Marching in a recent Ithaca, New York, demonstration in solidarity with Palestine was one of the truly gratifying moments of my life as an internationalist.
Organized by Cornell University undergraduates, the protest against Israel’s latest, massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip and assault on Palestinians within and beyond Jerusalem proved that even in Ithaca — a sleepy college town in upstate New York — one finds some of the legions of civilians around the world who have mobilized against Israel’s brutal policies of occupation and collective punishment.
The Ithaca demonstration, which featured a rally on Cornell’s campus followed by a march to the downtown commons, was heartening for another reason: The crowd of roughly 300 included a generous smattering of Black and brown faces. Indeed, almost half of the participants were people of color, most of them students.
That a critical mass of young people was willing to openly support Palestinian freedom — a cause many progressive activists once viewed as a third rail — reflects the extent to which public discourse on this issue has shifted. Even in the US, the citadel of support for Israeli might, some mainstream news outlets now supplement conventional assertions of Israel’s “right to defend itself” with forthright themes of Palestinian liberation.
In some ways, the visible presence of African Americans in many pro-Palestine mobilizations of recent weeks, including rallies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, constitutes an equally remarkable cultural transition. While no wholesale pivot to the anti-imperialist left is underway, there are signs of a revitalization of some of the most vibrant traditions of Black internationalism.
It may be an exaggeration to suggest that the upsurge of mass resistance to white supremacy that propelled the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has also reenergized ideals of global solidarity among African Americans. But there can be no doubt that BLM, which some have dubbed the “American Intifada,” has driven to the center of Black political awareness questions of human rights and state violence — and principles of popular revolt — that are germane to Palestinian struggle.
Still, transformations of consciousness are never absolute. If Palestinian suffering is increasingly legible to some African Americans, especially those younger progressives who have radicalized the practice of domestic anti-racism, many remaining barriers must be overcome before Black solidarity with Palestine becomes a genuinely grassroots phenomenon in the US.
The Black Lives Matter movement reenergized Black-Palestinian solidarity
African American militants have long been among the staunchest allies of Palestinians. During the heyday of the US civil rights era, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee all embraced the demand for Palestinian liberation.
After the 1960s and ’70s, the strands of African American-Palestinian solidarity waxed and waned. But those bonds were strengthened in recent years when new bouts of state violence led both populations to cultivate overseas support.
Some of the most powerful exchanges occurred after the advent of BLM as a mass movement in 2014. Palestinians played a crucial role in the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising that flared that year in the wake of the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown.
Palestinian activists used social media to share with African American protesters tactics for dealing with tear gas attacks by militarized police forces — an experience with which many subjects of Israeli occupation are all too familiar.
In 2015, more than 1,000 Black organizers and intellectuals signed a solidarity statement condemning Israel’s lopsided war on Gaza and stranglehold on the West Bank. That year also saw the release of a stylish video titled “When I See Them I See Us” that featured African American figures, from activist Angela Davis to singer Lauryn Hill, highlighting the “similarities, but not sameness,” of Black and Palestinian subjugation and resilience.
BLM, which rejuvenated mass African American protest amid the bourgeois racial politics of the Obama years, also provided a new framework for fashioning Black and Palestinian affinities.
Progressive, youthful Black organizations, from the Dream Defenders to Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, embraced Palestinian liberation as a core element of their global agenda.
Some members of these and other African American groups toured Palestinian territories as part of international delegations, then returned to the US to circulate accounts — overwhelmingly absent from Western reportage — of the barbaric conditions of life under Israeli occupation. Often, such travelers were struck by the warm hospitality of the Palestinians, who appeared eager to forge cultural and social links to Black America.
Meanwhile, African American thinkers such as journalist Marc Lamont Hill and author Michelle Alexander braved vilification to denounce Israeli practices of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”
Similar acts of solidarity unfolded during the recent, bloody siege of Palestinian civilian populations by the Israeli military. Groups such as Black Lives Matter of Paterson, New Jersey, have decried the wildly uneven violence unleashed on Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel, and have called on the US, which funnels $3.8 billion to Israel in military aid annually, to stop sponsoring the carnage.
Such expressions of kinship do not erupt spontaneously. Many of the latest manifestations of African American-Palestinian mutuality reflect the work of US organizations such as Existence Is Resistance that have designed political education campaigns to counter Western erasures and distortions of Palestinian socio-historical realities.
But to gain a fuller picture of African American outlooks, one must weigh such comradely efforts against deep dimensions of ambivalence. In truth, the Palestine issue generates no more consensus among Black Americans than it does among Americans more broadly.
Black people aren’t immune to the American ignorance of foreign conflicts
There will always be those African Americans who oppose, on ideological grounds, the right of Palestinians to self-determination and territorial restoration. Many such individuals belong to churches that propagate essentialist theories of “Judeo-Christian” values or otherwise promote Christian Zionist beliefs.
Some African Americans are simply accommodationists who refuse to challenge the foreign policy dictates of US elites. Others harbor real admiration for Israel, in some instances seeing the state as a model of uncompromising sovereignty and ethnocentrism that Black nationalists should attempt to emulate.
But the opposite of solidarity is not antagonism; it is indifference. Black people are hardly immune to the ignorance with which so many Americans view foreign, nonwhite populations. Victims of white supremacy, African Americans are nevertheless fully capable of internalizing and reproducing the racist, Orientalist tropes that have buttressed imperial ventures within and beyond the Arab world.
As members of a marginalized population, some Black Americans are loath to bear the social costs of open identification with Palestinians, a stigmatized group located thousands of miles away. In the end, many Black people may lack the desire or knowledge to contest framings of Israel-Palestine as a hopelessly intractable conflict rooted in ancient hostilities.
Nor has the compass of African American political conscience always pointed toward Palestine. Prior to the mid-1950s and ’60s, when events such as the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War underscored the imperialist nature of the Zionist project, many African Americans supported statehood for Jewish refugees. Like other Westerners, they tended to overlook the violent displacement of Palestinians that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.
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Still, it is safe to say that African American perspectives on Palestine remain well to the left of those of the American majority.
Solidarity is never predetermined — it must be reconstructed by each generation
As demands for Palestinian liberation gain international momentum, buoyed by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the relative independence of social media, and the painstaking labor of countless activists, expressions of Black kinship with Palestinians may continue to expand.
But if they do so, it will not be the result of mere similarities between African American and Palestinian oppression. Connections, of course, do exist; both populations face conditions of “internal colonialism,” including racialization, dispossession, underdevelopment, and state violence. However, no perfect analogy exists between Black and Palestinian suffering. Parallelism alone cannot foster a sense of shared fate.
For African American camaraderie with Palestine to become a truly popular ideal, broad segments of the Black rank and file must recognize the global scope of white supremacy. They must see the need to form insurgent, international alliances across lines of color and culture. These principles must transcend the ranks of seasoned organizers, galvanizing those who lack firsthand experience with anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns.
The complexity of African American political aspirations suggests that such an awakening is entirely possible. The Black working classes have never equated their own freedom with the demise of formal segregation, or with the prospect of greater social inclusion within the apparatus of American empire. They have rarely let parochialism constrain their visions of a more just and egalitarian world.
I suspect that in the final analysis, many Black people can fully appreciate the Palestinian cause, a protracted struggle for land, autonomy, and cultural redemption that posits the total dismantling of domination as the horizon of human dignity.
Solidarity is never predetermined. It must be reconstructed by each generation. I draw hope, therefore, from the scattered evidence that, practically everywhere, an insurgent spirit is spreading.
During the recent Ithaca march, I spotted on the sidelines a cluster of young African American men. They appeared to be non-students — members, perhaps, of the town’s tiny, working-class Black community. They watched intently but did not join the throngs of chanting protesters. “Black and Palestinian liberation,” I shouted in their direction, and raised a fist. They said nothing. Yet one of them signaled his approval by wrapping me in a spontaneous hug.
Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University.
Last week, no one had heard of Emily Wilder. Then she became the focus of a national campaign to get her fired. Days later, she was.
Things move fast. So there’s a good chance that days from now, the story of a rookie journalist who lost her job because of the way she used social media to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will have faded from the discourse. Her firing will become just another bullet point in future stories about “cancel culture” on the right and left.
On the other hand: I have a hunch that the particular circumstances of Wilder’s narrative will have more resonance than your standard Outrage of the Week. Because it merges two storylines — the long-running, intractable standoff between Israelis and Palestinians, and the newer, intractable fight over fairness and objectivity in journalism that is being hashed out on Twitter and in Slack rooms and in the real world. What do fairness and objectivity in journalism really mean? And do those two ideas have to be linked at the hip? That is: Can you be fair in your reporting but abandon “the unreasonable and hideously stupid expectation that reporters must harbor no strong opinions about the things they care about,” as journalist Laura Wagner put it in Defector?
Answers that might have made sense a few years ago don’t seem to work anymore, so journalists, their bosses, and their readers are coming up with answers on the fly — and, in this case, failing miserably.
First, the chronology, as relayed by Wilder in press interviews and via Twitter:
- Wilder, who graduated from Stanford in 2020 and had been working as an intern for the Arizona Republic, went to work for the Associated Press this month as a “news associate” in Phoenix, “helping edit and produce content for publication” — an entry-level job.
- On Monday, May 14, the Twitter account for the Stanford College Republicans circulated old tweets and quotes — commentary critical of Israeli policies and supporters, like calling Republican donor Sheldon Adelson a “naked mole rat” — from her days as a student activist at Stanford. Those were quickly recirculated by right-wing outlets like Fox News and the Federalist.
- Wilder says an Associated Press manager told her that the news organization would investigate her social media use, but that she shouldn’t worry. “The editor said I was not going to get in any trouble because everyone had opinions in college,” Wilder told SFGate. “Then came the rest of the week.”
- On Thursday, May 17, she was fired for violating the AP’s social media guidelines. Wilder said she asked the AP to tell her what specifically she’d done wrong but hasn’t received an answer. “I asked them, ‘Please tell me what violated the policy,’ and they said, ‘No.’”
The AP says it fired Wilder for violating the company’s social media policy while employed there — that is, not for tweets she made prior to getting hired — but wouldn’t spell out specific infractions. A rep passed along this statement:
While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder’s comments on Thursday that she was dismissed for violations of AP’s social media policy during her time at AP. We have this policy so the comments of one person cannot create dangerous conditions for our journalists covering the story. Every AP journalist is responsible for safeguarding our ability to report on this conflict, or any other, with fairness and credibility, and cannot take sides in public forums.
So we’re left to guess at Wilder’s supposed infractions. The most likely candidate is this May 16 tweet — posted the day before the Stanford College Republicans went after her — critiquing the way mainstream media covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Which presumably conflicts with the AP’s policy that “employees must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum.”
Wilder has also retweeted several other tweets about the conflict, and the AP says that “Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying … unadorned retweets must be avoided.”
But let’s be clear: Wilder was working out of the AP’s Phoenix newsroom, half a world away from its former offices in Gaza, which were destroyed this month by Israeli airstrikes. Firing her doesn’t “safeguard” the AP’s ability to report on the conflict in any way. All of this tweet-parsing is ridiculous and shameful. The most charitable explanation is that her managers really didn’t like a handful of tweets their new hire had made — which is something they could resolve without firing her. But firing her days after she became the target of a political campaign is an explicit capitulation, and a green light for other groups to target other journalists with similar efforts — which they most certainly will.
It’s worth noting that we still haven’t heard directly from anyone at the AP about its side of the story in any detail. In a memo distributed to AP employees this weekend, executives wrote that “much of the coverage and commentary does not accurately portray what took place,” but didn’t offer their own version of events.
But if the premise of the AP’s actions is that the appearance of wrongdoing is as important as the act itself, then the AP is the guilty party here: It’s signaled that it will throw its journalists under the bus at a moment’s notice if people on Twitter complain loudly enough. And while the AP has told employees it intends to have an internal “conversation” about its social media policy, my hunch is that it’s still going to be fundamentally uncomfortable with a point of view common among journalists in 2021 — which is that they have points of view, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
Wilder’s firing is one inflection point in a complex and evolving debate about journalistic objectivity that’s usually addressed sideways, rather than head-on. It highlights the strain newsrooms in the US are experiencing as they try to figure out how to tell journalists what beliefs they can express publicly. And which ones they’re either not supposed to have or that they’re supposed to pretend not to have.
Consider: Last year, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Americans on social media aligned, at least temporarily, behind the Black Lives Matter moment. There were few willing to defend the actions of the Minneapolis police officers who killed him or didn’t stop his murder. And social media services were bursting with people proclaiming their opposition to systemic racism and support for the Black Lives Matter movement — a movement that had been considered left-of-mainstream just a few years earlier.
That momentum swept up middle-of-the-road mega-companies, like Walmart and Amazon. And it definitely included newsrooms, including my own: Last June, Vox.com managers sent out a memo reminding us that Vox journalists aren’t supposed to participate in political rallies, and to “refrain from using hashtags associated with movements and organizations we are actively covering, or publicly endorsing them.” That said, the memo added: “Racism is not a ‘both sides’ issue, and employees are free to speak out against racism and inequality.” It was a major shift.
In the recent past, some mainstream journalists would announce, in public, that they didn’t vote because they didn’t want their work to be biased — or because they wanted to prevent anyone, ever, from accusing them of bias. And some of that thinking still, amazingly, exists. But it’s wildly out of step with the present moment, where debates about ideology and politics have been replaced with debates between facts and fiction.
Half of Republicans, for instance, believe that the Capitol Riot “was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists ‘trying to make Trump look bad.’” And that’s a story that requires no work at all to understand — you have to work hard not to comprehend what happened on January 6.
But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, there’s nothing like that kind of clarity, even among people who generally see the world the same way you do: Declare your support for children killed by Israeli artillery in Gaza, and you may find your Slackmate or Instagram followers have a lot to say about Hamas rockets aimed at Israel, or about a spike in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide since the most recent conflict. Or, just as likely, you may hear an uncomfortable silence. And my hunch is that those responses may surprise a younger generation of journalists.
Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for decades, but we haven’t seen much of the conflict unfold during the social media age that really started in the 2010s, years after the last full-scale intifada: People have certainly employed social media as a weapon in the conflict, but that was before social media was all-encompassing, and before algorithmic design brought stuff to you before you knew you wanted to see it. Which means there’s a generation of Twitterers, Instagrammers, and TikTokers fully accustomed to sharing their views and advocating for causes online, but who haven’t seen pushback from most of their peers or bosses before.
See, for example, a recent tweet from the New Yorker Union declaring support for Palestine by expressing “solidarity for Palestinians from the river to the sea.” After critics argued that the phrase was anti-Semitic — whether that’s true is also up for debate — the union deleted it.
Then again, things are changing. It used to be that mainstream American politics had room for just one response when it came to Israel and Palestine. Now some Democrats, at least, are willing to critique Israeli behavior instead of supporting the country’s actions without reservation.
So are some celebrities, though there are limits to how freely they can express that. Earlier this month, Mark Ruffalo, who has a starring role in Disney’s Marvel universe, compared Israel to South African apartheid. Now he seems to have either walked back that post or something else:
Which is a pretty good summary, maybe, of the mess we’re in right now: Americans have conflicting feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they aren’t quite sure about how to express that — and how publicly to do it. So of course journalists are in the same boat, but they’re also the ones who are often called on to pretend that they don’t have any opinion at all.
That might have worked in the past. But it certainly doesn’t now. Which is why Emily Wilder’s story may stick with us for a while longer.
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As the Israel-Gaza war raged, President Joe Biden made clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there was a problem.
Full-throated support for Israel among Democrats was waning, namely because of progressives. Among the clearest signs were moves in the House and Senate to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, a deal that only weeks earlier Democratic congressional aides said they hadn’t considered controversial or even noteworthy.
On May 19, about nine days into the conflict, Biden told Netanyahu that unless he wanted to risk losing bipartisan support for Israel in Congress, he “expected” the Israeli premier to wind down the fight. The next day, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire.
Progressives in and out of government say their actions both pressured Biden and gave him a convincing talking point in conversations with Netanyahu. “Progressives deserve a little credit for the ceasefire,” said Ben Rhodes, a former top national security aide to President Barack Obama and an outspoken advocate for a more progressive foreign policy. “Biden was looking over his left shoulder and told Netanyahu, ‘You have to move on this.’”
The true extent to which progressives directly played a role in ending this round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting is unclear. The administration insists no members of Congress changed Biden’s mind during the conflict, and the president openly stated last week that “my party still supports Israel.”
But what is clear is that progressives no longer play a fringe role in the American national security discussion. They’re a real force, and their time is now.
“Looking at where this debate was 10 or even five years ago and where it is now, I think we can’t help but be encouraged,” said Matt Duss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s national security adviser and a leading figure of the progressive foreign policy movement.
Biden’s presidency gave progressives a clear opportunity
Progressives have made their voices heard on foreign policy throughout US history. From the Wilsonian era to the Vietnam and Iraq wars, they’ve long pressured American leaders to avoid conflicts abroad and focus on economic and social issues at home.
The current progressive movement upholds those ideas and also places primacy on tackling climate change and promoting human rights while curbing support for authoritarian regimes.
The problem is that it didn’t have much success swaying either the Obama or Trump administrations.
Obama didn’t end the war in Afghanistan, for example, and supported Israel’s bombing campaign during the previous Israel-Hamas fight in 2014. “I think that undercut us with respect to human rights, and it didn’t help us make any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” Rhodes told me.
And though President Donald Trump shared some of the antiwar tendencies of progressives, namely not initiating long wars in the Middle East, he ignored all left-leaning advice while cozying up to dictators, minimizing human rights, calling climate change a “hoax,” and exacerbating racial tensions at home.
But progressives did achieve one moral victory with Trump in office. After years of trying and failing, in 2019 Congress passed a resolution, spearheaded by progressives such as Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, though Trump vetoed it. Still, it proved progressives could have a serious impact on the broader national security debate.
“The Yemen success was important and it gave momentum to the whole movement,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama White House official and now co-host with Rhodes of the left-leaning foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World.
Biden’s rise, though, was a boon to the progressive foreign policy movement.
Since the campaign, Biden’s team has remained closely connected to progressive climate, veteran, and other groups to hear their views on myriad national security issues. They’ve helped influence some of the president’s decisions, such as ending most offensive support for the Yemen war, withdrawing all US troops and contractors from Afghanistan by September 11, treating climate change as the top global threat, and waiving intellectual property protections for US-made Covid-19 vaccines.
That’s not to say the president is pursuing a purely progressive foreign policy, or that progressives are entirely pleased with him. “The left thinks it’s getting a raw deal from Biden on foreign policy generally,” said Van Jackson, a former Obama-era Pentagon official now at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. That perception, he said, has to do with Biden tying domestic issues to competition with China and resisting making deep cuts to defense spending.
Still, Jackson acknowledges, “there is a greater opportunity to influence policy from the left than any time since I’ve been alive.”
But privately, progressives share their concern that their wins so far came in areas where Biden already agreed with them. On the campaign trail, Biden said he would end “forever wars” and focus his attention on motivating the world to confront climate change.
The real test would be when progressives and Biden differed on a major issue. Then came the Israel-Gaza war.
The progressive pushback on Israel proved their staying power
Following weeks of aggressive and at times violent Israeli actions toward Palestinians in Jerusalem, the militant group Hamas launched rockets at Israel on May 10. Israel responded with devastating airstrikes and artillery fire on the group’s positions in Gaza.
The disparity between the two sides — Hamas has thousands of imprecise rockets while Israel has one of the world’s strongest militaries and most effective missile defense systems — meant it wasn’t a fair fight. Before a ceasefire ended the nearly two weeks of fighting, Israel had killed nearly 250 Palestinians, including 66 children, while Hamas had killed 12 Israelis, including two children.
Biden, as he has throughout his career, backed Israel’s “right to defend itself” while initially saying very little about the plight of the Palestinians. Progressives countered the president, saying support for Israel could and should be coupled with defending Palestinian rights.
Among the most vocal critics was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress. On May 13, she gave an impassioned speech on the House floor about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and why the US should reconsider its unconditional support of Israel.
“When I see the images and videos of destruction and death in Palestine, all I hear are the children screaming from pure fear and terror,” she said, holding back tears. A statement from a Palestinian mother she read about putting her kids to bed during the bombings “broke me a little more because … my country’s policies and funding will deny this mother’s right to see her own children live without fear and to grow old without painful trauma and violence.”
Five days later, Tlaib confronted Biden on a Detroit tarmac during the president’s visit to a Ford electric vehicle center and spoke to him quietly for eight minutes.
“Palestinian human rights are not a bargaining chip and must be protected, not negotiated,” a Tlaib aide said to NPR that day. “The US cannot continue to give the right-wing Netanyahu government billions each year to commit crimes against Palestinians. Atrocities like bombing schools cannot be tolerated, much less conducted with US-supplied weapons.”
In a speech at the Ford center after their conversation, Biden addressed Tlaib directly, saying: “I admire your intellect, I admire your passion, and I admire your concern for so many other people.”
“From my heart,” he continued, “I pray that your grandmom and family are well. I promise you, I’m going to do everything to see that they are, on the West Bank. You’re a fighter. And, God, thank you for being a fighter.”
And Tlaib did keep fighting. In response to reports that the administration had approved the sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel, Tlaib and two other progressives, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), put forward a resolution on May 19 to block the transaction.
The next day, May 20, Sanders filed his own resolution with the same goal in mind. And by May 21 in Israel, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, with some crediting the congressional pressure for ending the fighting after just 11 days.
US officials, including previous presidents from both parties, had sought to condition aid to Israel before. But to consider doing so while Israel engaged in a war with Gaza was different, and underscored the shift in Washington.
“The politics of Israel have changed,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), a progressive House Foreign Affairs Committee member. “People are standing up for what they believe, to be fair, but also to speak out against injustice, and I’ve seen many of my colleagues do it sincerely.”
The question now is if the progressive momentum can be sustained.
Foreign policy progressives are getting wins. Can they keep winning?
Progressives make three main arguments for their recent success and why they believe they’ll remain a force in years to come.
The first is that Trump’s disregard for human rights and relationships with autocrats like Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and right-wing leaders like Netanyahu brought disparate progressive factions together.
“The Trump years gave the progressive community time to formulate what their ideas really were,” said a senior House Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
Progressives expect the misbehavior of foreign leaders to continue, providing endless fodder for their case. Netanyahu, for example, “is all about short-term, Pyrrhic victories and he’s fucking himself in the long run,” said Vietor, the progressive podcast host.
The second is that the ubiquity of social media will continue to broadcast atrocities around the world. That will allow progressives to unite around whatever injustice goes viral online and then do something about it.
“The burden of knowing, and being faced with reality, is acting on that reality you’re aware of. That wasn’t true for generations,” said Castro. “Now you’re faced with the facts and you have to govern accordingly.”
And the third is that the progressive ranks in government keep swelling. “Progressives are saying things about foreign policy interests and values that a lot of Americans believe in and agree with, and have for a while,” said Duss, the Sanders adviser. “Thanks to years of hard organizing and policy work, there are more and more people in Washington who reflect those views.”
New progressive voices keep arriving. In one 2020 election result that many saw as a sign of the times, Jamaal Bowman defeated pro-Israel House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel in New York.
During the Israel-Gaza fight, now-Rep. Bowman put out a statement that was far more sympathetic to Palestinians than anything Engel likely would have offered. “It is imperative that the United States have an even handed approach and ensure our nation is not complicit in stoking the flames of conflict through continued settlement expansion and home demolitions that undermine the two-state solution, perpetuate endless occupation, and threaten the long-term security of both Israelis and Palestinians,” Bowman said on May 11.
More support in the capital gives progressives like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib even more political space to push their views and challenge Biden from the left.
But experts wonder what will happen if the progressive foreign policy movement becomes too successful.
One possibility is that receiving more attention and notoriety could force progressives to concretize and homogenize their views. “The risk of movements becoming more institutionalized is they lose their radical edge,” said Marie Berry, an associate professor at the University of Denver.
And what if the movement becomes so successful that some of its proponents become the national security adviser, defense secretary, secretary of defense, or even president? That, ironically, could be a problem.
“When you have to make hard choices about what you care about, things are going to get messy very fast,” said Josh Shifrinson, an associate professor at Boston University. And if a progressive finds themselves in the Oval Office, the problem will be that “you’re no longer the leader of the progressive movement, but the leader of US, which requires different choices, priorities, and thinking.”
The progressive foreign policy movement will have to contend with those risks as it moves from the wings to center stage. But for now, their perceived successes during the Israel-Gaza crisis will likely keep them in the spotlight.
“It will give us more confidence to conduct more foreign policy from the House and Senate,” said Khanna, one of the leading progressive lawmakers. “The voice of members of Congress can make a huge difference in standing up for human rights and for peace.”
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Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in a conflict that claimed nearly 250 lives. But the underlying status quo makes another round of fighting all but inevitable, and a fundamental solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems further away than ever.
Worse, the long-running American solution for the problem — a US-mediated peace process aimed at creating a “two-state solution,” with an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank existing alongside Israel — has proven to be a dismal failure.
Israel has become more and more entrenched in the West Bank, building new Jewish settlements that make it increasingly difficult to imagine a viable Palestinian state on that land. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership remains deeply divided: The militant group Hamas controls Gaza, while Fatah, a secular nationalist political party, nominally administers the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority (with Israel still ultimately in control).
This has led to a growing sense among analysts and experts that the two-state solution is no longer possible. Writing in the New York Times last week, the Arab Center’s Yousef Munayyer proclaimed “a growing global consensus” that “the two-state solution is dead. Israel has killed it.” Last year, influential Jewish American writer Peter Beinart declared that “the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades — a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews — has failed.”
But while pointing out the failings of the current approach is vital, its critics go too far. As far away as it may seem, the two-state solution is still the best possible option available for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s in large part because the alternatives are even less plausible.
The most commonly proposed replacement is a “one-state solution,” which would merge Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip into a single democratic country with equal rights for Arabs and Jews. Under this scenario, Arab Muslims would outnumber Jews, thus ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Nor would Palestinians have a state purely to call their own, instead having to accommodate a large Jewish minority.
One state is even less likely to happen than a two-state solution. It would involve the most powerful player in the conflict, Israel, choosing to abandon its raison d’être. It’s far more likely to abandon West Bank settlements than to give up on Zionism wholesale.
This speaks to the deeper reason the two-state solution remains better than the leading alternative: It is the only realistic way of dealing with the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one between two distinct nations. Israelis and Palestinians have fundamentally different identities and different ideas about how they want to be governed; in one state, one of their political projects would necessarily be defeated. This would make future violence more likely, not less.
Reviving the goal of a two-state solution is vital. But to do that, it needs to be separated from the moribund peace process. Instead, the US should pursue a strategy that could be termed “deoccupation”: one that aims to weaken the Israeli occupation’s hold on Israeli minds and Palestinian lives while, ultimately, creating the conditions under which its dismantling may become possible.
Why a two-state solution seems impossible right now
The reason for the surge in one-state advocacy is fairly simple: Developments on the ground have created a kind of one-state reality, one that is slowly but surely eroding the conditions that make partition thinkable.
There are currently 650,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. Many of these settlers live near the “Green Line,” Israel’s border prior to conquering the West Bank, in communities that would likely be ceded to Israel in any peace agreement. Many others reside in settlements across the West Bank, an archipelago built on occupied Palestinian land that cuts Palestinians off from each other by design.
These settlers are governed by Israeli law and protected by Israeli troops, and drive on separate Israeli roads. Palestinians, by contrast, live under a military occupation — given limited self-government under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority, but ultimately subject to the whims of the Israeli occupiers.
The growth of these settlements has made a two-state solution much harder to envision. The more settlements grow, the harder it will be to physically undo all of the infrastructure that has been put in place to separate them from Palestinians in the West Bank.
And the more settlers there are, the harder it will be politically for Israel to remove large numbers of them — a necessary condition for a two-state solution. When Israel evacuated settlers from Gaza in 2005, it was a brutal internal conflict that prompted a vicious right-wing backlash. There were only about 9,000 settlers in Gaza at the time.
Life in Gaza today is controlled by Israel in a more indirect way. While Hamas rules inside Gaza, Israel (in partnership with Egypt) tightly controls exit and entry. The stifling Israeli blockade, in theory designed to limit Hamas’s ability to arm itself, has destroyed ordinary Gazans’ ability to build a functional and healthy society. A 2018 UN report estimates that the combination of the blockade and three different wars did damage to Gaza’s economy worth roughly six times its GDP — leading to a poverty rate nearly four times what it would have been otherwise.
Israel’s approach to Gaza and the West Bank, together with its rule over heavily Arab East Jerusalem and its treatment of the Arab Israeli minority inside Israel, prompted two leading human rights groups — the Israeli organization B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch — to issue landmark reports this year declaring the current situation a form of “apartheid.”
In their view, there is one governing power applying different and unequal sets of laws to two different peoples, defined in ethnonational terms — a unified system of inequality and discrimination, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, that is becoming increasingly difficult to separate into two distinct states in practice.
As if this weren’t bad enough, the politics on both sides currently make a two-state solution nearly unthinkable.
Since the failure of the 1990s peace process, left-wing parties in Israel that championed the two-state solution have been in terminal decline, with voters blaming their vision of territorial compromise for the violence of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, and the rise of Hamas in Gaza.
The political right, which favors either the status quo or outright annexation of the West Bank, dominates the political scene. The settlement enterprise is primarily driven by the annexationist right, their ever-expanding enclaves planned to make an Israeli withdrawal more logistically difficult and politically costly. Israel’s rightward political drift, the growth of settlements, and waning public support for the two-state solution are all linked and mutually reinforcing — pushing Israel away from any kind of territorial compromise.
On the Palestinian side, the biggest problem is political division.
During the 1990s peace process, the Palestinians had a unified leadership. The Fatah party controlled both the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, giving its leader, Yasser Arafat, clear authority to negotiate on behalf of Palestinians as a whole. Then, Palestinian elections held in January 2006 delivered a split verdict, with Hamas winning a plurality of seats in the Palestinian parliament.
But Hamas and Fatah, now led by Mahmoud Abbas, couldn’t come to terms on how to share power — a disagreement partly fueled by an international community that rejected the idea of a Hamas-led government. Tensions between the two factions ultimately exploded into a brief civil war, which ended with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in charge of the West bank.
Since then, repeated efforts to reconcile the two sides have failed; Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president was supposed to end in 2009, rules indefinitely without a popular mandate. Before the war this year, Abbas canceled parliamentary elections, fearing he’d lose — a decision that points both to his lack of legitimacy and fundamental unwillingness to compromise with Gaza’s rulers. Hamas, for its part, runs a repressive Islamist regime in Gaza and hopes to extend its laws to the West Bank.
As a result, the political unity that once gave Arafat the ability to negotiate with Israel authoritatively no longer exists. There is no political entity that could make a deal on behalf of the Palestinians and enforce it in all of what would become Palestine — and it’s not clear that one will emerge in the near future.
Under these circumstances, it’s easy to see why people are proposing a one-state alternative.
Israel would not be forced to evacuate the settlements or come to some kind of negotiated compromise with the Palestinians on borders. Instead, it could unilaterally grant equal citizenship to everyone living in the territory and open up elections to all — the first step toward a system that would, in theory, deliver a better future than the status quo perpetuated by endless final status negotiations.
A two-state solution is hard. A one-state solution is even harder.
While one state may sidestep the political barriers to two states, it has its own problems — barriers considerably more serious than those standing in the way of two.
The most prominent one-state advocates are, primarily, supporters of Palestine abroad — not Palestinians on the ground. The official position of Fatah remains support for two states, and Hamas accepts it as the starting point for an end to hostilities. Ayman Odeh and Mansour Abbas, the leaders of the major Arab factions in Israel’s Knesset, its parliament, are both two-staters.
A March 2021 poll found that, while support for one state has risen over time among the Palestinian public, it’s still very much a minority position — only one-third of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians support abandoning the pursuit of two states in favor of one.
“I don’t see one state as politically viable when there is currently no party or movement advocating for it inside Palestine,” says Khaled Elgindy, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute.
Meanwhile, the nature of the Palestinian factions makes a two-state solution even less thinkable. Israelis see Hamas, with ample evidence, as a group bent on murdering Jewish civilians. Is their armed wing supposed to unify with the Israeli military into a new, jointly administered military? If not, how do you convince them to disarm? And what about the many other Islamist militant groups in Palestine, like Islamic Jihad?
Perhaps if the political reality on the Palestinian side changes radically, these questions might have answers. But in the short term, there is little prospect for Hamas and Fatah to get over their own differences and somehow unite behind one-state advocacy — let alone for Hamas to change so radically that Israelis would be willing to integrate it into their own government and society.
And the politics on the Israeli side poses an even bigger problem.
Today, more Arabs than Jews live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Any one-state solution would also include some version of the right of return, in which Palestinians displaced in 1948 and their descendants are permitted to move back to the new binational state. In a one-state arrangement, Arabs would outnumber Jews by a significant margin.
The result would be the end of Zionism, the vision of a specifically Jewish state that exists to protect Jews in a hostile world. The political structures of the Israeli state as they currently exist would have to be completely unraveled, replaced with some alternative that isn’t oriented around the state’s Jewish identity.
This is more than unacceptable to Israeli Jewish political leaders and citizens: It would, in their minds, amount to total defeat.
A 2020 poll found that a scant 10 percent of Jewish Israelis supported a one-state solution in which Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are equal citizens. And only 13 percent of Israel’s Arab citizens supported such an option. By contrast, 42 percent of Jewish Israelis and 59 percent of Arab Israelis supported two states — with much of the opposition among Jews stemming from a sense that two states were not currently achievable rather than a principled unwillingness to compromise.
The Israeli commitment to Zionism creates an insuperable political problem for a one-state solution. Israel holds the preponderance of the power in the current situation; getting to one state would require a nuclear-armed state with one of the world’s best-equipped militaries to unilaterally agree to dismantle itself.
“There’s no conceivable possibility that Israel would agree to disappear in favor of a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority, and there is no one on earth outside of some social media supporting the idea,” Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor and prominent pro-Palestinian intellectual, told me via email.
Compared to that, the barriers to a two-state solution seem more surmountable.
While evacuating settlements will be challenging for Israel, it has the capacity to do so. Daniel Seidemann, a leading expert on Jerusalem and the geography of the conflict, told me that Israel would have to withdraw and rehome about 185,000 settlers to make a two-state solution viable. This is a logistical challenge but hardly an impossibility: Seidemann points out that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel successfully absorbed roughly a million Jews seeking a new home in Israel.
The politics of evacuating Israelis from settlements are much harder than integrating Jewish immigrants from abroad. And yet they are infinitely easier than those of asking Israel to commit what Jewish citizens see as national suicide. If forced to choose between withdrawal and destruction by some kind of pressure campaign, Israel would have both the power and the will to choose the former.
“Even if you demand one state, and even if you generate enough pressure on Israel, Israel will retreat to two states,” Yehuda Shaul, the founder of the Israeli anti-occupation activist group Breaking the Silence, tells me. “Once we end the occupation and retreat to the Green Line, no one will support your struggle anymore. It doesn’t matter what you demand; what matters is the geographic and demographic reality on the ground.”
Similarly, while the divisions between Hamas and Fatah run deep, it’s much easier to imagine them agreeing to share power under the current Palestinian political framework than some new one-state movement. Since the split, there have been repeated negotiations between the two sides and several interim agreements on power-sharing.
These agreements, of course, broke down. But part of the problem is that the Palestinians were working with limited international support. A 2018 report on Gaza and Palestinian division written by a group of leading experts in Washington — including Hady Amr, Biden’s current deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs — argues that a more robust international effort to foster Palestinian unity could offer stronger incentives and security guarantees for all sides, increasing the chance that an agreement might stick.
“Getting agreement from Israel, Hamas, and the PA/PLO will still be extraordinarily difficult, but a campaign coordinated between all the external actors has the greatest likelihood of success,” the report argues.
Support for a one-state solution is born of a justified sense that the two-state paradigm is failing to deliver. But the argument that it is somehow more realistic than two states only works if one ignores the basic realities on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict.
“Out of despair, people turn to magic,” as Shaul puts it.
Two states are worth fighting for
One-state advocates are not unaware of these barriers. They believe they can be overcome by the moral force of the one-state democratic vision: an ideal that could galvanize a political movement akin to the South African anti-apartheid struggle, changing the way that people on both sides of the conflict think about themselves and their historic enemies.
“A struggle for equality could elevate Palestinian leaders who possess the moral authority that Abbas and Hamas lack,” Beinart writes. “Progress often appears utopian before a movement for moral change gains traction.”
But there’s a moral core to the two-state vision as well: self-determination for two peoples, each of which have a history of victimization that leads them to desire a government for and by their own people. And that makes two states not only more feasible than one, but also in certain respects more desirable.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just a fight for individual rights, though it is that. It’s a struggle for collective rights between two distinct groups of people. Depriving Israeli Jews of a Jewish state or Palestinians of a Palestinian state would represent a subordination of one group’s aspirations to someone else’s vision.
To overcome that, leaders and ordinary citizens on both sides would need to fundamentally change their national aspirations: Jews would need to reject Zionism and Palestinians reject Palestinian nationalism. That would involve not just changing political institutions, but changing the sorts of identities people have and care about. That is not impossible, but it is exceptionally difficult to imagine in this case.
“Abandoning the desire for self-determination, something that has been the very raison d’etre of Palestinian nationalism since the 1960s and something that has actually been achieved by Zionists, is a steep demand to make of both,” Nadav Shelef, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies national identity and ethnic struggle, wrote in a recent essay applying academic research on how nationalist sentiment declines to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Given the entrenched identities on both sides, it would likely be nearly impossible to create a truly “democratic” single state in which both communities feel authentically represented. Far more likely is a situation in which one national vision dominates the other, either by force of arms or force of numbers. In either case, one side will feel unrepresented by a one-state reality — which is a recipe for disaster.
“I don’t think there’s anyone that thinks that, right away, a one-state solution would lead to political equality between Jews and Arabs,” Shelef tells me in a phone interview. “In that context, you would expect a one-state solution would lead to violence.”
This analysis depends, crucially, on exclusive national identities on both sides running quite deep. Syracuse University professor Yael Zeira, an expert on nationalism, tells me that identities can be altered: that “physically separating ethnic groups in conflict is not necessarily required to achieve peace.”
But if anything, these national identities seem to be hardening, not softening.
For instance, during the recent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, communal violence between Jews and Arabs erupted on the streets of demographically mixed cities within Israel. This fighting reflected the deepening mistrust between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, fed by anti-Arab sentiment among Jews and a justified sense among Arabs that the Jewish majority does not consider them full and equal citizens.
And yet, Arab Israelis, also known as Palestinian citizens of Israel, had been part of the Jewish state for decades — and, in recent years, had made significant strides toward integration in Israeli social and cultural life. If tensions between Israelis and Palestinians can cause major internal violence in this context, it’s hard to imagine that a one-state reality would be remotely stable.
“It’s like saying Israelis and Palestinians hate each other so much that they can’t get divorced — and that they’ll have to have a successful marriage instead,” Seidemann, the Jerusalem expert, told me.
To save the two-state solution, ditch the “peace process”
Even if the prospect of a two-state solution seems impossible right now, it’s not impossible to imagine eventually getting there — if the right steps are taken.
“We can ignite a process that will create the reality of two states,” Ami Ayalon, former commander in chief of the Israeli navy and now peace activist, told me. “Probably it will take 10 or 20 years to execute, but we can achieve [it].”
Recent reports from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — prominent think tanks that recently employed some of Biden’s top foreign policy officials — have outlined ways to shift American policy away from immediate negotiations and toward changing the reality on the ground.
The first step, these experts say, should be to abandon the US-led peace process as traditionally conceived. This doesn’t mean Washington shouldn’t still be involved; America is by far the most important international actor here, given its close relationship with Israel and traditional role leading Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Rather, it just means the US focus needs to shift from trying to negotiate a final peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians to trying to create the conditions under which one is possible — a strategy Seidemann suggests could be called “deoccupation.”
The goal of a deoccupation strategy is to halt and eventually reverse the processes that are pushing the two sides further away from two states, with the ultimate aim of returning to final status negotiations when conditions have changed. It involves three key aspects: 1) raising the costs of the status quo for Israel; 2) changing the political equation on both sides; and 3) rethinking what an acceptable two-state solution might look like.
1) Raise the costs of the status quo for Israel
“The United States needs to send a clear and consistent signal to Israel that the violation of norms and the undermining of U.S. policy goals will have consequences,” the Carnegie report argues. “Absent these messages and the policies to back them up, the trajectory of Israeli policy and politics will not change and the door on peaceful conflict resolution and a two-state outcome will further close.”
As a baseline, this requires openly rejecting the Trump administration’s “peace plan,” which gave Israelis everything and Palestinians nothing.
It also means using US leverage over Israel to push it back on a better path. This could involve ending the US practice of vetoing UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, and putting conditions on the $3.8 billion of military aid the US gives to Israel every year, requiring the Israeli government to do things like ease the blockade of Gaza and freeze settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
This kind of approach used to be unthinkable in Washington, given staunch pro-Israel sentiment on both sides. But a dramatic shift in attitudes on the Democratic side — both in public opinion and on Capitol Hill — has created an opportunity for the US to use its leverage over Israel in pursuit of peace.
There’s even a bill in the House right now, written by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), that aims to block the use of US-provided weapons in Israeli human rights abuses. It has the support of both prominent legislators like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and J Street, the pro-peace Israel lobby that regularly attracts leading Democrats to its annual gathering.
2) Foster the political conditions under which genuine negotiations are possible
This means both supporting the pro-peace camp in Israel and, more controversially, working to reconcile Hamas and Fatah to create a unified Palestinian leadership that could make authoritative promises.
Mechanisms for achieving that include increasing funding to pro-peace civil society groups, negotiating with Hamas through third parties like Egypt, and investing significant resources in repairing broken Palestinian political institutions.
This will mean the US having to abandon its longstanding skepticism about including Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, in a Palestinian government — working not only to making such an outcome happen, but to create a world in which Israel could accept and even negotiate with its longtime enemy.
“The United States must encourage intra-Palestinian reconciliation by becoming more flexible about the composition of the government that the Palestinians form,” the CNAS report explains.
3) Rethink what an acceptable two-state solution could look like
Finally, the US and other international actors need to think more flexibly about the conditions that make two states so difficult — and what a solution to them might look like.
For example, a final agreement could allow some West Bank settlers to stay if they agree to Palestinian rule — an option once proposed by the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said as the only viable alternative to his preferred one-state solution.
Another option would be a confederal solution, a kind of 1.5-state arrangement in which Israel and Palestine are separate governments that maintain an EU-like open borders agreement. Israeli citizens could live in the West Bank, and many Palestinian refugees could return to their homes inside the Green Line — but they would vote in Israeli and Palestinian elections, respectively.
This sort of modified two-state solution is hardly easy. Much like the one-state solution, there are no meaningful factions on the ground lobbying for it. And leaving a large number of settlers in the West Bank has the potential to reignite violence even after an agreement. Erin Jenne, an expert on ethnic conflict at Central European University, told me that “stay behind” minorities are one of the key reasons why partitions have failed to solve conflicts in other cases (like India and Pakistan).
But the purpose of proposing ideas like confederation is not to present a silver bullet replacement for two states. It’s to broaden the scope of diplomatic discussions, ultimately changing the contours of negotiations in a way that actually makes a two-state approach more plausible.
“Confederation can help expand the range of possible options and negotiating tools available to the two sides — particularly at a time when physical realities have all but foreclosed the classic two-state model and political conditions do not yet allow for an egalitarian, one-state option,” Elgindy, the Middle East Institute scholar, wrote in a 2018 report for the Brookings Institution. “In order to salvage the possibility of a two-state solution we may first need to abandon it on some level.”
There is no guarantee that this three-pronged approach will succeed. But if implemented, it would represent a radical shift away from the current American approach — abandoning the conceit that the US-Israel alliance alone would give Israel the confidence it needed to sacrifice land for peace.
And the very fact that this new approach is available, and that it’s being proposed by leading experts with real clout in Washington, suggests that the world hasn’t exhausted every avenue for pursuing two states.
Thinking of the available options as a binary between the traditional approach and a one-state solution is a mistake. There are other, more realistic possibilities — ones that do not involve wishing away the fundamental facts of Israeli military dominance, strong Jewish attachment to Zionism, and the Palestinian quest for independent statehood.
No one should be too hopeful about the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the best hope for avoiding a future of apartheid or violence isn’t trying to achieve the unachievable; it’s thinking of new ways to reach a solution that both sides have already said they can live with.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a choice to make. It was mid-May, and in a few days he’d travel to Europe for talks with allies on the Arctic and climate change, and to meet with his Russian counterpart ahead of a presidential-level summit in June.
But a fight broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, threatening to explode into a larger, bloodier conflict.
Looking at his agenda and the events in the Middle East, Blinken consulted with his staff and the White House on what he should do. There were discussions about having him drop everything to shuttle back and forth between Middle Eastern capitals and help broker a ceasefire. Instead, Blinken decided he should keep his long-planned commitments in Europe but, along with other administration officials, get on the phone with key players in the brewing war.
He made that choice, the opposite of what previous secretaries of state had done during recent Israel-Gaza conflicts, for two main reasons.
The first was that he could still engage in “telephonic diplomacy” while in Europe, in the words of a senior State Department official, without the risk of having to potentially fly home empty-handed and embarrassed.
The second reason, though, speaks to the Biden administration’s view of foreign policy writ large: Less is sometimes more.
“I find that in the current moment in Washington, although it’s been true for a long time, the answer is to do more. Everyone wants more, more, we should be doing more,” said a senior State Department official who, like two others, spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Of course, more of everything is not a strategy.”
Blinken and others in the administration simply don’t believe solving a regional crisis requires top officials like Blinken to drop everything and fly to the hot spot, especially if there are larger, more consequential, longer-term issues to focus on elsewhere.
“I think it’s very important, given the geostrategic situation, the challenges we face, we be very disciplined and focused on the strategic direction,” the official continued, adding that the US can still “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
It’s not that the US was disengaged from the Israel-Gaza conflict. Top administration figures made more than 80 calls to world leaders during the conflict — with Blinken on the phone for at least 15 of them while in or traveling between Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland — in service of the ceasefire reached after 11 days of fighting.
But Biden’s team felt keeping to the European itinerary was better for the administration’s agenda in the long run and for the conflict in the short run.
“If Blinken had gone [to the region], it actually would’ve slowed things down,” said Dennis Ross, a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, because neither Hamas nor Israel would’ve wanted to look like it was caving to the US.
Critics say much of that is beside the point. When it mattered most, it looked as though the US washed its hands of the situation and let the bombs fall where they may.
“It seemed from the outside that the administration was less interested in intervening and more interested in running interference for Israel’s own operations in Gaza,” said Omar Rahman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. “They damaged their own claim to lead the world on human rights, even if they were working hard behind the scenes to bring a halt to the fighting.”
This episode underscores a challenge the Biden administration will likely continue to face. Many will clamor for the US to visibly involve itself in crises in lieu of keeping a laser focus on longer-term challenges. But strategy is one thing; public perception is another.
For now, that doesn’t bother Biden’s team. “We shouldn’t allow reflexive thinking and unevolved thinking to dictate what we do and how we do it,” said another senior State Department official.
“We’re a country that’s big enough and capable enough to do multiple things at once”
When I discussed Blinken’s European schedule with one of the State Department officials, it was clear the secretary and his staff agreed canceling his appearances there would be the wrong call.
The first part of Blinken’s trip was to Denmark, a nation that needed tending to after its bad relationship with the Trump administration. Then it was off to Iceland for a meeting with the Arctic Council, the eight-country organization that coordinates policy in the High North. It would’ve been “unfortunate” if Blinken’s was the only empty seat at the table, the official said, especially as Russia takes over as temporary chair of the council for two years.
Blinken and his staff also felt it was important to hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts to discuss matters ranging from climate change to pandemic response. The most important of these was a one-on-one with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Their discussion set the table for next month’s summit between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
All this “gives you an idea of what would have been put at risk if he had pulled it down,” the State official said.
The key message from my conversations with US officials was that sending Blinken to Cairo or Jerusalem would’ve kept him from reassuring allies, defending US interests in the Arctic, pushing for actions on climate change, coordinating global coronavirus efforts, and preparing Biden for a tense meeting with Putin. Though no one minimized the importance of ending the violence between Israel and Hamas, most experts I spoke to said the European agenda was robust enough to keep it.
“I think they made the right call,” said Heather Conley, senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, DC. “Usually it’s the urgent overshadowing the important, but this was working on the important while also managing the urgent.”
What’s more, she said, it’s never a good idea to send your top diplomatic official by themselves to solve thorny problems. “The secretary of state doesn’t always have to be the desk officer of the crisis of the moment,” Conley told me.
Martin Indyk, who served as the US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014, recapped for me the last two times a secretary of state flew to the region during a flare-up.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Egypt and other nations in 2012 when calls to counterparts weren’t working. Her efforts helped secure a ceasefire, making it seem like that should be the playbook: When there’s a crisis, send the secretary.
But the new secretary of state, John Kerry, wasn’t as successful two years later. Despite drafting a ceasefire document for Israel and Hamas to work from, he came back to Washington “really humiliated,” Indyk said.
Watching those events from within the Obama administration was Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national security adviser. What he took away from both cases, per Indyk, was that the nation’s top diplomat should travel to the area only to finalize terms that could make the ceasefire a success. Otherwise, the chances of in-person engagement working remained low, leading to inevitable embarrassment for the secretary and the administration.
That seems to have informed some of the thinking for why Blinken is in the region now, and not earlier. Once both sides agreed to stop fighting, he went to Israel to demonstrate that America still has its back and to meet with Palestinian leadership to announce more financial support for Gaza.
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That trip was more effective than, say, spending time to quash Israel and Hamas’s beef amid the fighting.
“A premature intervention would’ve prolonged the crisis, it wouldn’t have ended it,” said Indyk, now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The way to move Israel forward is to put your arm around them, reassure them that you’re in their corner, and push them in the direction you want to go.”
Threatening to place conditions on arms sales or call for a ceasefire early, as some critics from the left wanted, likely wouldn’t have worked. “The Israelis would dig in their heels and say, ‘Screw you, we’ve got rockets falling on our people and we’re going to respond,’” Indyk continued. Plus, he and others said, Hamas surely would’ve defied the US by launching more than the 4,500 rockets they did.
That a ceasefire came together after 11 days, and that Blinken was welcomed by both warring parties shortly after the fighting, has led Biden administration officials to consider their efforts a clear success.
“It was an affirmation that we’re a country that’s big enough and capable enough to do multiple things at once,” said a State official.
The Israel-Gaza strategy may have worked. The messaging didn’t.
One of the senior State officials I spoke with hinted they may consider this play again.
Blinken “was able to keep an important agenda moving forward on long-term strategic interests while maintaining a focus on the near-term crisis. That’s probably how we need to look at things going forward, as well,” the official told me.
In other words, don’t expect top officials such as Blinken, Sullivan, or even Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to divert from their schedules during the next crisis if they have more strategic issues (in their minds) to attend to.
That’s not to say the administration’s handling of Israel-Gaza was perfect or should necessarily be a model.
Ross, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy fellow who spent more than a decade working on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in government, noted that deploying Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israel and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr — an experienced and capable senior aide, but still ultimately an aide — to the region fed perceptions that the US cared little about the fighting. “There’s no doubt that sending someone at that level didn’t signal a level of engagement at a high enough level,” Ross said.
But Brookings’s Rahman said his problems with the administration’s play had less to do with Blinken’s absence and more to do with what the US did on the whole. “I think there are ulterior motives at work, and it had very little to do with the ceasefire itself,” he said. Namely, “they weren’t interested in pursuing a ceasefire until Israel had done what it wanted to do.”
Which brings it back to the messaging issue Biden’s team will struggle with. Again, it’s all well and good to focus on strategic priorities, but the US still has to show where it stands on certain crises. And when the administration had the chance early on, it appeared to many that the US was only worried about Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself from rocket attacks, not how the war might affect innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
The overall play to end the fighting may have worked, then, but the administration didn’t necessarily win the perception battle. Biden’s handling of Israel-Gaza may not be just a flashpoint of his early presidency; it may serve as an example of a recurring problem in the years to come.
In 2015, 20 residents of Yahaba, a small town in northeastern Japan, went to their town hall to take part in a unique experiment.
Their goal was to design policies that would shape the future of Yahaba. They would debate questions typically reserved for politicians: Would it be better to invest in infrastructure or child care? Should we promote renewable energy or industrial farming?
But there was a twist. While half the citizens were invited to be themselves and express their own opinions, the remaining participants were asked to put on special ceremonial robes and play the part of people from the future. Specifically, they were told to imagine they were from the year 2060, meaning they’d be representing the interests of a future generation during group deliberations.
What unfolded was striking. The citizens who were just being themselves advocated for policies that would boost their lifestyle in the short term. But the people in robes advocated for much more radical policies — from massive health care investments to climate change action — that would be better for the town in the long term. They managed to convince their fellow citizens that taking that approach would benefit their grandkids. In the end, the entire group reached a consensus that they should, in some ways, act against their own immediate self-interest in order to help the future.
This experiment marked the beginning of Japan’s Future Design movement. What started in Yahaba has since been replicated in city halls around the country, feeding directly into real policymaking. It’s one example of a burgeoning global attempt to answer big moral questions: Do we owe it to future generations to take their interests into account? What does it look like to incorporate the preferences of people who don’t even exist yet? How can we be good ancestors?
Several Indigenous communities have long embraced the principle of “seventh-generation decision making,” which involves weighing how choices made today will affect a person born seven generations from now. In fact, it’s that kind of thinking that inspired Japanese economics professor Tatsuyoshi Saijo to create the Future Design movement (he learned about the concept while visiting the US and found it extraordinary).
But most of us probably haven’t given much thought to how we can become good ancestors. As a quote attributed to Groucho Marx puts it: “Why should I care about future generations — what have they ever done for me?”
It’s also just genuinely hard to focus on the future when we’re struggling under the weight of our day-to-day problems, and when everything in society — from our political structures (think two- and four-year election cycles) to our consumerist technologies (think Amazon’s “Buy Now” button) — seems to favor short-term solutions.
And yet, failing to think long term is a huge problem. Threats like climate change, pandemics, and rapidly emerging technologies are making it clear that it’s not enough to adopt “sustainability” as a buzzword. If we really want human life to be sustainable, we need to break out of our fixation on the present. Training ourselves to take the long view is arguably the best thing we can do for humanity.
Why we should care about people who don’t exist yet
Picture this: A child is drowning in front of you. You see her desperate limbs flailing in a pond, and you know you could easily wade into the waters and save her. Your clothes would get muddy, but your life wouldn’t be in any danger. Should you rescue her?
Of course you should.
Now, what if I told you that the child was on the other side of the world, in a village in Nepal. She’s drowning in a pond there right now. An adult just like you is passing by the pond and sees her flailing. Is it just as important for that adult to save her as it is for you to save the child near you?
Hilary Greaves, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, thinks you should answer yes. “I’d hope that most reasonable people would agree that pain and suffering on the other side of the world matter just as much as pain and suffering here,” she said. In other words, spatial distance is morally irrelevant.
“And if you think that, then it’s pretty hard to see why the case of temporal distance would be any different,” Greaves continued. “If there’s a child suffering terribly in 300 years’ time, and this is completely predictable — and there’s just as much that you could do about it as there is that you could do about the suffering of a child today — it’d be pretty strange to think that just because it’s in the future it’s less important.”
This hypothetical — an adaptation of a classic Peter Singer thought experiment — highlights the idea that future lives matter, and that we should care about improving them just like we care about improving those of people alive today.
Roman Krznaric, a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation and the author of the new book The Good Ancestor, offers an even starker analogy. “If it’s wrong to plant a bomb on a train that kills a bunch of children right now, it’s also wrong to do it if it’s going to go off in 10 minutes or 10 hours or 10 years,” he told me. “I think we shouldn’t be afraid of making that moral argument.”
And, increasingly, people are making that moral argument. “Legal struggles for the rights of future people are exploding around the world,” Krznaric said.
In 2015, 21 young Americans filed a landmark case against the government — Juliana v. United States — in which they argued that its failure to confront climate change will have serious effects on both them and future generations, which constitutes a violation of their rights.
In 2019, 15 children and teens in Canada filed a similar lawsuit. That same year, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands issued a groundbreaking ruling ordering the government to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, citing its duty of care to current and future generations.
This past April, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court likewise ruled that the government’s current climate measures weren’t good enough to protect future generations, giving it until the end of 2022 to improve its carbon emissions targets.
Also in April, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled against the expansion of the cement industry, which is terrible for the climate, in certain areas of Punjab. In the decision, the presiding justice wrote: “The tragedy is that tomorrow’s generations aren’t here to challenge this pillaging of their inheritance. The great silent majority of future generations is rendered powerless and needs a voice. This Court should be mindful that its decisions also adjudicate upon the rights of the future generations of this country.”
Krznaric, who was surprised and delighted to find his book cited in the court proceedings, told me, “These lawyers and judges are trying to find a language to talk about something they know is right, and it’s about intergenerational justice. Law is generally slow, but stuff is happening fast.”
How to nudge society to care more about the long term
The push to embrace this kind of thinking isn’t limited to the courts. A few countries have already created government agencies dedicated to thinking about policy in the very long term. Sweden has a “Ministry of the Future,” and Wales and the United Arab Emirates both have something similar.
Prominent figures in other countries are pushing their governments in that direction. For example, philosopher Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, published a report in June urging the UK to appoint a chief risk officer who would be responsible for sussing out and preparing for extreme risks.
“By my estimate, the likelihood of the world experiencing an existential catastrophe over the next 100 years is one in six — Russian roulette,” Ord said. “We cannot survive many centuries operating at a level of extreme risk like this.”
Ord emphasizes that humanity is highly vulnerable to dangers in two realms: biosecurity and artificial intelligence. Powerful actors could develop bioweapons, and individuals could misuse advances in synthetic biology to create man-made pandemics that are much worse than those that occur naturally. AI could outstrip human-level intelligence in the coming decades and, if not aligned with our values and goals, could wreak havoc on human life. These are potential existential risks to humanity, and we need to devote a lot more time and money to mitigating them.
On both sides of the Atlantic, intellectuals in recent years have formed organizations dedicated to cultivating long-term thinking. While the UK has groups like the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, Ari Wallach has been working on Longpath in the US. Operating under the motto “Be Great Ancestors,” Longpath gathers together CEOs, academics, and other individuals to do exercises meant to counter short-term thinking, from practicing mindfulness to writing letters to their future selves.
There’s a story in the Talmud that Wallach likes to tell participants: “One day, a man named Honi was walking along and saw a man planting a carob tree. Honi asked him, ‘How many years will it take until it will bear fruit?’ He said, ‘Not for 70 years.’ Honi said, ‘Do you really believe you’ll live another 70 years?’ The man answered, ‘I found this world provided with carob trees, and as my ancestors planted them for me, so I too plant them for my descendants.’”
What the man expresses in the story is gratitude toward his ancestors, and it’s that emotion that propels him to look out for his future descendants. The story captures a truth about human psychology that has since been validated in scientific studies: Eliciting gratitude in people is an effective behavioral nudge for getting them to act in the best interests of future generations.
“When people evoke feelings of gratitude (through prayer, counting blessings, etc.), the result on decisions is one of patience and value for the future relative to the present. We find they become more generous and even extract fewer resources from common resource pools,” David DeSteno, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, told me. “If gratitude makes you willing to extract fewer resources in the present (e.g., fish), they (e.g., fish stocks) can replenish or remain for future generations. Of course, this reduces immediate profit.”
DeSteno’s words highlight a fundamental tension: If we really care about creating a sustainable future for humanity, we may need to be willing to sacrifice some short-term gains.
But Wallach doesn’t think we need to frame this as a tough trade-off at all. He doesn’t ask people to sacrifice the concrete pleasures of today for the abstract rewards of tomorrow. Instead, he’s found it more effective to highlight how acting altruistically toward future generations can actually bring us pleasure now.
“When we ask people if they want to be the great ancestor that the future needs them to be, as part of what gives them meaning and purpose, they are no longer under the spell of lifespan bias,” he told me. “They see themselves as part of something larger. They are no longer being asked to sacrifice for the future, but to enhance their own sense of meaning and purpose in their present.”
Is caring for the future more important than caring for the present?
If you’ve gotten this far and you’re convinced that you should look out for future generations, you’re already ahead of lots of people. But it might interest you to know that some philosophers think longtermism — the idea that we should be concerned with ensuring that the future goes well — doesn’t actually go far enough.
Both Greaves and another Oxford philosopher, Will MacAskill, advocate for strong longtermism, which says that impacts on the far future aren’t just an important feature of our actions — they’re the most important feature. And when they say far future, they really mean far: They argue we should be thinking about the consequences of our actions not just one or five or seven generations from now, but thousands or even millions of years ahead.
Their reasoning goes like this: There are going to be far more people alive in the future than there are in the present or have been in the past. Of all the human beings who will ever be alive in the universe, the vast majority will live in the future.
If our species lasts for as long as Earth remains a habitable planet, we’re talking about at least 1 quadrillion people coming into existence — 100,000 times the population of Earth today. (Even if you think there’s only a 1 percent chance that our species lasts for as long as Earth is habitable, the math still means the number of future people outstrips the number of present people.) And if humans settle in space one day, we could be looking at an even longer, more populous future for our species.
Now, if you believe that all humans count equally regardless of where or when they live (remember the drowning-child-in-Nepal thought experiment?), you have to think about the impacts of our actions on all their lives. Since there are far more people to affect in the future — because most people who’ll ever exist will exist in the future — it follows that the impacts that matter most are those that affect future humans.
That’s how the argument goes, anyhow. And if you buy it, it might dramatically change some of your choices in life. Instead of donating to soup kitchens or charities that save kids from malaria today, you may donate to researchers who are figuring out how to ensure that tomorrow’s AI will be aligned with human values. Instead of devoting your career to being a family doctor, you may devote it to research on pandemic prevention. You’d know there’s only a tiny probability your donation or actions will help humanity avoid catastrophe, but you’d reason that it’s worth it — if your bet does pay off, the payoff would be enormous.
But you might not buy this argument at all. You might object that you can’t reliably predict the effects of your actions in one year, never mind 1,000 years, so it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of resources in trying to positively impact the future when the effects of your actions might wash out in a few years or decades.
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That’s a very reasonable objection. Greaves acknowledges that in a lot of cases, we suffer from “moral cluelessness” about the downstream effects of our actions. “But,” she told me, “that’s not the case for all actions.”
She recommends targeting issues that come with “lock-in” opportunities, or ways of doing good that result in the positive benefits being locked in for a long time. For example, you could pursue a career aimed at establishing national or international norms around carbon emissions, or nuclear bombs, or regulations for labs that deal with dangerous pathogens. These actions are almost certain to do good — the kind of good that won’t be undone quickly.
“It’s in the nature of a lock-in mechanism that the effects of your actions persist for an extremely long time,” Greaves said. “So it gets rid of your concern that the effects will keep getting dampened and dampened as you get further into the future.”
You might object to strong longtermism on different grounds, though. You might think, perhaps not unfairly, that it smacks of privilege — that it’s easy to take such a position when you live in relative prosperity, but that people living in miserable conditions today need our help now, and we have a duty to ease their suffering.
In fact, you might reject the premise that all humans count equally regardless of when they live. Maybe you think we have an especially strong duty to humans who are alive in the present because aggregated effects on people’s welfare aren’t the only things that matter — things like justice matter too. We might owe it to disadvantaged groups today to help them out, possibly as reparations for harm done in the past through colonialism or slavery.
When I voiced this objection to Greaves, she admitted it’s plausible that thinking, utilitarian-style, only about what would be the better outcome doesn’t exhaust the moral story — that maybe we should take virtues such as justice into account. But she said it’s still a mistake to think that that obviously sways the balance in favor of present people. If justice is in the picture, she rebutted, why shouldn’t justice also apply to future people?
“Take the case of reparations. If you think that there are some people we owe reparations to because of wrongs done in the past that are affecting their interests now, and in some of those cases you’re talking about wrongs that were done hundreds of years ago, that quite nicely makes the point that bad things we do now can — via the route of justice — have adverse impacts in a couple hundred years’ time,” Greaves said. “So you might think it’s a matter of justice that we owe it to future generations to bequeath them both an existence in the first place and the conditions for their flourishing.”
It’s worth noting that Greaves does not find it easy to live her philosophy. She told me she feels awful whenever she walks past a homeless person. She’s acutely aware she’s not supporting that individual or the larger cause of ending homelessness because she’s supporting longtermist causes instead.
“I feel really bad, but it’s a limited sense of feeling bad because I do think it’s the right thing to do given that the counterfactual is giving to these other [longtermist] causes that are more effective,” she said. “The morally appropriate thing is to occupy this kind of middle space where you’re still gripped by present-day suffering but you recognize there’s an even more important thing you can do with the limited resources.”
Not everyone will agree with this reasoning, and that’s perfectly okay. You can agree with longtermism without agreeing with strong longtermism.
You can also decide that strong longtermism is pretty intellectually convincing, but you’re not confident enough in its claims that you want to devote 100 percent of your charitable donations or your time to exclusively longtermist causes. In that case, you can split your money (or time) into different buckets: You might decide that 50 percent of your donations go to longtermist issues and 50 percent go to causes like poverty, homelessness, or racial justice.
If you feel safer hedging your bets this way, you’re not alone. Even Greaves admits that it’s scary to commit fully to her philosophy. “It’s like you’re standing on a pin over a chasm,” she told me. “It feels dangerous, in a way, to throw all this altruistic effort at existential risk mitigation and probably do nothing, when you know that you could’ve done all this good for near-term causes.”
A few things about the future we can all probably agree on
If you care about helping both present and future generations, you might want to think about things that check both boxes. This is the strategy Krznaric recommends. “Let’s find the sweet spot between our self-interest today and the future that even Groucho Marx might be happy with,” he said.
While Krznaric isn’t confident in our ability to predict the knock-on effects of technological shifts, he thinks it’s easier to say for sure that certain ecological shifts would be good. For example, if we donate to groups that make a positive difference in staving off climate change and preventing pandemics, that’s really good for us today and in the near future — and highly likely to be positive for the long-run future too.
“What do we know about human life, whether it’s today or in 200 years or 300 years?” he said. “We know that if there are any creatures like us, they’ll need air to breathe and water to drink. If you want to think long term, one of the best ways to do it is, don’t think about time, think about place.”
He cited biologists such as Janine Benyus, who explains how some creatures have managed to survive for 10,000 generations and beyond: by taking care of the place that will take care of their offspring. They live within the boundaries of the ecosystem in which they’re embedded. They don’t foul the nest.
This focus on safeguarding place for both the present and the future could end up being an important line of research within longtermism. One advantage of this approach is that it’s not excessively morally demanding, whereas it’s maybe too demanding to say that we ought to devote most of our resources to improving the far future even when it comes at a serious cost to current interests.
Mind you, Greaves and MacAskill make a good point when they write that “even if, for example, there is an absolute cap on the total sacrifice that can be morally required, it seems implausible that society today is currently anywhere near that cap.”
Ultimately, the world doesn’t need everyone to focus all of their resources on the far future all the time — but we’re a long way from a situation where even a fraction of us are focusing even a fraction of our resources on it. Because long-term thinking is so neglected, it would probably do a lot of good if more of us were to direct more attention to making human life sustainable.
And if we think human life in the future might be full of awesome things like happiness and knowledge and beauty — or even if we think there’s just a decent chance it could be more good than bad — then thinking about how to increase the odds of such a future for later generations is really worth our time.
In fact, our lives may start to feel much more meaningful if we regularly pause to ask ourselves: How can I shape the larger story of humanity into something fruitful? What carob trees am I planting?
Further reading:
- Nick Beckstead’s 2013 philosophy dissertation, “On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future,” set the groundwork for more recent philosophical work on longtermism.
- Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill’s original working paper, “The Case for Strong Longtermism,” frames the case in very strong terms: “For the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1000) years, focussing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers.” The revised version, dated June 2021, leaves this passage out.
- Hilary Greaves explains “moral cluelessness” on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
- Toby Ord argues the long-term future matters more than anything else, also on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
- Roman Krznaric has a running list on his website of organizations promoting long-term thinking, as well as an interesting Intergenerational Solidarity Index, a measure of how much different nations provide for the well-being of future generations.
Thousands of Haitians have been displaced amid escalating gang violence in the aftermath of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination on July 7. Many of them are expected to seek refuge in the US, but while the Biden administration has taken steps to welcome some, it has threatened others with the prospect of repatriation and shut the door on those arriving via the southern border.
In addition to pledging millions of dollars in aid to Haiti, the Biden administration will soon allow more than 100,000 Haitians who arrived in the US before May 21, 2021, to apply for Temporary Protected Status, which is typically offered to citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters or armed conflict. It will allow those people to live and work in the US for at least 18 months after the government publishes a notice in the Federal Register, which the White House said is expected “within the coming days.”
But that won’t help anyone who has decided to leave Haiti in light of the recent constitutional crisis and power struggle that has unfolded since Moïse’s assassination, nor will it aid the thousands of Haitians who have long been stranded in Mexico due to the US’s pandemic-related border restrictions.
At the same time, the Biden administration has discouraged Haitians, as well as Cubans fleeing their communist regime’s recent crackdown on anti-government protesters, from trying to reach the US by boat. Those who try will put their lives at risk, be intercepted by the US Coast Guard, and will not be permitted to enter the US, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during a July 13 press conference.
“The time is never right to attempt migration by sea,” he said. “To those who risk their lives doing so, this risk is not worth taking. Allow me to be clear: if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that those individuals will either be repatriated back to Haiti or, if they can demonstrate the need for humanitarian protection, resettled in another country. It’s an echo of Bush- and Clinton-era policies in the early 1990s, when the federal government intercepted Haitian boats, detained HIV-positive Haitians indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay at what one federal judge referred to as a “prison camp,” and sought to repatriate them.
Immigrant advocates see the Biden administration’s response so far as an abandonment of its responsibilities to Haitians seeking humanitarian protections.
“The message is, ‘You are not welcome,’” said Denise Bell, a researcher for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International. “This is a message that the US is not fully upholding its human rights obligations around refugee protection. … We’re deeply concerned that the US continues offshoring its human rights responsibilities.”
But there are ways the Biden administration could open orderly, legal pathways for Haitians to come to the US and ensure they get the opportunity to make claims for protection. It can unilaterally lift pandemic-related restrictions at the US-Mexico border, guarantee that Haitians can come to the US legally via a parole program, and prevent them from being detained and deported back to dangerous conditions in their home country.
End pandemic-related restrictions at the border
The US continues to turn away the majority of migrants arriving at the southern border — including Haitians — under pandemic-related border restrictions, with exceptions for unaccompanied minors, some families from Central America with young children, and people who were sent back to Mexico to wait for their court hearings in the US.
Last March, at the outset of the pandemic, then-President Donald Trump invoked Title 42, a section of the Public Health Service Act that allows the US government to temporarily block noncitizens from entering the US “when doing so is required in the interest of public health.”
The policy has allowed US immigration officials at the southern border to rapidly expel more than 844,000 migrants since the outset of the pandemic. Though scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) opposed the policy initially, arguing there was no legitimate public health rationale behind it, then-Vice President Mike Pence ordered the agency to follow through with it anyway.
Biden has not overturned the policy, despite outcry from immigrant advocates and humanitarian groups who say it prevents migrants from exercising their right under US and international law to seek asylum.
“People who come [to] the US-Mexico border to ask for asylum are not doing so illegally,” Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, an organization that provides services to Black migrants at the border, said on a recent press call. “It is their legal right.”
Haitian Bridge Alliance estimates that 5,000 to 10,000 Haitians are still stuck in Mexico on account of Title 42, and most of them have been waiting between 18 months and five years for a chance to apply for asylum. They have reported facing discrimination in Mexican border towns, where they fear retribution from police or local armed groups.
And though Central American families have crossed the border and been released into the US, many Haitian families have been sent back to their home country. Immigration officials have chartered 34 flights to Haiti since Biden’s inauguration — including one the day before Moïse’s assassination — and pregnant women and infants have been among the passengers, Jozef said.
Reinstate a parole program for Haitians that would allow them to enter the US legally
Starting in 2014, the Obama administration allowed some 8,000 Haitians to come to the US under what is known as the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program. Certain eligible US citizens and green card holders could apply for parole on behalf of their family members in Haiti who already had pending visa applications, but would have otherwise had to face years-long wait times.
Parole is granted only in situations where the Department of Homeland Security finds there are pressing humanitarian concerns or determines it would significantly benefit the public. The program was designed to help Haiti recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake that displaced hundreds of thousands of people, in part by increasing the remittances that Haitian migrants could send to their family back home.
The Trump administration, however, terminated the program in 2019. Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, said Wednesday that the administration was weighing whether to revive parole for Haitians as well as Cubans. Over 130 human rights, humanitarian, immigration, and women’s rights organizations have supported the idea, but the groups are also calling for an even broader parole program that would apply to any Haitian arriving at a US border.
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That would provide an option both for those who arrived in the US after the May cutoff and for those who continue to arrive. But in the meantime, Psaki noted, those migrants would be able to ask for asylum or other humanitarian protections.
Reinstating a Haitian parole program would offer those fleeing the country an orderly, legal path to reach the US that would “encourage people to use mechanisms that will provide them safety,” as opposed to embarking on a treacherous journey to the US by boat, Bell said. In 2019, 28 Haitians died at sea while en route to the US.
But legal pathways such as parole “should always be a complement to their rights to seek asylum,” she added. “It shouldn’t mean that somebody who does come to the border and asks for asylum is punished, but that they have other pathways to find safety.”
Halt deportations of Haitians and make asylum more accessible
The Biden administration can unilaterally order immigration agencies to halt enforcement actions against Haitians and prevent them from being deported. That would merely require issuing guidance to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, agents, and trial attorneys.
It can also find ways to remedy unjust deportations of Haitians that occurred under the Trump administration. To that end, the Biden administration has already indicated it intends to review thousands of Trump-era expulsions — not just those involving Haitians — and bring some of them back to the US.
But the problem remains that Haitians face unequal treatment in the asylum system. Haitians intercepted by US authorities at sea face what’s called a “shout test” — they can only get a screening interview for asylum or other humanitarian protections if they voice or otherwise indicate concern about returning to their home country.
What’s more, Haitian Creole speakers are at a particular disadvantage, given that the US does not require any translators to be present when interdicting boats, so they might not be able to articulate their fears effectively.
“What’s really a form of continuing inequality before the law for Haitians is how few are ever considered for resettlement when they are intercepted at sea, and then for people who do make it to the US — whether by sea or over land on the southern border — how few are actually granted asylum,” Bell said. “I don’t think that’s a function of the validity of their claims. I think it’s a form of systemic racism.”