Rashida Tlaib is going viral at least once a day.
Whether it’s a photograph of the the Michigan Representative confronting President Joe Biden on an airport tarmac moments after he arrived in Detroit, or a video snippet of her choking up on the House floor as she asks her colleagues to recognize Palestinian humanity, Tlaib is the face of an emerging faction of progressive Congressmembers willing to challenge Washington’s decades-long status quo of unconditional support for Israel.
“Palestinians in the United States generally have been among the first to stand with Indigenous activists at pipelines and to stand up against police violence in Ferguson and Minneapolis.”
Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, frequently speaks of her sitty, her maternal grandmother who lives in the Occupied West Bank, weaving personal anecdotes together with damning statistics that illustrate the devastating reality of life under Israeli occupation.
When #SaveSheikhJarrah began trending across social media earlier this month, Tlaib created a petition, which urges U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to uphold international law by demanding an end to Israel’s evictions of Palestinians in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and elsewhere. The petition, which has garnered nearly 70,000 signatures, also calls on the U.S. to pressure Israel to halt demolitions of Palestinian homes and the theft of Palestinian land in the Occupied West Bank.
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Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib
Tlaib and the five other members of “The Squad,” as well as a handful of other Democrats in both the House and the Senate, have harshly criticized Israel’s use of force in Gaza and urged the Biden Administration to pressure Israel to end its ongoing operation, which has so far killed 230 Palestinians.
On May 12, twenty-five U.S. Representatives signed a letter to Blinken, demanding that diplomatic pressure be exerted to keep Israel from evicting the families in Sheikh Jarrah. Additionally, legislation introduced by Minnesota Representative Betty McCollum in June would prohibit Israel from using U.S. taxpayer dollars to carry out several specific human rights violations in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. These issues have achieved newfound traction in the national discourse occurring around the Israeli occupation.
While the shift in popular opinion on Israel may seem sudden, this movement has been gaining momentum for years, according to Sandra Tamari, the executive director of the Washington-based Adalah Justice Project.
“We can’t just sit here and talk about ceasefires. We need to deal with the real problem and not just the symptoms. We need to talk about the occupation.”
“What we are seeing is the result of years and years of grassroots advocacy and a growing Palestine movement that has developed relationships—not only with staffers and members of Congress, but by building wide support across communities in the United States,” Tamari tells The Progressive. “There’s no progressive or leftist coalition organizing in any city that doesn’t include Palestinian liberation on its agenda.”
Tamari describes Adalah as a Palestinian-led organization that is working to “change the conversation and place Palestine on the progressive agenda using a collective liberation framework,” both at the local and national levels.
“Palestinians in the United States generally have been among the first to stand with Indigenous activists at pipelines and to stand up against police violence in Ferguson and Minneapolis,” Tamari says. “These aren’t just photo-ops. It’s a deep feeling of our liberation being connected. We fight for all of us.”
This inter-movement solidarity has manifested as more members of Congress publicly advocate for Palestinian human rights. In the same House floor session at which Tlaib spoke, Missouri Representative Cori Bush recalled that when she organized against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, a Palestinian immigrant was one of the most committed activists with whom she had worked. She noted that the activist, Bassem, often drew from his own childhood experiences in East Jerusalem to advise others on how to deal with tear gas and rubber bullets.
“What the conversation about police violence has taught us is that you can’t reform a system of violence; you can’t dialogue away a system of violence,” Tamari says. “People are understanding more and more that there’s an asymmetry between Palestinians and Israelis. There is a system of violence that is structural and is the root cause of what is happening. It’s many things that have come together to help give people a deeper understanding.”
Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel/Palestine with the International Crisis Group, credits the shift among some in Washington, D.C., to the success of advocacy organizations and progressive politicians in reframing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a human rights issue above all else.
“The go-to talking point in Washington has always been, ‘Oh, if Israel is doing something harmful against Palestinians, it hurts its ability to be Jewish and democratic. It prevents the two-state solution,’ ” Zonszein says. “The Trump years exposed how U.S. foreign policy has been complicit in a lot of destructive Israeli policies. Now, this specific spike in violence and Israeli air strikes on Gaza are an opportunity for Congress members who had already been working on this issue to come out full throttle.”
The U.S.-based American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) is one of the advocacy organizations that can be credited with pushing the discourse surrounding Israel and Palestine further to the left. In addition to organizing Americans to lobby their representatives on Capitol Hill and at local levels, AMP organizes national campaigns and supports educational initiatives across the United States.
Taher Herzallah, AMP’s Director of Outreach and Grassroots Organizing, says that when he first moved to Washington, D.C., at the end of Barack Obama’s second term, the stances that some members of Congress are taking now would’ve been “unthinkable.”
“The dynamics and discourse have changed dramatically over the last five years,” Herzallah says. “The Biden Administration and any administration after his will need to realize that the voter base and the donor base has shifted on this issue, and they will need to catch up to it.”
For U.S. policy regarding Israel to change, Herzallah says the discourse still needs to be pushed forward.
“Now is the time to take advantage of the momentum that we have to build better alliances, to organize our community and to force policy change,” Herzallah says. “We can’t just sit here and talk about ceasefires. We need to deal with the real problem and not just the symptoms. We need to talk about the occupation. We need to talk about the siege on Gaza. We need to talk about Israel’s violation of Muslim sacred spaces and its erasure of Palestinian identity and heritage. These are things that need to be addressed if we are going to provide justice for people in the region.”
As Palestinian rights becomes a more normalized part of leftwing priorities, Tamari encourages citizens to remind their Representatives and Senators that the funds earmarked for aid to Israel can be redirected to fund progressive domestic initiatives, such as Medicare for All or student loan forgiveness.
“We have everything we need, and we have learned from Biden’s bold moves in his first few months that it’s possible to redirect funds,” Tamari says. “We need to start by backing up our values with our budget priorities and go from there. What we see is that if you give a values statement to a member of Congress and insist that they be consistent with their values, not only on domestic issues but across borders, then we can make headway.”