by Cole Harrison
As Israel’s genocide in Gaza approaches the two year mark, the Democratic State Committee offered a draft platform that was silent on the genocide and on all foreign policy and peace issues.
Delegates entering the Democratic State Convention in Springfield Sept. 13 were met with leafleters organized by MAPA calling on the state party to take concrete steps to end US complicity and on Congress to Block the Bombs to Israel. The Block the Bombs Act, offered by Rep. Deiia Ramirez with 47 House cosponsors including Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Jim McGovern, would block seven categories of weapons the U.S. is currently shipping to Israel and which it uses to commit human rights violations in Gaza. Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren have voted several times to block individual arms shipments to Israel. Markey said in his speech in Springfield, “We should not be sending thousand pound bombs and other offensive weapons that are being used to decimate innocent Gazans. Netanyahu is using famine and starvation as a weapon of war”, a line that got the biggest applause of the day.
Then, when the convention finally got down to business at about 1:30pm, progressives defeated (for now) a move to change the conventions from every year to every two years, which would have reduced the opportunity for grassroots control over the party, and then defeated the leadership’s procedural tricks as it tried to substitute a new unpopular platform text for the 2021 version of the platform. Party chair Steve Kerrigan ruled the substitution amendment out of order, but the floor erupted with people shouting and protesting. After a half hour of confusion, Kerrigan and party enforcer James Roosevelt relented and allowed a vote, with Kerrigan preposterously claiming he was honoring the grassroots character of the party. Delegates then overwhelmingly defeated the watered down platform and returned to the 2021 platform, adding sections expanding the section on LGBTQ+ rights and on the right of State House staff to unionize.
MAPA joined this effort, led by Our Revolution Massachusetts and called Commonwealth Courage, to make sure the more progressive 2021 platform was retained. While it does not say much about war and militarism, and while the state party has generally succeeded in keeping those issues out of the platform, the 2021 text does call for repeal of the 2021 Authorization for Use of Military Force which is regularly used by presidents of both parties to launch wars of their choosing without consulting Congress. We chose not to file a platform amendment on the Gaza genocide to make sure the focus stayed on defeating the party leadership’s overall effort to move to a centrist politics.