New Democrats Are Anti-Israel

A New Wave of Democrats Tests the Party’s Blanket Support for Israel

NYT, 10/7/18

One Democratic House candidate has pledged that she will vote against bills that include aid to Israel, denouncing what she saw as the “injustice” of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Another wrote that “Israel has hypnotized the world” with its “evil doings.”

Still another helped write a scathing book on relations between the United States and Israel, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive political star expected to win a House seat in New York, condemned the “occupation of Palestine.”

A cluster of activist Democrats — most of them young, most of them cruising toward House seats this fall — has dared to breach what has been an almost inviolable orthodoxy in both political parties, strong support for Israel, raising the specter of a crack in the Democratic Party that Republicans could use to attract Jewish supporters.

Surging support for the Palestinian cause has already strained relations between liberal parties and Jewish voters in Europe. In Britain, the Labour Party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been accused of anti-Semitism for a pro-Palestinian stand that has veered into statements that many see as outright bigotry. Across the United States, movements to force colleges and universities to boycott, divest investments from and place sanctions on Israel have divided some progressive students from their Jewish peers.

Now some Democrats are testing the boundaries of what has been the politically acceptable position on Israel in the mainstream parties. They include Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American Muslim running for an open House seat in Minneapolis; Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American Muslim running in Detroit; Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, running in a heavily Democratic district in the Bronx and Queens; and Leslie Cockburn, co-author of “Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship,” who is running in a Republican-leaning district in Virginia. None of them would comment for this article.

They have not made their views on Israel a central issue of their campaigns, but they also have not held back. Ms. Tlaib, in an August interview with the liberal magazine In These Times, endorsed a one-state solution that could jeopardize Israel’s status as a Jewish state.

“It has to be one state,” she said. “Separate but equal does not work.”

Ms. Omar, who had criticized Israel’s “evil doings” in 2012, was accused on Twitter of anti-Semitism after her campaign got underway. “Drawing attention to the apartheid Israeli regime is far from hating Jews,” she responded.

Against a backdrop of a White House that has taken a series of measures explicitly targeting Palestinians — moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, slashing aid and most recently, closing the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington…

But those candidates’ leanings appear to align with a broader consensus among Democratic voters. Two years ago, Democrats were more likely to sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians by a 14 percentage point gap, according to a Pew Research Center poll. In January, the same poll showed that gap had shrunk to two points.

Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, accused Democratic leaders of failing to push back against “hostile” remarks from Democratic candidates.

“That involves policing and enforcing their own and making clear that these views are outside the mainstream,” he said. “So far they haven’t done that.”…