For Democrats, spurning student protestors is risky and wrong | Opinion

Earlier this month at the Florida Democratic Party’s Leadership Blue fundraiser, the keynote delivered by Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., was interrupted by a young protester shouting “Free Palestine” and accusing those assembled of having “blood on your hands” given the party’s continued support for the Israeli assault on Gaza, which has so far killed upward of 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

Video of the event picks up prominent Florida Democrats booing, staring expressionless, and then joining in a chant of “four more years,” apparently led by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, before the protester, a Palestinian-American activist, was hustled out of the hall and off to jail for the night.

The scene captures local and national Democrats’ risky strategy in a nutshell. In response to a growing youth rebellion against an unpopular U.S.-supported war, the cry for Palestinian freedom is met with a panicked call for “four more years” backed by police muscle.

The problem is that neither shouting down nor silencing will make the situation in Gaza less monstrously inhumane nor the knowledge of its contours any more acceptable to those who have taken the time to learn the truth.

Both the International Criminal Court and a U.S. federal court have found that Israel’s conduct of the war may amount to genocide. The ICC prosecutor is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leaders and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Growing numbers of experts are coming to the same conclusion as the courts — as are, according to polls, the majority of Democratic voters.

Yet, if the events in Orlando, and the White House’s genocide denial, are any guide, Democratic strategists are not listening.

Rather, they have constructed a new “small-tent,” undemocratic Democratic Party that has determined that its best prospects lie neither with the majority of its members, 75% of whom disagree with Israel’s conduct of the war on Gaza according to a recent Gallup poll, nor with previously reliable Democratic voters who are, like the protester who interrupted Fetterman, young, Muslim and Arab — or who are, like me, middle-aged, Jewish and progressive.

This choice is dangerous morally, and, as recent polling shows, may well be dangerous electorally, because it assumes that the repression and inhumanity that have made the Republican Party historically repellant to liberal voters will be more popular when Democrats do it.

Such was the Democratic Party on display in Orlando. Fetterman has lost a great deal of his national youth and progressive support by positioning himself to the right of President Joe Biden on the Gaza war and hemorrhaging staff appalled by his “utter lack of any empathy for the Palestinians being slaughtered,” making his marquis presence at Leadership Blue a very intentional affront to the majority of Democrats critical of the war.

Now, we can all see what’s going on here. With the memory of the chaotic 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention setting a kind of worst-case scenario for the upcoming Chicago Democratic Convention in 2024, the party has decided that it must contain the spectacle of dissent, lest they pave the way for a latter-day Nixon who will, like Nixon, claim to be the candidate of the “non shouters, the non demonstrators.”

But what they have done is to pitch Biden not as the better leader, but as a better Nixon than the more obviously Nixonian Trump. By doing so, the Democrats are drawing precisely the wrong lesson from ‘68 and choosing to gamble with both Palestinian lives and American democracy.

A second Trump presidency presents a clear danger to American democracy. He has already shown a dangerous disregard for bedrock concepts like free elections and the rule of law. He has made his authoritarian intentions clear.

A half-century of hindsight should give us sufficient perspective to recognize the way out of this dilemma. The problem in 1968 was an unjust and unwinnable war, not the people who righteously objected to it. With a ceasefire in Gaza, there will be no war to protest. The way to stop Trump is to end this war.

Martha Schoolman is an academic and a volunteer member of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party and Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida. She lives in Coral Gables.