In Washington state’s 6th Congressional District, the mostly unexciting race to succeed retiring centrist Democratic Rep. Derek Kilmer has recently acquired a little spice. The two candidates in the Democratic primary–to be held on August 6th–are Hillary Franz, the state Commissioner of Public Lands, and state Senator Emily Randall. Both candidates have fallen over themselves to express devotion to the state of Israel. However Senator Randall’s path to her current pro-Israel position has featured controversy. 

Last month, Jewish Insider (JI) reported that Anna Carlson-Ziegler–then Randall’s campaign manager–“has a history of liking extreme anti-Israel posts on Instagram,” including posts which allegedly downplayed or denied the atrocities of October 7th and praised Hamas. 

Upon being approached by JI, Randall reported that she had had no idea that Carlson-Ziegler was aligned with such disturbing views, After privately confirming with Carlson-Ziegler that she had indeed “liked” the posts, Randall fired the campaign manager. 

JI also noted that Randall had connections to other figures possessing harsh sentiments about Israel, for example, Yasmin Trudeau, Randall’s fellow Democratic state senator. Trudeau, whose endorsement of Randall once appeared prominently on the latter’s campaign website, “has a history of posting inflammatory rhetoric about Israel” on social media, according to JI. 

In response to the JI reporting, Randall scrambled to prove her pro-Israel bonafides, frantically distancing herself from her former campaign manager and any other person in her political orbit who might have been harshly critical of Israel in the past. The Stranger, the leading Seattle alternative media publication, noted that some observers believed Randall did so to forestall an intervention into the race against her on the part of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful zionist lobbying organization. After all, last month, AIPAC’s heavy financial intervention in a New York Democratic congressional primary played a crucial role in unseating Jamal Bowman, member of The Squad and critic of Israel. The Stranger noted the possibility that someone in Franz’s campaign monitored Carlson-Ziegler’s pro-Palestinian Instagram activity and sent screenshots to JI, hoping the publicity would induce full-throttle AIPAC support for Franz. Randall was already substantially behind Franz in fundraising; an AIPAC intervention on Franz’s behalf might have dealt her a knockout blow. 

So, accordingly, in being interviewed by JI, Randall defended Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza since October 7th. She offered familiar cliches: “Israel has exercised its lawful right to defend itself against terrorist attacks.” Hamas “uses [Palestinian] civilians as human shields.” She even alluded to biblical history as she stressed a need for a “fundamental understanding that Israel existed before the modern state of Israel was founded and has the fundamental right to exist.” As an LGBTQ+ person, she offered a contribution to Israel’s pinkwashing: “I feel a great connection to Israel. Israel is the only country in the region where I could live openly with my wife.” She said she generally supported no restrictions on US aid to Israel “as long as the Israeli government acts in compliance with international law.”–clearly her position was that Israel has not violated international law in Gaza in any major way. She allowed that she shared the concerns of the Biden administration about some of Netanyahu’s actions since October 7th. However, she stressed her general unbreakable commitment to strengthening the US-Israel bond so the two could work together to “end Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons” while the Biden’ administration works “towards a two-state solution” to finally settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

Meanwhile, for her part, Franz criticized the Biden administration for publicly indicating displeasure with Israel by temporarily halting the transfer of 2000-pound bombs to its military. Franz told JI: 

“I believe that public fissures in the US-Israel relationship embolden Hamas and Hezbollah, which ultimately only leads to more death and destruction….The special relationship between the United States and Israel is rooted in common values of democracy and equality and has stood for decades against threats to those values…. We need to support the moral urgency of destroying Hamas while also pushing for the legal and moral obligation to feed and protect the civilians of Gaza.” 

Reality Check

It is depressing to see Franz and Randall pander to Israel–but completely unsurprising. To have any chance of further advancement at the national level, careerist politicians like Franz and Randall must demonstrate to establishment leaders of their party–as well as certain major party donors–that they are supportive of the US empire. A key pillar of that empire is US support for Israel. 

It is not surprising but it is still disgusting, an insult to the intelligence and basic human decency. Nowhere in the rhetoric of Franz and Randall is there any recognition of Israel’s longstanding oppression of Palestinian human rights and legitimate national aspirations.  Nowhere in their rhetoric is recognition of the obvious: Israel–with US backing–is conducting a literal genocide in the Gaza Strip, spreading famine and death in its wake. Israel is deliberately killing civilians in Gaza and has done so in past conflicts. Contrary to Randall’s nonsense, there has never been any substantial evidence that Hamas has used Palestinians as human shields in the current genocidal war or in previous conflicts. According to the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, as many as 186,000 Palestinians may have died as a result of Israel’s genocidal campaign since October 7th–well above the official total of nearly 40,00 civilian deaths calculated by the “Hamas run” Gaza health ministry. On June 24, the charity Save the Children estimated that 20,000 Gazan children were “lost, disappeared, detained, buried under the rubble or in mass graves.” 

Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, implementing what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has just ruled is systematic racial and ethnic discrimination against Palestinians–consistent with the previous findings of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B’tselem that Israeli rule in the occupied territories constitutes apartheid. The ICJ–the top judicial body of the United Nations–also ruled that all Jewish settlements in the occupied territories are illegal under international law, constituting violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. 

Last month, around the time Randall was desperately trying to burnish her pro-Israel credentials, the New York Times reported on some of the hideous conditions, including torture, at Israel’s Sde Teiman prison where hundreds of Gazans are detained:  

“Mr. al-Hamlawi … .said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with ‘unbearable pain.’

A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators ‘made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,’ and also said that another detainee ‘died after they put the electric stick up’ his anus.

Mr. al-Hamlawi recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that, after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days. Mr. al-Hamlawi said he, too, had been forced to wear nothing but a diaper, to stop him from soiling the floor.”

Israel: A Settler Colonial Society 

While Hilary Franz’s words about the US and Israel sharing “the common values of democracy and equality” are mostly silly, there is some truth to them. Both societies have considerable achievements to their credit. For example, both have made visible strides in better treatment of gay and lesbian persons. As Randall noted, lesbian relationships of the sort she holds with her wife are allowed to exist openly in Israel. However both societies still have a long way to go in achieving full LGTBQ+ equality. For example in Israel, same-sex marriage certifications are still outlawed domestically–although certificates obtained abroad are recognized. 

However, Franz’s and Randall’s abjectly adulatory stance toward Israel avoids mentioning key unpleasant facts about the country: like the United States, Israel is a settler-colonialist society, where ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples and racist oppression is deeply rooted in the country’s DNA. In Israel there has been an extremely limited reckoning with the country’s settler-colonialist legacy: in the late 20th century a group of Israeli Jewish historians known as the “new historians” began pouring through Israeli government archives and found direct evidence that Israel’s founding in 1948 was based on the deliberate ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.The work of the new historians has had no visible impact on lessening the chauvinism and racism of the significant mass of Israeli Jews. Some of the historians–notably Shlomo Sand, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe–have shown great courage in opposing the ongoing human rights violations of the Israeli government. On the other hand, Benny Morris, perhaps the most famous of the new historians, famously justified–after the Second Intifada was launched in 2000–the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians because he believed the latter possessed a barbaric culture.  He claimed that Israel offered Palestinians a generous peace deal at Camp David in 2000 but was rejected because Palestinians preferred to launch the Second Intifada in order to exterminate Jews. In reality, as Noam Chomsky wrote in 2002, the 2000 Camp David offer was anything but generous. The Oslo peace process which preceded the Camp David offer was intended to solidify what former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami called the “neocolonialist basis” of the relationship of Palestinians to Israel. Ben Ami wrote that Israel desired to place Palestinians in a state of subaltern status “forever.” .

Chomsky’s classic 1983 work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Fateful Triangle, also contained useful information to counter Franz’s blather about Israel’s longstanding commitment to the “values of democracy and equality.” The serious human rights abuses currently occurring at Israel’s Sde Teiman prison have plenty of precedent. Chomsky noted that in the early 1980s leading members of the opposition Labor Party presented a report to Likud Party Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The report detailed abuses of Palestinians by Israeli Border Police in the West Bank village of Halhul: 

“….Border Guards broke into houses, beating people with shouts and curses. During the many hours that hundreds of people were kept in the mosque square they were ordered to urinate and excrete on one another and also to sing [Israel’s national anthem] and to call out ‘Long Live the state of Israel.’ Several times people were beaten and ordered to crawl on the ground. Some were even ordered to lick the earth.” 

Chomsky elaborated further about the report’s findings on conditions among West Bank Palestinians: “the report continues, detailing how prisoners are beaten, tortured and humiliated, how [Jewish] settlers are permitted into the prisons to take part in the beating of prisoners, how the settlers brutalize the local inhabitants with impunity, even in the case of a settler who killed an Arab, whose identity is known, but who is not arrested.” 

Chomsky noted that Israel under the “moderate” Labor Party governments which ruled Israel during its first three decades of existence (1948-77) regularly committed war crimes as it deliberately bombed civilians in Palestinian refugee camps and other population centers in neighboring Arab countries. Chomsky quoted Abba Eban, longtime Labor Party foreign minister, as admitting that Israel desired to terrorize Palestinian and other Arab civilians into pressuring Palestinian and Arab government leaders into ceasing support for Palestinian guerillas and other manifestations of Palestinian nationalism. 

In using Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle to help counter the angelic picture of Israel painted by the likes of Franz and Randall, I also thought of a recent statement by Bernie Sanders that “the Israel of today is not the Israel of Golda Meir….it is a right-wing country, increasingly becoming a religious fundamentalist country.” In reality, the Israeli government of today–with its open embrace of Jewish supremacist settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing–has precedent in the supposedly progressive premiership of Golda Meir (1969-74). For example, in Fateful Triangle, Chomsky noted that, in January 1972, IDF units under the command of future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drove thousands of Arab farmers and bedouins from their homes so multiple Jewish kibbutzim, villages and the major Jewish city of Yamit could be built in the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had seized from Egypt in 1967. The Fourth Geneva Convention was heavily violated as Sharon’s forces systematically destroyed Arab homes, crops and water wells.The ethnic cleansing and the building of Yamit was cited as a partial justification by Egypt for joining with Syria to launch their October 1973 war upon Israel

The Way Forward

It appears little has come of noises made last month by multiple Washington state Democratic caucuses and local party organizations about possibly withdrawing their endorsement of Randall’s congressional candidacy in light of her abject pro-Israel pandering. With a handful of exceptions, national Democratic politicians ((like their Republican counterparts) are fully committed to backing Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians. From Democrats you are infinitely more likely to see such abominations as Washington state Democratic congressman Adam Smith’s denunciation of pro-Palestinian protestors as “left-wing fascists”–or former Obama administration official Van Jones’s comparison of the Palestinian keffiyeh to the Confederate flag–than you are to see something like the courageous (but relatively solitary) pro-Palestinian stance of Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. 

On the positive side, Randall’s state senate colleague Yasmin Trudeau has withdrawn her endorsement of Randall’s candidacy, stating that the latter’s public pro-Israel pandering is inconsistent with previous private conversations she had with her. Also withdrawing her endorsement of Randall is Jamika Scott, who was elected to the Tacoma City Council last fall with the endorsement of the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Additionally, delegates to the Washington state Democratic convention last month endorsed resolutions calling for a pause in US aid to Israel until the achievement of a ceasefire in Gaza and the reversal of the Biden administration’s cutoff in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main provider of humanitarian assistance for Gaza’s residents. As a result of some voters in Washington’s presidential primary on March 12th selecting the “uncommitted” option in protest of Joe Biden’s support of Israel, Washington state will send 2 “uncommitted” delegates (out of 94 total) to the Democratic National Convention.

The criticism of Israel coming from dissident figures and the grassroots within the Washington state Democratic Party has been relatively below the radar. However, it exists and hopefully will one day grow around the nation to place unbearable pressure on our political leaders to cease US support for Israeli apartheid. Grassroots pressure is the only hope. Our political leaders are completely hopeless as far as deciding by themselves to do the right thing on Palestine (and many other issues).