On August 18^th, an Israeli missile hit a café in Gaza murdering six, including a child, the day after the White House’s own envoy left Occupied Jerusalem without a deal concerning the “peace” plan that would further entrench Israel’s infinitely expanding land theft and Israel’s unbridled ability to murder Palestinians enjoying some respite on the beach. Since the “ceasefire” supposedly took hold last October, Israel has murdered more than 1200 Palestinians, about one child per day by UNICEF’s count, inside a “peace” agreement that has never once required Israel to actually stop killing but has demanded Palestinians die peacefully, without the indecency of defending themselves.

This hypocrisy extends beyond Gaza and none of it happens without the consent American politicians who have either accepted Palestinian death as the cost of maintaining their empire or never recognized Palestinians worthy of life at all. Shireen Abu Akleh was a Palestinian American journalist wearing a vest marked “PRESS” when Israeli Occupation Forces shot her in 2022, Amer Rabee was a 14 year old murdered by the same soldiers “defending” their right to land not theirs, and Safyollah Musallet was a 20 year old who was beaten to death by settlers. Nine Palestinians have been murdered in the West Bank in the last few years and not one case has produced an arrest, a charge, or so much as a condemnation by the American government. The world has come to learn America is okay with their own being murdered so long as it’s an Israeli settler holding the gun.

This is what feigned support costs, paid out in café’s bombed, incubators without fuel, and children murdered while Washington spends its energy on whether the word genocide offends anyone.

Only July 15^th, 103 House Democrats, nearly half of the caucus, voted to strip Israel of the $3.3 billion it receives every year in Foreign Military Financing, a margin so tight that Hakeem Jeffries sent his caucus a letter the day before asking them not to embarrass him – 98 democrats voted with 215 Republicans to keep the money moving. Of course, the amendment failed since it needed a Senate that was never going to take it up and a president who has made unconditional funding of Israeli occupation and domination important to his brand. But, even so, a vote might be one of the only places left where we can still see what a person actually believes in.

Seventy one percent of likely Democratic primary voters nationally now say they want their party’s next presidential nominee to support cutting off weapons to Israel. That number has made Democrats realize that supporting genociders is becoming costly to their campaigns, that the common person who has watched livestreamed Gaza, who have heard Ben-Gvir demanding thirty or forty Palestinian deaths each night, who have seen settlers trying to burn Palestinians alive, or who have learned about state built on Indigenous dispossession and sustained by violent occupation, is no longer willing to make Palestine a secondary issue to their morals or whom they choose to represent them. Kamala Harris now regrets that she did not pressure the Biden administration to be firmer with Netanyahu, and Matthew Miller now admits Israel “without a doubt” committed war crimes, but dead Palestinians cannot feast on regrets that became politically convenient only after the killing was done.

So, as the midterms approach, we should not mistake election-season sympathy for a human-rights awakening, but ask every would-be beacon of justice whether their solidarity extends to sanctioning and isolating the Israeli state itself and affirming that Palestinians possess the same right to defend themselves that America has spent decades reserving for their occupier.

In June 2026, Brad Lander beat incumbent Dan Goldman, a man who defended Israel’s conduct without qualification. Brad Lander, who rode on the heels of Mamdani, joined national consciousness for supposedly being the pro-Palestine choice of the two. But still, Lander identifies as a “liberal Zionist”; his criticism only goes so far as to get him elected as a seemingly “good guy” but one who in actuality still supports a state that openly makes clear their racial hierarchy, Apartheid, and permanent right to occupy a people. Zohran Mamdani, who similarly built his campaign on the backs of Palestinians, has similarly condemned the Palestinian resistance.

Abdul El-Sayed took the Democratic nomination for a Senate seat in Michigan away from a four term incumbent after AIPAC and its allies spent somewhere close to sixty million dollars trying to make sure he didn’t, in what became the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in American history. In New Jersey, a surgeon named Adam Hamawy, who once refused to leave Gaza until the last member of his own medical team could leave beside him, won a twelve person primary running on an end to the arms sales that produced the wounds he had just finished treating. Two years ago neither result would have been offered as a serious prediction. Now it is what happened twice in one summer, months apart, in two different states, and some part of that should feel, even briefly, like vindication, that after three years of watching Palestinians get called terrorists for the crime of dying, the world is finally starting to wake up. But even El-Sayed, once compared Palestinian resistance to a “bacteria” and “Israel’s policies” (not the Israeli state) an “immunodeficiency”. All this to say, that Palestinians are the first to be throne under scarified at the alter of political respectability, including by the very candidates whose victories were made possibly by our grief.

Ro Khanna spent years insisting Israel’s Iron Dome deserved American funding. It took ninety minutes on a blocked road outside a demolished school, armed settlers standing over him while Israeli soldiers arrived and did nothing, before he arrived at a position Palestinians have held for longer than he has been alive. Even then, standing before the Democratic National Committee that same month and declaring zero aid to Israel, he still led with the disclaimer, the promise that Hamas’s attack must be condemned unequivocally, offered before a single sentence got spent on the eighty years that came before it and without reaffirming the Palestinian’s right to resist.

That reflex, condemning the resistance in the very breath that condemns the siege, as though a besieged people fighting for their own survival and the siege killing them belong in the same moral sentence, is the whole test, and almost none of the newly arrived can pass it. A solidarity that requires us to suffer quietly enough to be worth mourning, without ever being permitted to fight back loudly enough to be worth defending, was never a solidarity with our freedom. It was a solidarity with our stillness, offered on condition, extended only as far as our willingness to remain the kind of victim that does not implicate the person doing the mourning, and it evaporates the instant we stop performing that particular helplessness. If your version of standing with Palestine cannot also stand with our right to resist the conditions killing us, then what you offer is only an audience to Palestinian death.

Underneath even the sincere half of this shift sits a second, quieter dishonesty, the insistence that the crisis belongs to Netanyahu, to Ben Gvir, or to Smotrich, as though the colonial mind predates none of them and will not simply outlive all three. Anyone still making that argument in year three of a livestreamed genocide is also invested in the continued subjugation of the Palestinians. The ignore the Nakba, they ignore statements by the earliest Prime Ministers that Palestinians are not a people at all, they ignore the decades of continuous land theft and violence, and they ignore a settler population that attacks and displaces Palestinians by the day. Was Tel Aviv not a settlement built on bones? Do they not think the settlements built over the next Palestinian village will not later serve as a testament to their willing blindness to Israeli brutality? Netanyahu did not invent the idea that our land needed to become someone else’s through whatever the moment required. He inherited it fully built, ran it with more discipline than most of his predecessors, and will be replaced by someone who runs it just as competently. Someone should tell these facts to Bernie Sanders and AOC.

El-Sayed should still win in November, and so should every democrat willing to confront AIPAC and the colonial regime. However, Palestinians have already buried too many people beneath the distinction between a good settler and the ones dropping bombs, to be thankful for the crumbs of solidarity thrown our way as if we are not the ones these politicians owe their platforms too. We have watched politicians discover our humanity one election at a time, always late enough to escape responsibility for what they said or permitted when it mattered. The measure of this political turn will be whether anyone is finally willing to admit that Palestinians were never put on this earth to make our colonizers look merciful for putting our existence to a vote.

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