In another sign that there is a civil war over Israel inside the Democratic Party, a former aide to Kamala Harris says that Harris’s lawyer was “doing her job” when she asked Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro whether he had been an agent for Israel in vetting him for the running mate job in the summer of 2024.
Ilan Goldenberg, who worked for the Harris campaign as director “for Jewish outreach” and now works for the Israel lobby group J Street, said that questioning whether an official has loyalty to another country or has been a foreign agent was perfectly legitimate given Shapiro’s ties to Israel. Shapiro had worked at the Israeli embassy for several months in 1996, putting out Israeli talking points to Americans.
Shapiro, who did not get Harris’s vice presidential nod, says that the line of questioning was offensive. In a memoir that comes out next week, Shapiro reportedly writes:
“I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way.”
Israel supporters have responded with outrage to Shapiro’s report and characterized the Democratic Party as antisemitic. For instance, Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz called the questioning “totally insane” in Jewish Insider.
Goldenberg says the outrage is inappropriate.
“If you worked for the Israeli embassy, you would be asked that question, and my understanding is that was basically the question he was asked,” Goldenberg said on a J Street podcast this week. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s eventual running mate, was asked similar questions because of his long connection to China, Goldenberg said.
“He [Shapiro] is trying to sell books,” Goldenberg said. “There’s not a ton of love [between Shapiro and Harris]. There’s some 2028 stuff going on.”
Goldenberg says he was asked similar questions before he could serve in the U.S. government because he was born in Israel, had been an Israeli citizen, and has family in the country.
Shapiro has long been a pro-Israel hack, whose vigorous support for Israel’s actions in Gaza won him the nickname “Genocide Josh.”
Goldenberg says that Shapiro’s position on Gaza was not very different from other possible running mates (yes, truly pathetic!), and there was likely some “ugly stuff” in critics focusing on Shapiro. But, “I think he was probably feeling super sensitive and he heard this question about foreign agent and he might have taken it the wrong way.”
Goldenberg, a longtime Democratic Party policymaker on Middle East issues, is a big Israel supporter himself. But in recent comments, he has highlighted the role of the Jewish community in setting foreign policy in the Middle East.
Congress’s tradition of backing Israel “no matter what” was imposed by the Israel lobby, Goldenberg wrote in a J Street Substack post. “A small, organized and well-funded group of American Jews treated the issue as a threshold question in elections, and most candidates decided it wasn’t worth antagonizing them.”
Candidates were only asked about the Israel/Palestine issue when “you were in a room with people who had money,” Goldenberg elaborated. So politicians just went along with what donors were pushing.
Gaza has changed these dynamics.
Now the issue is “popping up in town halls,” and candidates are hearing from the “everyday average voter.”
Polls show that the base of the Democratic Party overwhelmingly wants to withhold military aid to Israel because of what they regard as a genocide. This is surely one reason that Kamala Harris lost last year. She stuck with the donors, and refused to move on the Gaza slaughter even as progressives demanded a moral stance against an ally’s rolling massacres.
Goldenberg’s group, J Street, is using its political capital to stem what it calls “far left” forces in the Democratic Party– to keep the military aid flowing to Israel, and to stop the use of the terms “genocide’ and “apartheid” inside the Democratic Party. It repeatedly criticizes the left and gives a platform to right-wing figures (including an Israeli saying that there are no “moderate” Muslims in Palestine.)
The good news here is that the issue is finally being debated openly in the Democratic Party and will surely be a focus in Democratic primaries later this year. Many progressive Dems are challenging centrist and incumbent Dems over their support for Israel.
Israel is also becoming an issue on the right. Young people in Charlie Kirk’s movement have questioned whether it is in the American interest to support a government that has perpetrated unending bloodbaths of a civilian population. Tucker Carlson lately spotlighted Francesca Albanese, the human rights leader, describing Gaza as a “textbook genocide.”
Political upheaval on the right and left is laying bare the base of U.S. policy–a special interest group, the Israel lobby.
To its credit, J Street has argued that the lobby’s machinations are giving a bad name to American Jews and threatening Jewish security in the U.S.
J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami said on the group’s podcast this week that the rightwing Israel lobby group AIPAC has endangered Jews by operating in a “cynical manipulative” way in a New Jersey congressional primary, the race for the seat left vacant by former Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s move to the governor’s office.
AIPAC has spent over $800,000 on ads signed by the “United Democracy Project,” attacking frontrunner Tom Malinowski from the left, over his vote as a Congress member in 2019 to fund ICE. AIPAC’s real concern is the fact that Malinowski, whom it once funded, has been slightly critical of Israel.
“The reason it’s a hidden hand approach is that AIPAC is a toxic brand in the Democratic Party,” Ben-Ami says.
AIPAC’s underhanded approach, he said, “is not good for the U.S.-Israel relationship, it’s not good for Israel’s reputation in the Democratic Party, which is already in deep trouble, it’s not good for the Jewish community in this country.”
Goldenberg agreed, saying that AIPAC’s action “just plays so badly for American Jews.” He said, “It kind of confirms the worst stereotypes and tropes about secret money and hidden hand kind of stuff. It’s yuck in every way possible.”
I welcome these comments because I have written that loyalty to Israel is a legitimate concern when it comes to Israel lobby activists, and that the lobby’s corruption of policymaking represents a threat to Jewish safety because it so fulfills antisemitic stereotypes.
I was often accused of antisemitism for making those arguments. The shoe is now on the other foot.
The game-changer here is the mobilization of a mass movement for Palestinian human rights. Activists are making it legitimate to ask about pro-Israel bias inside the government.
“Israel is also becoming an issue on the right. Young people in Charlie Kirk’s movement have questioned whether it is in the American interest to support a government that has perpetrated unending bloodbaths of a civilian population.”
If that topic interests you then you will want to read this article in the January Harper’s, apparently open access:
Turning Point – How the GOP consensus on Israel cracked….I felt that what I was hearing from the crowd was MAGA youth’s revulsion for America’s disastrous twenty-first-century wars, a seismic shift brought to a head by Gaza. “It’s very obvious to me that the Republican coalition is fracturing over foreign policy,” Carlson said at one point, “specifically Israel.”...Kirk, the face of conservative youth and a powerful force in Republican politics who enjoyed potent connections to the Trump Administration, had shown clear signs that he was changing sides on that battlefield of ideas—at least when it came to ideas about Israel….For decades, Zionist political organizations like AIPAC and a media industry concentrated in a few reliably sympathetic hands protected the narrative that Israel is the sole democracy in the Middle East, permanently imperiled by genocidal foes, from serious challenge—even as Israel populated the occupied West Bank with illegal settlements and kept the fenced-off population of Gaza in a state of near malnutrition with a total military blockade starting in 2007. But over the past two years, Israel has thrown the doors to debate wide open with its actions in Gaza: killing civilians by the tens of thousands, burying many alive under the rubble of their homes, destroying hospitals, sniping children with drones, and starving young and old alike….
Turning Point, by Andrew Cockburn
I am almost at the point of recommending that participation in any of the sundry programs subsidizing travel to Israel by Jewish youth should disqualify that person from ever seeking elected, or being appointed to, political office in this country. Grounds? Implicitly validating an illegitimate, apartheid state. Draconian? Only commensurate with the insidious nature of the intent behind them.
Just about everyone in American politics could be called an agent for Israel. (Not Bernie Sanders! or Zohran Mamdani!) But not all of them are Israeli citizens.
“….the lobby’s corruption of policymaking represents a threat to Jewish safety because it so fulfills antisemitic stereotypes.” By the same reasoning, Phil, the events of October 7, 2023, could be seen as fulfilling anti-Palestinian stereotypes. The characterizations of Palestinians by the most extreme Israeli chauvinists and racists were seen in action on that day.