It is no surprise that Israel, and particularly BDS, has become a hot-button issue in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th district.
The race for the Democratic nomination to be NY’s mayor is heating up, and Israel is a big part of the discussion. Leading Democratic Party candidates for NY mayor all oppose BDS, with Ray McGuire denouncing the human rights campaign and Andrew Yang saying it’s rooted in Nazi thought. Though Shaun Donovan panders best of them all on Israel: “I have not visited Israel but I have visited both Dachau and Auschwitz.”
Anti-Palestinian racism is at last moving the needle in US politics. The demotion by leadership of NY City Councilman Kalman Yeger for his anti-Palestinian comments this week sends a message to the Democratic Party nationwide, that the profound political shifts that the left is generating on a host of issues, from sexual harassment to economic inequity, will include Palestine, too.
New York City residents write an open letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio saying his recent statements about Israel and antisemitism are extremely troubling and damaging: “You speak about Israel providing Jewish safety. Standing up for Israeli apartheid, as you have repeatedly done, does not promote safety. Quite the contrary.”
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio gave the “simple, clear, progressive case for the state of Israel” at AIPAC this morning. He touched again and again on the Jewish history of persecution and “exclusion” and “expulsion” and never acknowledged that 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled from their lands at the birth of Israel in 1947-49. As such, his speech was a monument of Democratic denial of the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe.
New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio (Photo: Maxine Dovere/The Algemeiner) The campaign to…