Israel’s indifference to international law is destabilizing the Middle East, even establishment voices say. The head of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party thinktank, says Israel is not a democracy and peace will only be possible if Palestinians have equal rights.
More Democrats are beginning to criticize Israel, but it will add up to an actual policy shift?
At a town hall in Natick, Massachusetts this week Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told a group of supporters that she supported conditioning aid to Israel, but couldn’t remember whether she voted in favor of the United States’s $38 billion military aid deal with the country.
In fact, she cosponsored a 2018 bill that aimed to enshrine the agreement.
Are Massachusetts activists successfully moving local politicians on Palestine? Pro-Israel groups sure think so.
Pro-Israel groups lament they have lost Rep. Ayanna Pressley as a dependable vote.
“In Hebron, I saw what to me looked like two Americans coming towards us, but they were escorted by four or five Israeli soldiers with rifles. And I was hoping to have a conversation with them. But before I got too close– the rifle kind of came out, to push me away, when it was clearly evident that I’m a tourist. It was an unnecessary reaction. Because I wasn’t at all threatening. But these were American dignitaries, and I think it was part of the deal. To illustrate this is a dangerous place. ‘Okay, we’ll take you to Hebron, but you need to have a five-soldier escort.’ That’s the narrative that is played up. Our security is paramount no matter what happens.”
At its conference, J Street sought to triangulate support for the “Jewish state” and the progressive left as political bedfellows. But there is an inherent contradiction there, and simply hoping for the two-state solution to arrive some day — after Israel has rejected a Palestinian state for its entire existence — may get J Street access in the Democratic Party but won’t preserve its alliances on the left.
“Given the spread of the coronavirus in the West Bank and Gaza, the extreme vulnerability of the health system in Gaza, and the continued withholding of U.S. aid to the Palestinian people, we are concerned that the Administration is failing to take every reasonable step to help combat this public health emergency in the Palestinian Territories,” reads the letter. It was lead by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), but was also signed by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden told the Israel lobby group AIPAC this week that it is “dangerous” for Israel to become “another issue that divides Democrats and Republicans.” But he warned that Israeli moves to build more settlements and annex occupied territories were threatening that divide by alienating young Americans.
The pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC once prided itself on doing its business in the dark. But today loving Israel too much is being politicized in the age of Trump. The battle between the liberal Israel lobby and the rightwing Israel lobby portends a day when leftwingers who support boycotting Israel will not be railroaded instantly from US politics.