Socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant, a former Seattle City Council member who delivered an impassioned speech last week in support of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, said something a supporter stumping for a candidate isn’t supposed to say. Sawant, speaking to a crowd in Dearborn, Michigan, admitted her candidate can’t win. What’s more, she said, winning wasn’t the aim.
“We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan,” Sawant said, identifying it as a top "goal." Pointing out that the polls show it’s unlikely Harris could win the White House without Michigan, Sawant said that "if we manage to accomplish this, it would be absolutely historic by voting for a presidential candidate who is against the war and by rejecting a presidential candidate ... because she is supporting the genocide.’”
At the same event, Hassan Abdel Salam, a co-founder of the Abandon Harris campaign, said, “The former president prevented our families, our friends, our colleagues from entering the country.” (He was referring to former President Donald Trump’s travel ban on a number of Muslim-majority countries.) “But the vice president killed them,” Abdel Salam said.
If the efforts to abandon Harris succeed, then the activists behind it will have done a great disservice to their cause.
(Despite supporting Stein, neither Sawant nor Abdel Salam works for Stein’s campaign. The candidate’s campaign told MSNBC in a statement: “We are in the race to win and to build the Green Party as an alternative for the large majority of voters who believe the parties of war and Wall Street don’t represent them.”)
These activists’ pitches to Michigan voters to torpedo Harris’ election odds come as a significant share of Muslim voters in Michigan appear to be considering voting for Stein to protest Harris’ Israel policy. The Democrats don’t consider it an idle threat, and put out an ad addressing third parties (instead of Republicans) on television in Michigan and other battleground states. But if the efforts to abandon Harris en masse succeed, then the activists behind it will have done a great disservice to their cause: Trump will undoubtedly lead to more suffering in the Middle East.
I am sympathetic to why a non-trivial number of voters on the left are tempted to vote for Stein. As I’ve written previously, human rights observers and scholars of genocide — a number of them Israeli — have characterized Israel’s ongoing conduct in Gaza as perpetrating genocide. Public health experts estimate that, when taking account of deaths caused by malnutrition, disease and other causes tied to Israel’s control of supplies and movement in and out of Gaza, the true death toll in Gaza is in the hundreds of thousands. That the U.S. is backing this is unconscionable, unacceptable and a blow to the country’s and the Democratic Party’s alleged commitments to human freedom. And Harris' signals on the issue have not been promising for those pushing for change. Such a bleak situation is the kind of thing that can make some voters feel there’s no moral distinction between the parties and their presidential candidates.
And yet, as frightening as it is to contemplate, things could still get worse if Trump is elected president again. There are millions of people living in Gaza. And while President Joe Biden has sent billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and has declined to impose any serious consequences on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so far, Netanyahu knows that the Democrats probably have some limits that haven’t been reached yet. After all, Biden did at least temporarily suspend some arms transfers in one symbolic attempt to scold him and is floating the possibility of a new halt on transfers.
And while the U.S. has doggedly shielded Israel at the United Nations, it did allow the Security Council to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza this spring, infuriating Netanyahu and prompting Israeli officials to cancel a Washington visit.
Even though Biden’s pressure on Netanyahu has been wholly inadequate, his administration’s backroom negotiations with Netanyahu over letting more aid into Gaza has probably saved lives. Biden’s criticism of excess civilian deaths hasn’t prevented a bloodbath, but it has almost certainly reduced its size. Netanyahu knows that there probably is some threshold of all-out belligerence that could trigger the U.S. firehose of military aid to slow down dramatically.
By contrast, Trump hasn’t signaled that he views anything Israel has done as wrong or that he would put any limits on Netanyahu. When he was in office, he recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, signaling a break from long-held U.S. neutrality on recognizing Israel’s capital, and encouraged Netanyahu to pursue West Bank settlements. Trump isn’t committed to a two-state solution. There is nothing to suggest Trump would object to the extremists in the Israeli government who are even to the right of Netanyahu and openly calling for ethnic cleansing and annexing Gaza for Israel. There is nothing to suggest that Trump would not encourage the acceleration and expansion of a genocidal operation in Gaza and growing Israeli aggression across the region, including a sustained occupation of Lebanon and airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
While Biden’s policies have led us toward the possibility of a regional war in the Middle East, Trump would likely increase those odds dramatically. Many Democrats and foreign policy observers believe Netanyahu wants Trump to win and may even be taking steps to escalate war in the region to tip things in Trump’s favor. (Even Biden has declined to rule out that Netanyahu may be seeking such an outcome.)
These are grisly, nightmarish distinctions, but they matter. Palestinian civilian lives aren’t an abstract cause; they are real and precious. So are the lives of everyone else in the region who would be affected by unending conflict in and around Gaza or a major regional war. Reducing harm is not just an ethical consideration, but an ethical imperative. And working to ensure the election of Trump would violate that imperative.
The way to think about voting is not as a mode of personal expression or a moral endorsement, but as an action with material consequences. And a vote against Trump is not only an action that will reduce harm, but will also ensure a less hostile activist terrain for actually achieving the longer-term goal of ending unconditional U.S. support for Israel. There is a tremendous amount of political organizing and protesting that needs to be done in the U.S. to build a mandate for the U.S. government to change its policies in the region. That organizing is going to have a much higher chance of working against a Harris administration than a Trump one. Not only is Harris more likely to concede to protesters if they develop a big enough movement, but she’s less likely to repress them as harshly as Trump has reportedly promised to do.
Seeking to "punish" Democrats might make some people feel pure. But if it succeeds it's going to make the horrifying situation in Gaza even worse.