After the parents of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin were given a gracious reception at the Democratic National Convention last night, demands that a Palestinian-American speaker be added to the program went into overdrive. The Uncommitted movement—which has been pushing voters to punish the Democrats for being too friendly toward Israel—is especially agitated, though it remains unclear why they think they should be rewarded by a party for trying to sabotage that party.
Chutzpah and hypocrisy aside, though, there’s a very clear reason such a speech hasn’t happened: The Democrats don’t cultivate relationships with Palestinians whom they trust to handle a prime-time convention speech.
This gets at one of the more harmful but least-understood facets of progressive identity politics: the concept of “authenticity.”
Take, for example, the most recent illustration of this. Kamala Harris designated one of her political advisers to be the campaign’s official liaison to Muslim and Arab voters, and another of her advisers to lead outreach to Jewish voters. In so doing, the campaign made a statement about who it sees as an authentic Muslim/Arab American and who it considers an authentic Jewish American.
The authentic Jewish American, to the Harris campaign, was someone who carefully toed the line of Democratic Party ideology and sided against Jewish Americans on topics such as Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem. The authentic Arab/Muslim American, to the Harris campaign, was someone who has defended the anti-Semitic group Students for Justice in Palestine in the legal and NGO worlds and who embodies the ethos of the “tentifada” campus protests.
Is a staunch defender of anti-Zionist, pro-Hamas street violence an accurate representation of most Arab/Muslim Americans? I am not Muslim nor am I Arab-American, so it’s not exactly my place to say. But I doubt it.
This is typical of what can be called the “Jewish exception” to identity politics. In the left-wing world of representative factionalism, “authentic” usually means “maximalist” if not, at the very least, “strident.” The only meek representative in progressive activism will be the Jewish one. This is why vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s relationship with a Hitler-promoting, Hamas-praising imam—whom Walz refers to as a “master teacher”—has barely caused a ripple in the campaign. At the same time, Walz’s status as the veep nominee is due in part to the fact that his Jewish rival for that position volunteered in Israel as a teenager, and this was deemed scandalous and probably disqualifying.
This mangling of the concept of authenticity explains the impasse between the Harris campaign and the Uncommitted organizers over a Palestinian convention speech.
Last week, a Gaza-born American named Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib posted on Twitter/X about his own experience with this kind of gatekeeping. For background: Alkhatib has lost family in the current war. His parents were raised in a refugee camp in Rafah. He has not shied away from piercing criticism of Israel’s prosecution of this war when he feels that criticism is justified. But neither has he ever let Hamas off the hook; on the contrary, Alkhatib has gained a platform during this war precisely because he is unsparing in his judgment of Hamas and its strategy of violence and terrorism.
Alkhatib supports the establishment of a Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state. His own family lost their home inside Israel in 1948, and yet he advocates for a Palestinian right of return to the Palestinian territories and a future Palestinian state. Alkhatib supports a ceasefire—but he does so honestly: He opposes the taking up of arms against Israel, though he supports some targeted sanctions from the international community.
In his own words, Alkhatib says this about the way his worldview is deemed inauthentic by progressives: “An Israeli peace/humanitarian activist friend of mine told me that within some ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ Israeli and American Jewish circles, I am considered ‘too controversial’ because I’m not ‘like other Palestinians.’ When I probed further to clarify, those individuals believed my views were inconsistent with other Palestinians’ beliefs, which meant that ‘I wasn’t a real Palestinian.’”
This, Alkhatib wrote, is racism dressed up as anti-racism. “One of the most damaging aspects of pro-Palestine solidarity from non-Palestinians is the constant projection onto our community by people who want to be ‘allies’ but, in so doing, reduce Palestinians to narrowly defined boxes and sets of views that are far too reductionist.”
Last night, as I watched the debate unfold on social media over whether there could be a Palestinian-American speaker at the DNC, all I kept thinking was: Isn’t the obvious choice to give a speaking slot to Alkhatib? Lo and behold, today Alkhatib posted that in fact he wanted to speak at the convention and “even offered to bring a hostage family and talk together about ending the war in Gaza, releasing the hostages, and confronting hate and extremism.”
He was rebuffed.
The Democrats have been arguing that excusing what they see as Israeli extremism is bad not just for Palestinians but for Israel itself. Yet they clearly don’t believe that excusing Hamas is bad for Palestinians. Gatekeeping factional authenticity makes every part of the coalition a more extreme version of itself. This week’s events are simply more proof of that fact.
