Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) said on Wednesday that he doesn’t currently have plans to leave the Democratic Party but would do so if Democrats completely turn their backs on US support for Israel.
Fetterman’s comments came after 103 Democrats supported an amendment sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to cut off $3.3 billion in annual military aid to Israel.
Speaking during an interview at the Hill Nation Summit in Washington, Fetterman said, “If our party ever becomes — and just makes it official — the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me.”
Fetterman said he “can’t understand why the Democratic Party would turn against Israel, a long-standing ally of the US and the only democracy in the Middle East.”
He pointed to House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark’s support for Massie’s bill, saying that it reflects a trend in the party. “You look at the kinds of individuals that are winning our recent primaries. It’s becoming more anti-, anti-Israel and hostile to people” who are pro-Israel.
He criticized fellow Democrats who “are trying to ingratiate ourselves with that segment of the base of our voters are intensely, intensely anti-Israel.”
Fetterman admitted that Republicans have approached him about leaving the Democratic Party but declined to reveal further details.
During the interview, Fetterman also slammed progressive candidates for their support of the “defund the police” movement.
“Now here’s more Democrats to ‘defund the police.’ Here we are back to part of the worst impulses that we just can’t resist. We forgot the crazy things that we said, and that cost us the election in 2024. Now we want to revisit that — if anything they’re coming back in the strongest kind of terms. Look at the people who are winning,” he said.
According to The Hill, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist candidate backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), deleted a social media account in which she called for abolishing police, borders and prisons, and claimed Israel doesn’t exist. Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old activist, defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District.
(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)
2 Responses
There are plenty of Jewish Democrats who feel that way. Unknown is mow many pro-Israel non-Jews remain in the Democratic party, and is anti-Semitism an important enough issue for them to leave. And then the big question, while the gap between RINOs and DINOs isn’t that great, there is a large gap between DINOs (which includes any Democrat who opposes anti-Semitism and who fails to support pro-Hamas’s policies) and MAGA. Assuming the RINOs don’t retake control of the Republican party, is there a serious chance of a RINO/DINO alliance to result in a “third party” to fill the gap between MAGA and the “Socialists” (note that the last, and only time a “third party” won a national election was in 1860).
In 2011 or maybe even 2007 the Democrat Party convention rolled out its platform that sneakily eliminated recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. That’s 15 to 20 years ago under Obama.
When that was called out they took a ‘Yea’ and ‘Nay’ voice votes to restore it. The ‘Nay’ vote was clearly MUCH stronger than the ‘Yea’ vote, but out of embarrassment they pretended that the motion to restore it passed.
Today they wouldn’t be embarrassed.