Israel's war puts the Democratic Party at a crossroads

And it's up to Joe Biden to steer it in the right direction

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

Tonight, I’m going to examine how developments in Israel’s campaign in Gaza are shifting our politics, revealing the power structure within the Democratic Party, and sparking a generational change.

As always with this topic, I’m eager to hear your opinions in the comments, whether you agree with me or not; please just keep it respectful and assume good faith.

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Joe Biden’s career began in 1968, the year that the national Democratic Party snapped and splintered under the weight of generational conflict and the war in Vietnam. A similar situation unfolding now could wind up bookending Biden’s six-decade career, and more importantly, shifting the balance of power once again.

Biden was not an anti-war protestor in the 1960s; he preferred sports coats over tie-dye, a contrast he’s pointed out many times since. He didn’t vote for Richard Nixon in 1968, but it wasn’t until he ran for Senate in 1972 that Biden publicly expressed any opinion about the Vietnam War. Once dismissive of peacenik protestors in private, Biden made his opposition to the war a centerpiece of his first campaign for federal office, especially in his pitch to young and first-time voters.

“Don’t talk to us about a generation of peace when every day hundreds of planes cut through the skies of Indochina, and countless women and children and old men run from their liberators, their flesh burned with napalm,” Biden railed in a campaign speech that summer.

Ultimately siding with the new generation of activists and reformist Democrats put Biden in the US Senate. More than 50 years later, as the world watches in horror at Palestinian women and children are pulled out from beneath the rubble of their homes, Biden is the establishment figure in the White House, facing a new schism that threatens to splinter the Democratic Party once again.

Ignoring the Early Signs

When the White House rushed to pledge unconditional support to Israel after Hamas’s heinous and depraved terrorist attacks killed 1400 Israelis near the Gaza border, it acted on instincts, moral outrage, and strategic calculation based on an outdated paradigm.

The instinct was understandable: Biden was a new senator when Israel fought off coordinated attacks from Arabic nations in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the country remains a key strategic bulwark for the United States, and generations of Washington policymakers have become enjoyed warm relations with Israeli leaders. And, to be clear, the terrorist attacks were truly diabolical, and the victims’ families deserved nothing but true support.

The White House, however, did not seem to consider several other crucial factors, including the ongoing shift in Israeli politics, how American attitudes have shifted in response, and how unchecked violence in Gaza might detonate the situation at home.

The impact of Israel’s long blockade of Gaza began to shift attitudes on the left in the early 2010s, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s embrace of Donald Trump and the Israeli lobby’s turn to the right led to Democratic presidential candidates boycotting AIPAC in 2018. Many politicians may have retreated from that stance, but it’s still fresh in the memory of so many Democratic voters.

Even if Biden didn’t recognize the shift in public opinion, he should have seen the diplomatic change. Netanyahu’s aggressive bombing of Gaza forced Biden to put his foot down in 2021, and now the indicted leader was back in office only by the grace of the country’s most extreme religious right-wing parties, whose bigotries he indulged and leaders he elevated.

The Growing Divide

Hamas’s horrific rampage on October 7th elicited outrage, mourning, and deep sympathy, as it should have, but in some corners those things were paired with discussion of the Israeli government’s role in helping to create an untenable powder-keg on the Gaza Strip.

Acknowledging the broader context did not ignore or justify the slaughter of innocent, and certainly nobody with any soul was excusing Hamas’s unspeakable brutality.

The early pro-Palestinian freedom rallies across the US were inelegant and in some places downright ignorant, but the disproportionate response to campus activists by society’s most powerful figures did not help. Billionaires like Bill Ackman, legal elites, and party donors reacted with such pure venom — including firings, pledges not to hire young people, efforts to out students, paused university donations, and furious political statements — that instead of inspiring dialogue and education, they only served to further alienate young voters who were already dismissive of the liberal establishment.

In the weeks since, that internal conflict has continued to grow and engulf the party’s electorate. Now, the balance is shifting, largely due to Israel’s cavalier rhetoric and indiscriminate leveling of the Gaza Strip.

The IDF has bombed refugee camps three times now, killed Palestinians fleeing in the directions instructed, conducted air strikes against ambulances, and shrugged at the deaths of nearly 4000 children. Overall, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed, with only occasional reports of unnamed Hamas members being among them; Israeli officials say that Hamas militants hide among civilians, but the country’s leadership has also made clear that it does not distinguish between the two, even as neutral experts and the United States itself have urged them to do so.

These are facts, verified by the UN. Whether you think they are justified or not is your own decision, but the carnage has been almost universally condemned both globally and in the United States.

By October 20th, one poll found that 66% of Americans were hoping for a ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza. Instead, the violence has become so overwhelming that even pillars of the center-left like the president of the Center for American Progress are now calling out Israeli leadership for the relentless attacks and mass slaughter.

Today, former Barack Obama had harsh words for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and said that American leaders, who have enabled this situation for years, are somewhat complicit in what’s happened. He shared the opinion during an event hosted by his former staffers who now run the Pod Save America podcast, a show that’s not likely in the queue of the hundreds of thousands of protestors who poured into streets in cities across the country and around the world today.

Politicians in office have been far slower to reach the same public conclusion, even as protestors continue to confront them on camera.

No doubt they have the State Department in their ears, sharing privileged information that suggests strategic complications, but the calculation is probably as simple of assuring their own political survival.

Given the polling numbers — 80% of Democratic voters want the violence to end — that seems incongruous, but money now equals speech, and the cash from the pro-Netanyahu lobby and wealthy donors is screaming.

AIPAC demolished progressive Democrats and even some establishment ones during the 2022 primaries, spending tens of millions of dollars to single-handedly reshape the electorate with a bombardment of advertisements. Former Reps. Andy Levin, who is Jewish, and Donna Edwards, who was close to Nancy Pelosi, were taken out for reasons tied to their economic positions — AIPAC is financed by Republican billionaires — in a sign of how easy it is to trigger the group’s financial fuselage.

AIPAC subsidiary DFMI has already been pounding Rep. Rashida Tlaib with attack ads for her calls for a ceasefire and willingness to call Israel’s treatment of Palestinians an apartheid system. The organization is lining up primary challengers for Tlaib along with Reps. Summer Lee, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar, who co-sponsored a resolution asking Biden to request a ceasefire. Billionaire Reid Hoffman is also looking to finance primary challengers, adding a further warning to members who think about criticizing Israel.

Remarkably, Sen. Dick Durbin was the first member of the Senate to call for a ceasefire, and remains the only one to do so thus far. (For all that I’ve criticized him, it’s only fair to give him serious applause for stepping up on this.)

Otherwise, it’s been tepid at best; the closest that even Bernie Sanders has gotten is calling for a “humanitarian pause” to the bombing to allow aid to get to Palestinians before Israel resumes flattening Gaza. Whether it’s due to AIPAC or some other reason, the reality is that the party’s leadership in Washington is increasingly out of touch with a vast majority of its voters.

Weaponizing fear

Local Democratic leaders are also making unpopular decisions. Last week, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee caved and fired a constituent service representative named Miguel Sanchez for having the audacity to call Israel’s campaign a genocide (while still mourning the 1400 Israeli victims) on social media. The firing drew condemnation from Rhode Island’s chapter of Black Lives Matter.

This week, the Iowa Democratic Party moved to oust the College Democrats at the University of Iowa after they released a statement that indicated support for Palestinians caught in the crossfire. The members twice changed the statement as requested, but that ultimately wasn’t enough. Florida Democrats, meanwhile, just proposed a resolution in support of Israel that does not make any mention of the innocent Palestinians who have been killed by the mass bombings.

The firings and oustings have been justified by citing the supposed, implied antisemitism of certain chants that express the desire to see a free Palestine. To suggest that hundreds of thousands of young people marching and singing are advocating for a genocide of the Jewish people is ludicrous, especially because many of the protests are led by Jewish activists.

Again, though, this is beside the point. The condemnations are not about any chant or song, but disagreement in any form.

AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and other right-wing organizations have weaponized the real threat of antisemitism — and the fear of being accused of it — in an effort to silence dissent. As I’ve written before, criticizing Israel’s government is not any more antisemitic than criticizing the Vatican is anti-Catholic, and most Israelis themselves want to see Netanyahu ousted from office. The government is not an expression of religion, but an organ of ideology. As a Jew myself, I’ve long been wary of Netanyahu, and do not support his government of far-right zealots, in the same way I’ve opposed far-right US governments run by zealots in the United States.

[On a personal note: As those accusations harden, they become more offensive; my family died in pogroms and the Holocaust, and I refuse to believe that the lesson of those atrocities is that a Jewish state can commit its own genocide. That so many American Jews seem to think otherwise is disturbing and disappointing, not to mention dangerous.

True antisemitism is a horrible scourge, and undoubtedly, incidents have gone up since October 7th. There’s no excuse for them, but the reality is that Israel’s actions are putting Jews everywhere else in the line of fire. Kids in the US are being forced to answer for mass slaughter being carried out by a government halfway around the world.]

Threats to individual lawmakers’ incumbency is less relevant to the White House, and the Biden administration is clearly feeling the heat. The president himself has publicly called for a humanitarian pause and stressed the importance of aid reaching Gazans. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has privately pleaded with Israel to stop the bombing for a moment before it loses the rest of its support from the international community.

Blinken also provided a list of ways that could lower the civilian death count, including actually targeting Hamas leaders instead of dropping two ton bombs in civilian areas. That sounds like bad satire, but it does make the case that the mass slaughter is a policy choice, not a necessity.

The pressure is growing for Democratic lawmakers to come down harder on Israel’s far-right government, especially as it ignores all recommendations and pursues maximal destruction. Muslim-American voters have started to promise to abstain from voting for President Biden in 2024, millennials and Gen-Z were already disillusioned by the administration before this disaster, and the marches through the streets are only going to grow larger.

None of this is to say that the administration should abandon Israel or deny its right to exist. It does not have to align itself with the most adamant protestors. Instead, Biden could push for maximum diplomacy, pressing on Qatar and other Arabic nations that privately dislike Hamas to help secure the release of hostages and dismantle the organization’s military wing. There are carrots and sticks available, down to hosting the World Cup and participating in major pro soccer tournaments.

Ending unqualified allegiance to the Netanyahu government is not an attack on Israel or the Jewish people, yet it’s inevitable that doing so will cost Biden and Democrats some support from hardliners and major donors. But the party has never been well-served by deciding its foreign policy based on fear, and taking a stand against such ongoing violence will prove crucial down the line.

Biden was able to stay quiet until the public tide definitively turned during the Vietnam War, which allowed him to be on the right side of history. He no longer has the luxury of silence, but he does have an opportunity to prevent a repeat of the 1968 schism that broke the Democratic Party, installed a truly crooked warmonger in the White House, and changed the trajectory of history. Instead, Biden’s legacy could be reasserting the United States’ moral authority, giving new generations a reason to have faith in government.

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