Would Yglesias have opposed genocide under Harris?
Democratic loyalists are happy to join the antiwar movement when their leaders aren't in power.
Once again, Matt Yglesias is struggling to explain how he ended up on the wrong side of a war that the left opposed from the start:
I’m just deeply reluctant to credit the critics with being “right” about this — they at every turn took concrete political actionts that made the worst case outcomes more rather than less likely.
In particular, Yglesias alleges that “the protest movement focused on helping Trump win the election on the theory that things couldn't get worse.” This is of course is a deeply cynical characterization of what happened on multiple levels. While it is clear that Harris lost a considerable amount of support over her refusal to take a moral stand against genocide, the polls make it clear that an overwhelming majority of Israel’s critics backed Harris, and that they in fact made up more than 2/3rds of her base. More to the point, it is just a lie to claim that protesters were “focused on helping Trump” when they in fact plainly wanted to vote for Harris. It was Harris who thwarted their aspirations by refusing to oppose the genocide.
The most interesting claim, however, is the one that most liberals — not just Yglesias — take for granted at this point: that things have “gotten worse” for Palestine with Trump in office than they would be otherwise.
The centerpiece of Yglesias’s argument on this point is that “Since the start of Donald Trump's second term, Israel has pivoted tactics in Gaza in a direction that is provoking mass famine.” He points readers to this chart:
But there are some inconsistencies with this argument. For one thing, as this chart clearly demonstrates, aid did not dwindle at “the start of Trump’s second term” — on the contrary, aid reached its highest levels during the Febuary ceasefire under Trump. Critics will object that this was simply the result of aid operations that were set in place before Trump in office, but that underscores a crucial point: much of what has happened since Trump took office was set in motion long before he was sworn in.
That brings us to the second and most important point touched on by this graphic: the role of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It is hard to argue at this point that the GHF hasn’t played a central role at this point in the starvation of Gaza’s inhabitants, serving as a private-sector fig-leaf over the Israeli military’s genocidal ambitions; its entire role, as The New York Times puts it, is to “bypass the United Nations, which Israeli official do not trust and have accused of anti-Israel bias.”
But as the NYT also notes, this was a plan that was hatched all the way back in 2023, and which consolidated during Biden’s last year in office. There is at this point no evidence of direct involvement in its development by figures associated with the Trump administration; it was spearheaded by Israeli government officials and US private-sector figures like Philip F. Reilly. Neither is there any evidence that the Biden administration ever opposed or planned to block this initiative.
Yglesias says that all of this has happened “since the start of Trump’s second term” in order to imply a unique relationship between Trump and the GHF that has not actually been established. The claim that Gazans would have been better off under Harris rests at this point largely on the blind faith that she would not have gone along with this strategy. This faith is particularly suspect since as recently as last year Harris was touting her reliance on privatized humanitarian aid to “enhance food security” elsewhere in the world.
Ironically, Yglesias himself gives us another reason to wonder whether the case for Harris on Gaza is all that strong. Now that Trump is in office Yglesias has taken to condemning Israel’s starvation campaign…but would he have done so under Harris? Given his apathy under Biden, his present condemnation not of the starvation campaign itself but of the “new tactics” deployed to ensure it, and his fixation not on Israel but on the supporters for Palestine he so reviles — given all of this, the evidence suggests that he would not have said a thing.
And these are in fact good reasons to suspect that very few of the elite Democrats who have suddenly voiced their opposition to Israel would have done so had Harris won. The campaign of starvation was already well underway before Trump was elected, the outcome we are seeing today is one that international observers were warning about well before Trump was elected, and yet this (still minimal) elite protest against it is one that only emerged after Trump was elected.
If you don’t believe me, consider Yglesias’s own record on the war in Iraq. Here are his own words on why he supported it in 2002:
Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously. I knew that Carl Levin & Nancy Pelosi were on the other side, but the bulk of the leading Democratic voices on national security and foreign policy issues were in favor of the war. So was Tony Blair. These were credible people whose views I took seriously.
Let us generously suppose that Harris, instead of going along with the GHF plan, would continue Biden’s 2024 policy. Would media elites and Democratic Senators still be speaking out against the marginally less hasty genocide in Gaza? Or would they still be waging war against the damned antiwar movement that so many of them clearly despise? Yglesias wants to take for granted that an aggressive genocide coupled with a growing antiwar consensus that could conceivably stop it is worse than a slow-rolling genocide with hardly any elite opposition at all. Perhaps he’s right, but the case would be a lot more clear-cut if guys like Yglesias ever opposed war when Democrats are in power.
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