Gaskin: Dems need concise policy on Israel, Palestine

As Israel celebrates its 78th birthday, Democrats should also reflect on a political reality they can no longer avoid: they lost Michigan in the last presidential election despite fielding one of the most symbolically intersectional tickets in modern American history — a Black woman married to a Jewish man.

That loss exposed a growing fracture inside the Democratic coalition over Israel and Palestine — one that symbolism and political ambiguity could not overcome.

Before the next presidential election, Democrats need a coherent and concise policy on Israel and Palestine — or they risk losing everyone at once: Jewish voters who fear rising antisemitism, Arab voters outraged by Gaza, independents exhausted by ideological chaos, and younger voters demanding moral consistency.

The Democratic coalition increasingly contains voters whose lived experiences, moral frameworks, and political priorities pull them in different directions on Israel and Palestine. Jewish voters worried about antisemitism, Arab voters horrified by Gaza, Black voters shaped by historic coalition politics, and younger progressives focused on human rights all occupy the same political tent. The challenge is whether Democrats can articulate a morally coherent framework capable of holding these groups together.

The language of intersectionality reminds us that identities and struggles are rarely isolated. They overlap, influence, and shape one another. For African Americans, questions of solidarity have often reached beyond our own borders. Sometimes that solidarity has aligned with the Jewish community, sometimes with Palestinians, and sometimes with both.

The bond between Black and Jewish communities in the United States has deep historical roots. Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise supported the NAACP from its earliest years, while Jewish organizations backed anti-lynching campaigns. The partnership reached its height during the civil rights movement. Jewish lawyers played pivotal roles in landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, and during Freedom Summer in 1964, roughly half of the volunteers who traveled to Mississippi to register Black voters were Jewish.

The most tragic example of this solidarity was the murder of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two young Jewish activists, alongside James Chaney, a Black activist, in Mississippi. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, later reflecting, “I felt my legs were praying.”

Shared outsider status reinforced this bond. Blacks endured slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation; Jews carried centuries of antisemitism, pogroms, and exclusion. The civil rights movement is unthinkable without Jewish support, and this history remains a reminder of what coalition across differences can achieve.

In the 21st century, another alignment has gained visibility: solidarity between Black activists and Palestinians. This shift reflects a generational and global change, where younger activists increasingly understand their struggle through the lens of state violence and international solidarity.

While this connection has roots in the 1960s, it became more prominent in the era of Black Lives Matter. After the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, Palestinians used social media to share advice with protesters about coping with tear gas, based on their own experiences in the West Bank. The phrase “From Ferguson to Palestine” became a rallying cry reflecting a belief that struggles against police violence and military occupation are connected.

This newer alignment has sometimes been perceived as a break with the historic Black–Jewish partnership.

Some Jewish organizations viewed criticism of Israel as one-sided or hostile. Some Black activists have viewed Jewish institutional support for Israel as complicity in Palestinian oppression. Some Jewish groups have also questioned why many activists have been slower to condemn the atrocities of Oct. 7 and the human rights violations committed by Hamas and similar groups.

At the same time, critics across the political spectrum have argued that some forms of modern activism apply moral outrage inconsistently — focusing intensely on Israel while showing less sustained attention to abuses in places such as China, Russia, or Syria.

Human rights organizations and investigative reports have also documented Hamas abuses against Palestinians, including intimidation, torture, executions, and the use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes. What seems unfair is that  some human rights groups don’t even provide an estimate on the number of Palestinians directly or indirectly killed by Hamas in Gaza, even when the executions are public. But they have no problem reporting on the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza. To be fair the same organizations should report the same numbers no matter who the perpetrator is.

But framing the issue as simply “pro-Israel” versus “pro-Palestinian” oversimplifies reality. It erases diversity within both Jewish and Black communities and ignores a critical fact: many Jews themselves oppose Israeli government policies.

Intersectionality, at its best, does not force us to choose between solidarities. It calls us to hold them together.

A both/and approach requires rejecting antisemitism while also opposing Palestinian suffering. It requires distinguishing between Jewish identity and the policies of the Israeli state. And it requires consistency — applying the same moral standards across contexts.

True intersectionality must be willing to confront all forms of injustice consistently — including antisemitism, terrorism, occupation, civilian suffering, and abuses of power by any actor.

We can oppose antisemitism in all its forms while also opposing violence and injustice in Gaza.

The real test of solidarity is not who we stand with when it is easy — but whether we can remain committed to justice when it becomes complicated.

For Democrats, this is not merely a foreign policy debate. It is rapidly becoming a defining test of coalition politics in a diverse democracy. A party built on intersectionality cannot survive if it treats competing forms of suffering as mutually exclusive.

Intersectionality does not ask us to choose sides.

It asks us to be informed, morally consistent, and capable of applying universal principles even when doing so is politically uncomfortable.

Ed Gaskin is Executive Director of Greater Grove Hall Main Streets and founder of Sunday Celebrations