The Democratic Party “hates Israel,” President Donald Trump thundered last month in an interview with his former aide, Sebastian Gorka. On Tuesday, he said President Joe Biden has “abandoned Israel” and “any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined.”
Trump is wrong. The Democratic Party does not hate Israel, and Biden has not abandoned the Jewish state.
Stalwart Democratic Israeli supporters such as senators John Fetterman from Pennsylvania and Jacky Rosen from Nevada, as well as congressmen like New York’s Ritchie Torres, New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer and Illinois’ Brad Schneider, prove that Trump’s first assertion is incorrect.
And Biden’s statement on Thursday that his commitment to Israel’s security against threats “from Iran and its proxies is ironclad” disproves Trump’s assertion about the incumbent president’s “abandonment” of Israel.
Trump supporters may argue these are “just words,” but the president’s dispatch of air force carrier strike forces to the eastern Mediterranean shortly after October 7 to deter Iran from attacking Israel shows he has a track record backing up those words.
Yet, we must admit, there are worrying signs within the party that its long-time commitment to Israel is waning.
A sign of this is a letter signed by 56 Democratic representatives, almost a quarter of the 213 House Democrats, calling on Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to reconsider arms transfers to Israel – at the very time that the country is fighting a terrorist organization bent on its destruction.
That this letter was signed not only by the anti-Israel “Squad” and other assorted progressive lawmakers, but also by pro-Israel stalwarts like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, is another sign.
Yet another sign is that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren faced little blowback from within the party when she said international courts may rule that Israel is committing genocide and repeated the lie that the Jewish state is intentionally starving Palestinians.
If before the current war it was comfortable to dismiss the anti-Israel voices inside the party – from congress people like Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – as the inconsequential murmurings of a definite minority, these sentiments have started to seep into the party’s mainstream since the war.
This is a worrisome trend
While some of the rhetoric against Israel is a result of the war, this is a process that started long before the war and will continue regardless of how the war turns out. The growing partisan debate inside America has as much to do with changing dynamics and demographics inside the US as it does with Israeli policies.
America is considerably less religious, older, and more ethnically diverse than it was a generation ago. The country is polarized, with race and gender dominating much of the national conversation, and social media turning that conversation toxic.
As America changes, so too will its attitudes toward Israel. Among a not insignificant part of the US population there is now a tendency to view the world through a “social justice” prism, judging what is right and wrong based on who is strong and who is weak: who is the perceived “oppressor” and who is the perceived “oppressed.”
Those tendencies are far more prevalent inside the Democratic Party than the Republican one, explaining why support for Israel among Republicans – both politicians and the public – is so much higher than it is among Democrats. Over the last decade, polls have shown a steady drop in sympathy for Israel among Democrats, something that has filtered upward and translated into less sympathy for Israel by Democratic politicians.
Nonetheless, Israel must not write off the Democrats as a party that, as Trump erroneously charges, “hates Israel.” First of all, it is patently false, and secondly because bipartisan support for the Jewish state in Washington is one of Israel’s key strategic assets.
Instead of dismissing the Democratic Party as one that has turned its back on Israel, Jerusalem should concentrate its energies on bringing its truth to those significant segments of the party not taken in by far-Left slogans, who understand that supporting Israel is not only the morally right thing to do but also what is in America’s best interests.