Over the next two days, those conventioneers would hear speeches from President Obama—trying desperately to paper over his disagreements with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu over whether the 1967 borders were a starting point for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations—and numerous top members of his foreign-policy team. Hundreds of congressmen would attend the AIPAC banquet Monday evening, where, as in past years, they would hear their names called out from the podium and be applauded. Netanyahu would speak there, a warm-up for his Tuesday address before a joint session of Congress, where he would be treated to a rapturous 29 standing ovations.
Against this juggernaut, Code Pink gathered a few hundred people in a small park near the convention center, a camp of placards and banners and a makeshift podium. I was part of this group, a smorgasbord that included twentysomethings and sixtysomethings, young Muslim women in headscarves and Jews in yarmulkes, among many others—including an impressively eloquent Israeli peace activist.
While the older AIPACers tried to signal with sneers and gestures that we were beyond the pale of civilized discourse, several of the younger conference-goers, perhaps accustomed to pro-Palestine agitation on American campuses, did stop to argue and engage. They were usually polite young men, but those I spoke with seemed intellectually imprisoned—armed with debating points but ignorant of Israel’s history and blind to the impact of settlement activity on the geography and economy of Palestinians in the West Bank.
But that is changing. Benjamin is Jewish, as is much of Code Pink’s leadership. They are part of a broader group of Jewish progressives, increasingly visible in pro-Palestinian advocacy, who refuse to exempt Israel from their wider commitment to social justice.