The race for the Democratic nomination to be NY’s mayor is heating up, and Israel is a big part of the discussion. This makes sense because there are so many Jewish Democratic voters in New York; and support for Israel is still a reliable Jewish issue, especially among the orthodox.
And so we see the candidates shamelessly pandering on Israel, denouncing the BDS campaign, for boycotts, divestments and sanctions targeting Israel. Sitting Mayor Bill de Blasio also weighed in, saying that “it’s incumbent on all Democrats, and particularly progressive Democrats, to denounce BDS” because “Israel is a fundamentally progressive concept” And saying “vast majority of Democrats” are against BDS. So, now you know where Dems are!
The Forward reported a survey that most of the leading Democratic candidates for mayor are opposed to BDS, “an issue that is of great importance to the Jewish and pro-Israel communities.” That includes frontrunner/entrepreneur Andrew Yang, business exec Ray McGuire, city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama cabinet official Shaun Donovan, and Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams. Yet Stringer and Maya Wiley, a former de Blasio aide/civil rights advocate, told the Forward that even though they don’t support BDS, the “right to boycott is essential to American democracy.”
All these candidates would call themselves progressive, to be sure! And seven of the eight surveyed told the Forward they would consider visiting Israel if elected, with Shaun Donovan going furthest and saying he wanted to learn how Israel has done so well in its vaccination program and adding:
“I have not visited Israel but I have visited both Dachau and Auschwitz.”
McGuire, who has raised a reported $5 million-plus since announcing his candidacy, went furthest in the Forward survey on BDS. “I absolutely condemn BDS and any other movement that seeks to exclude, delegitimize or isolate Israel.”
And in December, McGuire got the recommendation of a real estate exec/radio show host from the Brooklyn orthodox community. “He’s very strong on Israel and he seems to understand our issues also,” Leon Goldenberg told Jewish Insider.
Andrew Yang is fighting hard to get the Israel lane all to himself. Last month he said that BDS is rooted in Nazi thinking; and his political operative Chris Coffey says Israel is a big part of the campaign.
@AndrewYang plans to fight hard for Jewish vote. Proud of his support of Israel, his commitment to go there first as Mayor, and his opposition to BDS. We can bring tech talent from Israel to NYC and vice versa.
Yang has reportedly hired David Schwartz, a protege of far-rightwing City Council person Dov Hikind, as his Jewish outreach aide. In 2016, Hikind accused Bernie Sanders of a “blood libel” against the Jewish people, for daring to criticize Israel’s Gaza slaughter of 2014. But to be clear, Dov Hikind is setting the bar in NY politics, not Bernie Sanders…
Schwartz is a Hasidic man who in 2016 at 22 became Democratic district leader in Brooklyn with Hikind’s backing.
The New York Post explains that the Jewish vote is up for grabs in this election, with no candidate having an obvious advantage (though Stringer is Jewish):
New York City has about 1.5 million Jewish residents, by far the largest population of Jews in the United States. While it’s impossible to say for sure how many are registered to vote, one study from PrimeNY estimated that up to 14 percent of city voters were Jewish, with more than 60 percent of them registered Democrats and thus eligible to vote in the city’s closed primary…
Many Jewish voters — particularly the more conservative-leaning Orthodox and Hasidic in Brooklyn — tend to vote in blocks, amplifying their political power.
Of course fundraising is also the reason these candidates are pandering so hard. The influence of pro-Israel Jewish donors are the “elephant in the room” of Democratic politics, even the New York Times has reported.
As for de Blasio, political operative Howard Wolfson sent Jewish Insider an Israel answer he got from de Blasio that was edited out of a Q-and-A with de Blasio that he published at Bloomberg. Wolfson is putting down an official marker here, about the limits to criticism of Israel inside the Democratic Party. Notice Wolfson saying his “friends” are Israel supporters– that means the party establishment– and de Blasio saying all leading Democrats are for Israel.
Wolfson: You have been very strongly pro-Israel during your political career, even friends of mine who tend to be critical of you recognize that and give you credit for it. How concerned are you, as a leading progressive, about the growth of the BDS movement on the left? How concerned should mainstream Democrats be?
Bill de Blasio: I’m concerned, but I wouldn’t overrate its growth. I think it’s incumbent on all Democrats, and particularly progressive Democrats, to denounce BDS because there’s a profound contradiction in what they are saying and doing. I respect their First Amendment rights, but that doesn’t stop me from profoundly disagreeing with what they’re doing. Israel is a fundamentally progressive concept. It is about having a homeland for a people who’ve been oppressed for millennia and who still have to wonder if they will have safety in the rest of the world. I don’t know what could be more progressive than a homeland for oppressed people… It is about our values as Democrats and progressives. I truly believe we should stand by the State of Israel, oppose BDS, and at the same time, I’m happy to say I believe in this two-state solution and I consistently disagree with Netanyahu and I look forward to the day when he’s no longer prime minister. But that’s a healthy discussion. And I honestly believe that’s where a vast majority of Democrats are, so that I would wrap it around and say, yes, it should be taken seriously as a problem, yes, people should speak up, but let’s not mistake it for a moment. If you went to every Democratic U.S. senator, representative, governor, mayor in America, you would find overwhelming support for the State of Israel and an overwhelming opposition to BDS.
Notice de Blasio hedges on his criticism of Netanyahu…
Back to the candidates, and frontrunner Andrew Yang. The Daily News reports that Yang passed up a forum last week sponsored by Muslims but did show up on a podcast with Sam Harris, who has made Islamophobic comments (“Islam at the moment is the motherlode of bad ideas”).
Last Wednesday — the same day Yang passed on attending a virtual mayoral forum sponsored by several Muslim groups — he appeared on the Making Sense podcast, which is hosted by Sam Harris, whose remarks about Islam and race have elicited outrage in the past and continue to rankle Muslims..
“He’s one of the most renowned liberal Islamophobes out there,” [Mohammad] Khan, [president of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York] said. “It’s concerning that someone who’s seeking to hold public office in New York City would publicly associate with Sam Harris without challenging him on his Islamophobic views. Yang owes an explanation to New Yorkers on whether he agrees with the views Harris holds publicly.”
Several other candidates, including Wiley, Adams, Stringer, and Donovan, did appear on the Muslim forum.
The Daily News says that on a previous podcast in May, Yang credited Harris with launching his “entire presidential run.”
And though Maya Wiley has a more progressive track record than other Dems — the NY Post calling her “the far left side of the spectrum” –she has aligned herself with liberal Zionists and against Netanyahu (not far off from her former boss de Blasio). Last year Wiley accepted an award at a fundraiser to fight hunger held by the National Council of Jewish Women last year; the NCJW is a liberal Zionist organization. NCJW highlighted Wiley’s progressive record;
Maya Wiley has spent her career fighting to dismantle structural racism and win transformational change with low income communities of color. As Counsel to the Mayor she delivered for New York City on civil and immigrants’ rights, women and minority owned business contracts, universal broadband access and more…
So the politics of NY Democrats are firmly Progressive Except Palestine. These politics are all about the Israel lobby inside the Jewish community and the Democratic Party establishment. And not about the progressive base that overwhelmingly supports cutting aid to Israel over human rights violations. Don’t forget Raphael Warnock walking back his Israel-critical statements to get a key endorsement from a Jewish Zionist org ahead of the Georgia senate election.
Some day generational forces are going to break up that Democratic Party consensus. Not today, sadly.
The Arab Spring Failed But the Rage Against Misery and Injustice Continues – CounterPunch.org
FEBRUARY 17, 2021, COUNTERPUNCH
“The Arab Spring Failed But the Rage Against Misery and Injustice Continues” by Patrick Cockburn
EXCERPT:
“Ten years ago, people across the Middle East and North Africa rose up in protest against their rulers, demanding freedom and democracy. Despotic rulers were toppled or feared that power was being torn from their grasp in countries across the region, as millions of demonstrators surged through the streets, chanting that ‘the people demand the fall of the regime.’
“There was nothing phoney about this mass yearning for liberty and social justice. Vast numbers of disenfranchised people briefly believed that they could overthrow dictatorships, both republican and monarchical. ‘We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery,’ recited the 20-year-old poet Ayat al-Gormezi, speaking to thousands of cheering protesters in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. ‘We are the people who will destroy the foundations of injustice.’
“But these foundations were stronger than she hoped and the dream of a better tomorrow expressed by herself and millions during the Arab Spring in 2011 was to be brutally dispelled as the old regimes counter-attacked. Crueller and more repressive than ever, they reasserted themselves, or where they had fallen, they were replaced by chaotic violence and foreign military intervention.”
As we can see from this article, any American politician who wants to get elected is required to kiss Israel’s patootie. Which politician has bent the farthest backwards to satisfy Israel? My vote goes to John Kerry. From Jerome Slater’s “Mythologies Without End”, page 322-323. Emphasis mine:
In summer 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry began an effort to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Over the next eight months…Kerry sought to establish a personal relationship with Netanyahu…By contrast, Abbas and the Palestinians were treated as distinctly less important..an ISRAELI official who participated in the talks was strongly critical of Kerry…
“At one point we discovered that throughout the entire period, the Americans DIDN’T ACTUALLY TALK to the Palestinians, only to us,”, a senior official said.”
Shaun Donovan’s comment ‘I have not visited Israel but I have visited both Dachau and Auschwitz,’
brings to mind the following:
https://al-awda.org/on-israels-little-known-concentration-and-labor-camps-in-1948-1955/
“On Israel’s little-known concentration and labor camps in 1948-1955” Oct 19, 2014 | Articles & Features
“It is shocking that this would have happened in Palestine within just a few years after the Nazi regime was defeated and all the prisoners including the large number of Jews in their concentration camps were freed. The following article by Yazan al-Saadi was published in Alakhbar on Monday, September 29, 2014.”
EXCERPT:
“Much of the grim and murky circumstances of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the late 1940s have gradually been exposed over time. One aspect – rarely researched or deeply discussed – is the internment of thousands of Palestinian civilians within at least 22 Zionist-run concentration and labor camps that existed from 1948 to 1955. Now more is known about the contours of this historical crime, due to the comprehensive research by renowned Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta and founding member of the Palestinian resource center BADIL Terry Rempel.
“The facts are these.
“The study – to be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies – relies on almost 500 pages of International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) reports written during the 1948 war, that were declassified and made available to the public in 1996, and accidentally discovered by one of the authors in 1999.
“Furthermore, testimonies of 22 former Palestinian civilian detainees of these camps were collected by the authors, through interviews they conducted themselves in 2002, or documented by others during different moments of time.
“With these sources of information, the authors, as they put it, pieced together a clearer story of how Israel captured and imprisoned ‘thousands of Palestinian civilians as forced laborers,’ and exploited them ‘to support its war-time economy.'”
Everyone must be thinking that the Democrats have a Senate majority because Warnock won in Georgia and that he would not have won without that Zionist backing. Moreover many politically active New Yorkers will know about Corbyn. The lesson gets well driven home.