The Michigan Senate candidate, like so many on the left, makes a political fetish of ‘Palestine.’
D uring a “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall Wednesday, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed returned to his alma mater, the University of Michigan.
His homecoming featured expected critiques of the Trump administration and allusions to a Kamala Harris 2028 presidential run, but tensions rose when student Iman Dashti questioned El-Sayed about the violence in Iran.
“My cousin was hunted in the streets of Iran by the IRGC because her hijab wasn’t on right,” Dashti said, going on to describe other members of his family beaten by the regime. He asked the candidate to state “unequivocally” that he is against IRGC violence and political oppression.
El-Sayed responded that the United States has too often acted as “the world’s policeman” while affirming his support for democratic movements abroad. “I will always stand for and with democratic movements, always,” he said, but added that America was wrong “to go to war to topple the government of Iran. . . . It is the responsibility of the people of Iran to decide what their leadership should look like.”
Dashti pressed him further with a simple question: “You stand with us?”
El-Sayed again affirmed his support for freedom and democracy . . . so long as change came from the Iranian people.
This would be an unremarkable exercise in a politician avoiding an uncomfortable foreign-policy question were El-Sayed ordinarily so reticent about passing moral judgment on foreign governments. He is decidedly not.
El-Sayed has explicitly called Israel’s conduct in Gaza “genocide,” campaigned against American military assistance to Israel, and defended making Gaza an issue even when politically costly. He could have easily answered Dashti in one sentence: Yes, I condemn the IRGC’s repression, and no, I don’t believe America should impose regime change.
Quick and simple. And yet, El-Sayed wouldn’t say that.
El-Sayed’s hesitation around Iran points toward a broader distortion in American politics: Suffering now arrives pre-interpreted, neatly wrapped in red and green with a ready-made vocabulary of victims and oppressors, resistance and complicity. Other suffering must first pass through its thicket of qualifications before that same moral fervor can even begin to be applied.
That is what makes the peculiar place of “Palestine” in leftist politics worth examining. It increasingly functions not merely as a foreign-policy cause but as a totalizing political symbol. The issue stretches into every aspect of life: Does supporting Palestine mean having to go to a Macklemore concert? Does your instructor have a contract that honors adjunct professors’ struggle and its obvious equivalency to Palestine? Must Pride have a foreign policy? Even more pressingly, must cheese?
The peculiarity does not lie in caring about the conflict in Gaza, where there is abundant human suffering worthy of moral attention. But, ironically enough, there is fitting language within the Marxist tradition for what El-Sayed is exemplifying: fetishism. Considering that he keeps close ties to Marxists and socialists, El-Sayed should at least be vaguely familiar with the concept.
Marx was writing about commodity fetishism, but the structure of his argument is useful here. “Gaza” or “Palestine” becomes an ideological object detached from the realities of the people there: a political fetish. Particular Palestinians and their suffering matter insofar as they symbolize abstractions — colonialism, oppression, resistance — while suffering elsewhere that complicates that symbolic function is pushed aside.
An Iranian woman chased through the streets because her hijab doesn’t meet morality-police standards invites qualifications about intervention, sovereignty, and the proper limits of American foreign policy. A Palestinian killed by Israeli military action, by contrast, is immediately legible: victim, oppressor, injustice. The suffering of Palestinian women under the rump Hamas regime who are being sold for food or coerced into marrying the man who raped them is no less Palestinian, but it sits outside the black-and-white narrative that activists rigidly uphold.
Even Palestinians themselves can become strangely incidental to the Americanized politics of Palestine.
That is the trouble with any political fetish. Some Palestinian suffering readily acquires enormous political meaning when it suits Western leftist agendas. Other suffering, when not politically convenient, is discounted.
Dashti wasn’t asking El-Sayed to invade Iran. He was asking him to name an oppressor. El-Sayed has demonstrated throughout his campaign that he does understand the difference. Naming “oppressors” has been central to his politics. The question put to him last Wednesday exposed the way his moral vocabulary shrinks when the subject is Iran.