The debate inside the Democratic Party over Israel has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 30. In 2024, the party platform boasted that Joe Biden had given the Jewish state $14 billion in military aid. These days, among the Democrats jockeying for the 2028 presidential nomination, the prospect of eliminating all military aid appears likely to be a centrist position. Progressives will probably call for stopping most arms sales as well.
As dizzying as this transformation has been, something essential is still missing. While Democrats are rethinking their approach to Israel, they haven’t yet rethought their approach to the Palestinians.
As the party looks toward the midterms and beyond, Democrats should do more than pledge to stop subsidizing Israel’s crimes. They must also stop supporting Palestinian authoritarianism — whether practiced by Hamas or by Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah — and champion the right of Palestinians to choose their own leaders.
Today, unfortunately, top Democrats often ignore that right. In a speech at Tel Aviv University this summer endorsing American pressure to create a Palestinian state, the likely presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel advised Arab countries to be “the adult in the room with the Palestinian leadership” and “stand up a governing authority capable of accepting the historic Jewish connection to this land.” He noted that “corrupt Palestinian leadership has never lived up to the Palestinian people’s legitimate aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination” but said nothing about the need for Palestinian people to choose their own leaders.
This absence made Mr. Emanuel’s advice both patronizing and detached from reality. No Palestinian leader can legitimately commit his people to a vision for peace — be it two states, one state with equality for all or something in between — absent a mandate from Palestinians themselves.
That mandate requires allowing Palestinians to vote. Under pressure from the European Union and the United States, Mr. Abbas has promised to hold elections for the Palestinian Authority’s Parliament in November, and for its presidency early next year. Unless Washington commits to fully supporting the effort, however, Israel may throw up roadblocks, which Mr. Abbas could use as an excuse to cancel the vote.
American presidents of both parties have been enabling Mr. Abbas’s dictatorial tendencies for the past 20 years. In 2006, the last time Palestinians held elections for the Parliament of the Palestinian Authority, which encompasses the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Hamas won a majority of the seats. The Bush administration responded by demanding that Hamas endorse a series of conditions set by international interlocutors and accepted by its rivals in Fatah as part of the Oslo Accords — which included forswearing violence and recognizing Israel.
During negotiations brokered by Saudi Arabia, Hamas still refused to recognize Israel but agreed to “respect” those commitments. That wasn’t enough for Washington. So, the United States reportedly tried to overturn the election results by force. It developed a plan that called for allies in the region to funnel weapons to Fatah fighters in the hopes that they would oust Hamas from its stronghold in Gaza. (The Bush administration denied this). The plan backfired and the Islamist group seized control of the Strip.
Mr. Abbas then declared a state of emergency. This allowed him to suspend Parliament, eventually seize control of the judiciary and rule as an autocrat. He’s been doing so ever since, and has transformed not only the Authority, but also the Palestine Liberation Organization — which historically included all Palestinian parties — into his personal fief.
This authoritarianism, argues Omar H. Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, has left Palestinians “saddled with a weak yet highly repressive leadership, buoyed by external support” but “unresponsive to its constituents.” Mr. Abbas’s despotic rule has clearly proved convenient for the United States and Israel, since a democratically elected Palestinian leader would be less likely to cooperate with the Israeli military while Palestinian territory remains occupied. When Mr. Abbas flirted with holding elections in 2021, the Biden administration did not publicly endorse the idea. A State Department spokesman at the time said the decision to hold elections was a “matter for the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian leadership to determine,” thus implying that elections were a prerogative of Mr. Abbas. Mr. Abbas claimed that Israel was stonewalling efforts to allow Palestinians to cast ballots in East Jerusalem and used that as a justification to cancel the vote.
Democrats must learn from Mr. Biden’s mistake and support Palestinian elections now. But presidential elections will be hollow if the candidate most likely to win them remains in jail. According to a poll conducted in August by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Mr. Abbas’s popularity is dwarfed by that of Marwan Barghouti, a longtime Fatah activist who, if elections were held freely, would receive more than twice as many votes as the current leader of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya, and almost four times as many as Mr. Abbas.
Mr. Barghouti has been in prison for more than two decades. As a Fatah leader in the West Bank, he came to be seen by many Israelis as a key planner of the second intifada, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis. He was indicted in 2002 on charges of masterminding attacks that killed 26 people; he was ultimately convicted in the murder of five and for membership in a terrorist organization. Mr. Barghouti denied the legitimacy of the proceedings, and the ruling was criticized for containing “numerous breaches of international law” by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the global organization of national parliaments.
The same year he went to prison, Mr. Barghouti said that while he had “the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom,” he has also sought “peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine.” His son, Arab Barghouti, told A.F.P. in April that despite being repeatedly tortured by his Israeli captors, his father still supports a Palestinian and Israeli state living alongside each other in peace.
Democrats should make Mr. Barghouti’s release a central part of their agenda in the run-up to 2028. They should also go further and call for allowing Palestinians to choose who runs in their elections, even though that probably means letting Hamas compete, either on its own or as part of a broader coalition. That prospect would outrage Israel’s supporters, and prove unpopular among many Americans. But no Palestinian election can be credible if the United States and other outside powers dictate who can take part. And the Fatah dominated P.L.O. can never regain its position as the representative of all Palestinian people if Hamas — one of the two largest Palestinian parties — remains outside of it.
This call will not be easy for many Democrats to make. Hamas has committed horrifying atrocities against Israeli civilians, has brutally repressed dissent in Gaza and has not recognized Israel. Democrats should not excuse Hamas’s crimes. But they should, finally, treat Israelis and Palestinians the same way. In both societies, political leaders have overseen grave violations of human rights and rejected the concept of two states. America’s principle should be this: The United States will not tell Israelis or Palestinians how to vote. And it will impose sanctions on anyone, Israeli or Palestinian, who violates international law.
Decades ago, the Palestinian American critic and activist Edward Said wrote an essay titled “Permission to Narrate” about the challenges Palestinians faced in being heard. Democrats need to support Palestinians’ right to do so where it matters most: at the ballot box.
Peter Beinart, a contributing Opinion writer, is a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York and an editor at large at Jewish Currents. He writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. His latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Democrats’ Policy on Palestine Is Detached From Reality appeared first on New York Times.
