Sorry We're Still Mad About the Genocide

A new piece is shocked—shocked!—that people have the nerve to keep questioning Democrats about their support for Israel.

Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

The genocide in Gaza continues unabated. Israel has cut off all humanitarian aid for months. People are starving. The world is largely indifferent.

Which means it’s a perfect time for another story about the people to blame for where we find ourselves: activists who won’t curb their annoying habit of being mad about all of this stuff.

On Sunday, The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan wrote a predictably nasty piece purporting to check in on what she calls the “absence of contrition” from people who fought to make the Democratic Party stop supporting genocide in 2024. I won’t really run through my objections to Egan’s general MO—which is to point to all of the immense suffering in Gaza and then point back to pro-Palestinian activists and say “still wish you’d been part of the Uncommitted movement?” and then do that again for a bunch of paragraphs—because I wrote a very long blog a couple months ago about why that’s such an appalling and vacuous thing to do.

Really, the flaws in the piece can be summed up by the fact that Egan turned to Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff for John Fetterman, for thoughts on why the activists’ position “lacks morality.” Yes, that would be the same John Fetterman who, New York recently reported, once told a meeting that Israel needed to “get back to killing,” and added, “kill them all.” (Fetterman denied the report.) This is who you’re relying on to lecture Palestinians about their moral values? Interesting choice.

But there’s one part of the article that jumped out at me, because it perfectly summed up the arrogance, entitlement, and moral rot at the heart of this whole conversation.

After noting that pro-Palestinian activists have kept up their efforts to make Democrats abandon their backing of Israeli genocide—using such dastardly and extremist tactics as briefing Democratic National Committee candidates on “polling that showed Democratic and independent voters in swing states would have been more likely to support Harris if she broke from Biden’s steadfast support for Israel” and sending a letter to the DNC “asking it to analyze the Harris campaign’s actions on the Israel-Gaza issue as part of their post-election analysis”—Egan writes (emphasis mine):

To Democratic leaders, the fact that these activists continue to push the party even after they helped (to some degree) facilitate its loss of power has been a source of immense irritation. While Biden could hardly step outside the White House during his last year in office without being confronted by pro-Palestine activists—and Harris was frequently interrupted by protesters on the campaign trail—it has not gone unnoticed that Trump rarely, if ever, faces a heckle. No demands are being made for him to call for a ceasefire. No threats are being made to ensure that the Arab and Muslim voters who supported his campaign stay home or switch back in 2028.

Activists say the reason for this is that they do not have the same juice within the Republican party as they do among Democrats, and have little ability to influence Trump’s policy approach. So they continue to focus on the party where their influence remains. And they feel vindicated by news developments and stray comments, like when Michael Herzog, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview this week with an Israeli news program that the Biden administration “never” demanded a ceasefire.

Where to begin.

Oh, Democrats are annoyed that people haven’t forgotten that a genocide is still taking place, and that the party has been complicit in that genocide for every single moment of its existence, and that those people would like the party to maybe try not supporting a genocide? Too fucking bad! You know what would stop Democrats from having to take all these boring meetings and ignore all these boring letters? Ending their backing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their voters would be happy if they did this; there’s credible evidence that their support for genocide hurt them badly in 2024, and an April Pew poll reported that over two-thirds of Democratic voters now have unfavorable views of Israel. (Side note: weird how, when polls suggest that trans people or immigrants are unpopular, Democrats can’t stop yakking about how they need to reflect voter sentiment, but when polls suggest Israel is unpopular, it’s crickets.) But Democratic politicians, being politicians and thus amoral freaks, think that it’s odd to have values that you keep fighting for even after powerful people tell you to stop.

As for “why no protests now???”: First of all, there very much are protests happening now, all the time. Activists literally took over Trump Tower! The idea that nobody is making any demands these days is bunk. And perhaps part of the reason Democratic activists and their allies aren’t spending all of their time sending Trump letters or making him have meetings is because…he’s not a Democrat???

Lastly, the report that Egan dismisses, quite bafflingly, as a “stray comment” is not some minor throwaway bit of news. It’s the entire point. Here’s the full quote from Michael Herzog, who was the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. until just a few months ago:

“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted,” the former Israeli ambassador said.

So that is a very senior former Israeli official saying that the idea that Biden was, unlike Trump, pushing—you might even say “working tirelessly”—for a ceasefire is false. Fake news. Nonsense.

Does Biden regret that, in political terms at least? Does Harris regret joining Biden in backing the genocide to the hilt? Do Democrats think there is any room for introspection or contrition on their part? Do journalists like Egan think those things are important to ask in any way?

Apparently the answer to all of these questions is no. In the mainstream political universe, complicity in genocide is not a position to reconsider, ever. The real weirdos and villains are the people who have the nerve to keep being mad about genocide, and expecting politicians to listen to their views. What a crime.