs to show support for Palestinians, which Shapiro inaccurately took for a necessarily anti-Israel article of clothing, telling Jake Tapper, “We have to query whether or not we would tolerate this, if this were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia, making comments about people who are African American in our communities, certainly not condoning that, Jake, by any stretch.”
I wrote in April, “Supporters of the Israeli genocide against tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian women, children, and noncombatant men in Gaza have fixed upon an unlikely villain in their denunciation of the slightest protest against this century’s worst act of barbarity. They are denouncing the patterned black-and-white scarf of cotton called a kuffiyeh or keffiyeh, which is worn by many Palestinians but also by Iraqis, Saudis and others in the Arabian Peninsula (where it is called a ghutrah). The scarf is useful in dusty climates. It can be drawn up over the face when dust is heavy. It can be worn on the head against the sun or the cool desert night, fixed by an agal, a thick, doubled, black cord. The latter can also be used as a horse or camel whip. This ordinary item of apparel has become associated with Palestinian culture in North America, though it isn’t only Palestinians who wear it, and in the 19th century it appears to have been mainly worn by Bedouins.”
Shapiro is the one who is ignorant of history or culture here. And what he said is outrageous, as though a White nationalist should say African Americans wearing a dashiki is a sign of hating White people.
There is nothing wrong with supporting the Israeli people living in peace and security. I do myself. Some brands of Zionism, however, are more than that. Many Zionists have a militant commitment to Israel keeping everything it has won by war and remaining on a war footing to ensure its rogue actions are unchallenged. It is a commitment to shutting people up when they point to Israeli atrocities. Some Zionisms are a form of militant nationalism.
Shapiro may not be as militant now as he was in his 20s, but that is where he came from, and he still has some of the militancy on occasion.
Walz does not. He is a typical American Democrat of his generation, very pro-Israel. But he supported the UNSC Iran nuclear deal and objected when Donald Trump torpedoed it. He calls the situation in Gaza “intolerable.” He spoke for a working ceasefire.
We don’t hear those things from Shapiro, because his form of Zionist nationalism gives him a set of blind spots. My guess is that while he regrets the destruction in Gaza, he thinks it is legitimate as a way to destroy Hamas, which he in turn thinks is an existential threat to Israel. This is Biden’s “people die in war.” It is naive about what Netanyahu and his far right buddies are up to in Gaza. It is a blind spot.
Whereas the University of Minnesota came to a peaceful resolution with students who set up protest encampments on campus, Shapiro called for police intervention against the encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, and under Shapiro’s pressure, the university fired its president for declining to crack down on student protesters chanting “from the river to the sea,” which Zionists brand “anti-Semitic.” The phrase, by the way, appears in the charter of the Israeli Likud Party that is led by Netanyahu.
Shapiro sees citizens’ choice to boycott Israel as “antisemitic” and used the full force of the state’s unconstitutional anti-BDS law against Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for not wanting to sell its goods to squatters in the occupied West Bank. Shapiro also attempted to implement a speech code for Pennsylvania state government workers that outlawed “scandalous” speech and “hate speech,” which seemed aimed at preventing people from protesting the Gaza genocide in that state, and which is clearly unconstitutional. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even applied such standards to university professors, attempting to outlaw the teaching of slavery as a historic wrong.
When some of your initiatives look more like those of a DeSantis than like those of a Tim Walz, you really shouldn’t be on the Democratic Party ticket.
Juan Cole is founder and editor of Informed Comment. He is professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of “Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires” and “Engaging the Muslim World.” He blogs at juancole.com; follow @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us