This weekend, Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Detroit, appeared at the “People’s Conference for Palestine,” where she called for the voters to punish Joe Biden at the ballot box. “It is disgraceful that the Biden administration and my colleagues in Congress continue to smear [anti-Israel demonstrators] for protesting to save lives no matter faith or ethnicity,” she exclaimed, “It is cowardly. But we’re not gonna forget in November, are we?”
Also this weekend, the Washington Post reported on plans that Donald Trump is sharing with donors to crush protests by deporting non-citizens participants. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” he promised. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
In short, Tlaib is so angry at Biden for denouncing antisemitic rhetoric at pro-Palestine protests that she wants to elect the man who is promising to deport them from the country. (And while she phrased it coyly, telling people to punish Biden’s “disgraceful” behavior in November can only describe one kind of recourse, because November is when people vote.)
There is something irrational, at least on the surface, about this horseshoe alliance. Many progressives are already pleading with the anti-Israel left to reconsider its determination to punish Biden, whose campaign it has spent months attempting to disrupt or target with harassment. And some protesters surely do hope merely to move Biden as far left as possible and will climb down eventually.
But the position Tlaib revealed this weekend does have a real logic to it that suggests she may not merely be bluffing.
Tlaib, like the groups organizing the protests, opposes any two-state solution to the conflict and uses the slogan “from the river to the sea” to denote her demand for liberation of the entire territory controlled by Israel. Her speech this weekend confirmed the militant thrust of her position. It contained not even a word of condemnation of terrorism, any mention of the hostages, or acknowledgment that Jewish Israelis possess any rights to live under any future settlement. She treated criticism of antisemitic rhetoric at the protests — the extent of which can be debated, but the existence of which cannot — as nothing more than a smear.
She understands the conflict as one of pure good versus pure evil, with the side of good having no obligations and incurring no guilt, and the side of evil having no rights.
Trump has the same belief structure but in reverse. While Tlaib lambasts Biden for continuing to support Israel’s right to self-defense, Trump and his allies attack him for attempting to constrain its exercise.
David Freidman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel and the leading candidate to hold the same position in a second term, told Marc Caputo that Trump sees the conflict as one of good versus evil. “It’s a far less nuanced approach,” he said. “Trump sees adversaries in two buckets: Are they people who are loyal to America or share American values? Or are they people who threaten America and hate American values? Not everyone fits cleanly in those buckets. But in the Middle East, they do.”
Likewise, Matthew Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, explained Trump’s position as a “blank check” to Benjamin Netanyahu. “He’s giving the Israelis a blank check to go in and do what they need to do to destroy Hamas and eliminate the threat in Gaza from Hamas. And what he’s also saying, which is actually true, he said ‘but do it quickly’ because time is not Israel’s ally right now.”
Netanyahu has always tried to maintain some balance between the demands of his right-wing coalition partners to maintain control over all occupied territory and the hope by American presidents to create a two-state solution. Netanyahu has putatively left the door cracked for peace while doing everything in his power to make it impossible: from allowing settlers in the West Bank to terrorize Palestinians with total impunity to shoveling money to Hamas in hopes of marginalizing any Palestinian figures who might want to negotiate peace.
Netanyahu is a one-stater. Trump is increasingly signaling his support for a one-state solution. Tlaib likewise supports a one-state solution. And while Trump and Tlaib obviously have opposing visions for how that single state should be governed, they share an incentive to discredit the forces of compromise that stand in their way and an unstated commitment to some violent future conflagration that will settle the struggle one way or another.
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