The Finger Pointing Issue
Jewish Democrats are at a crossroads, which is no one else's fault since they were awake during the journey that brought them there.
Recently I was added to a group discussing counteracting the local pro-Palestine movement in my local area. What I noticed from the composition was that it was a familiar cast of characters who I've known for years, friends and acquaintances, and all of them basically struggling to just agree on methods of action, when to meet, and who can be relied on. One of the faultlines that continues to come up is the political and partisan divide between us, where many Republican voting members are eager to attack the Democrats, while the Democrat voting members feel that this aspect needlessly divides and distracts from the ultimate goal of addressing the activist groups that make life deeply uncomfortable for college students and the community at large. So I decided to write up a focused response to this and tell the straight up truth: The political element to the Israel/Palestine issue is not in any way a distraction, and the multi-generational Jewish tendency to "vote blue no matter who" is a significant cause of the problem. It's also a reason that so many like Alan Dershowitz are saying they no longer recognize the party of JFK that they voted for even though they were along for the ride on its journey to where it is today. Last week he wrote in the Wall Street Journal on behalf of his late friend former Sen. Joseph Lieberman that American Jews that the Joe Biden campaign "can no longer count on pro-Israel Jewish voters to vote Democratic if it turns against Israel". Lieberman was the first Jewish nominee for a major party in 2000 when he was chosen by Democrat Al Gore as his running mate. He tragically died in a fall at home on March 26 at age 82. Dershowitz is himself an icon given his role in defending prominent clients like presidents Clinton and Trump during their impeachment trials, and infamous criminals like Jeffrey Epstein and OJ Simpson. He is 85.
Momentum's coup in Labour
I don't think this is a case of better late than never. All of the conditions I am about to discuss within the Democratic Party and sympathetic corners of American society happened notwithstanding the influence of them and others like them that are still active in the party like Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. What I want to discuss today is the growing success of entryist movements within the Democratic Party. Entryists are small, radical activists that organize to take over a larger more well resourced organization from within and transform it to suit their needs. In the US the process is much more subtle, although I would argue we are living in the midst of one. However, you may be familiar with the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn (2015-20). The story of how it happened that the party of George Bush bestie Tony Blair careened so far to the left that its 2018 national conference featured a convention hall filled with party officials waving Palestine flags without a single Union Jack among them, is one of the most fascinating sagas that I followed in recent years. What few know is that Corbyn was brought into leadership in part thanks to an organization called Momentum which sought to drag the Labour Party away from neo-liberal economics and foreign intervention and back to hard-left socialism and a progressive foreign policy. Momentum was founded as a grassroots effort to elect Corbyn, and its leader curiously enough was a British Jew named Jonathan Lansman raised in an Orthodox home. It is possible that without the support of Lansman and Momentum, Corbyn's candidacy would have never happened to begin with. Until then he had been a largely anonymous backbencher apart from his central role in the Stop the War Coalition in 2002-03. His messages on economics and education reinvigorated the party and caused a massive membership spike. Momentum corralled the signatures needed to nominate Corbyn. They successfully solicited the support of trade unions who provided the organizational muscle that turned this late middle aged radical into the biggest crowd draw of any British politician in ages.
However, once Corbyn was elected leader Lansman often was having to do damage control to address the sundry accusations of Jew hatred within the party as well as past episodes of Corbyn having supported or fraternized with terror leaders. Once ensconced in the leadership position, Corbyn was too formidable for any critic from within Labour to take down; in fact within a year an effort to dump him through a parliamentary revolt and leadership election re-run ended in total defeat as he won a greater victory than his first. There remained pro-Israel groups within the party such as Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, but the broader membership and party base rejected them as "Zios" and "Blairites". Corbyn had become a cultural hero to the left. Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for the British people and everyone else) his leadership ended after a massive electoral defeat in 2019 that had nothing to do with Israel but rather his "neutral" position on Brexit. The consequences of the Momentum/Corbyn entryist movement continue to reverberate within Labour today as major organizations and unions linked to the party continue to embrace the same policies he supported including his position on Palestine. Corbyn himself came into politics from organized labour, so when his successor Sir Keir Starmer has attempted to steer Labour away from Corbyn's position on Israel-Palestine, the party's reliance on South Asian Muslim and youth voters has made his tenure very tumultuous. Does that sound familiar?
Big Tent, Small consolation
Corbyn's meteoric rise could not have happened the same way in the US. The Labour Party, as its name suggests, is deeply connected to trade unions in the UK and its leadership is elected at both the constituency and national level by membership. In the US entryist movements have a harder time seizing control of major parties due to the absence of a true membership system for either the Democrats or GOP and our convoluted primary system that varies from state to state. Therefore radicalism has progressed at a slower pace, but it is progressing nonetheless. For the pro-Palestine movement decades of involvement by activists in kindred causes and organizations has yielded fruit. Such activity is much more the domain of the Democratic Party than the Republicans. Until recently Republicans eschewed the type of mass movement organizing in question here. Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt the Democrats have been considered the party of organized labour, and later thanks to certain figures like Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. and Rep. John Lewis (GA) of the civil rights movement and minority communities. As organizations go, the pro-Palestine movement has embedded itself in all of these and all of them are aligned with the Democratic Party. Below I am listing such groups and linking their stances on Gaza.
NAACP (300,000) - The black civil rights movement has supported a ceasefire since November 2023.
SEIU (1.9M members)- The state employee union has supported a ceasefire since January.
ACT UP! - The LGBT civil rights and AIDS advocacy group called for a ceasefire in January.
UAW (971,000 members) - the auto workers union called for a ceasefire in December.
NEA (2.8M members) - the largest teachers union in the US reaffirmed a previous call for a ceasefire in February.
AFT (1.7M members) - the second largest teachers union in the US called for a ceasefire in January.
AFL-CIO (12.4M members) - the largest umbrella of labour unions in the US called for a ceasefire in February.
All of these decisions by major labour and advocacy groups to issue statements largely irrelevant to their stated purpose for existence should lead one to wonder: Why do teacher unions and civil rights organizations have any policy on Gaza, or any international issue that doesn't affect their members? The answer is that all of these have long been targets of entryism by pro-Palestine radicals, and they are far from the only ones. Often labour unions adopt policies and make endorsements without asking their membership, because in many workplaces the members are fairly inactive and rely on their stewards and business agents to make decisions. Therefore members that are more militant and active can seize control of locals and have a disproportionate effect on the broader organization's policy, and we get what we see in America where a series of tails wag their dogs. In January for example two union locals at the Port of Oakland attempted to block the loading of ships bound for Israel on the grounds that the cargo included arms that could be used against Gaza.
As mentioned, the Democratic Party has traditionally championed organized labour, and therefore Democratic candidates rely on these robust membership based organizations, in addition to non-profit activist groups, for endorsements, fundraising, voter engagement, event planning, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts, voter registration, advertisements, and other crucial elements of traditional campaign management. They have a major advantage in that they are able to bring politics into the workplace. When the AFL-CIO and UAW issue a statement on Gaza the White House, in particularly if it is a Democratic president, knows they have to be receptive of the message. Democrats also pride their party as being a "big tent", meaning that different constituencies with diverse interests are seen as building blocks of a winning combination, the "rainbow coalition" as former presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson called it in a speech before the 1984 Democratic National Convention. In this speech he made specific reference to minority groups including Arabs and Jews. While at the time this model of organizing failed, it was adopted during subsequent cycles, bolstering two victories by Bill Clinton and overwhelming landslide victories for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. It was during this period that Jewish Democrats were at the prime of their political influence, with many examples rising to unprecedented levels of leadership, from Rahm Emanuel to Dianne Feinstein, but that era is coming to a close. The Gaza War has also upended the Big Tent as pro-Israel and pro-Palestine elements have contradictory demands for policy action from the same presidential administration. It is entirely possible that pro-Palestine Democrats like Rep. Cori Bush (MO) could be voted out in primaries this year, however their activist base in organizations and unions do not face re-election and are not going away.
In 2020 when Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed in a New York Times candidate interview while running for the presidency that aid to Israel be conditioned on pursuing an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and "a range of human rights concerns" he was considered somewhat of an outlier in the Democratic field. However now four years later this is a mainstream position within the party being voiced by many establishment Democrats including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But what about Republicans?
A forgotten chapter of American politics is the fact that until the mid-1980s the most vocal anti-Israel voices in American politics were on the right, specifically two GOP congressmen, Rep. Paul Findley (IL) and Rep. Pete McCloskey (CA). Both of them left office in 1983 after electoral defeats, Findley ironically replaced by current Senator Dick Durbin who at the time was supported by AIPAC. McCloskey would later change his party affiliation to Democrat and in 2020 was a presidential elector for Joe Biden. Ron Paul's non-interventionist movement, first achieving prominence in 2008 during his first presidential run, is the most serious recent challenge to the relationship from within the Republican fold, but never achieved any headway with the party institutions the way I just outlined has happened within the Democratic Party. I have paid attention to a growing tendency on the political right to oppose the US-Israel alliance since roughly 2019 called the "Groyper Movement". As of yet it has not had any success on the policy level, creating much noise but achieving very little. Motivations for these movements include anger at foreign aid spending, a desire to end the US policy of world policing under both party administrations, and in some cases a backlash by traditional Christians who oppose pro-Israel evangelical views of the Middle East. I am completely aware that in the future the same swing away from sympathy with Israel could occur within the GOP as it has with the Democrats. It may not even take as long. I think that there are problems with both parties and not to trust either one, but make no mistake the Democratic Party is the one with much more acute divisions and extremism on this issue. In contrast to the Democrats and the left in general, conservatives do not organize and mobilize as well in society. How many conservative dominated colleges and universities are there? Unions? Social media companies? By this I mean that the institution is permeated with a culture centered in traditionalist views of the family and society, free market values, and the place of government in society. Chick-Fil-A, a Christian owned company for decades considered intolerant to gays and lesbians, has largely hewed the mainstream line on those issues has embraced a total DEI policy. Even some Catholic universities like Sacred Heart in Connecticut have offices of LGBT affairs including its own chaplain. Even if the Republican Party becomes hostile to Israel or full of Jew haters, its footprint in non-political workplaces and social spaces is very weak. When the GOP changes course on a given issue the
The solution I'm proposing is much different from what mainstream pro-Israel activists advocate. I've urged for the past six years for Americans and Israelis to oppose foreign aid and urge both countries' governments to end the dependent relationship. Until now many have greeted me either with rolled eyes or accusations of being a self-hating Jew, but I am far from the only person to say this. Columnist Caroline Glick has been vocal about how Israel is handcuffed by the US, as quoted in WSJ. In 2014 Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon warned about how dependence on the US would lead Israel into an unfavourable settlement with the Palestinians.
Turning back to the main theme, Jewish Democrats are feeling in this moment betrayed by their political allies and scapegoated by their Jewish critics on the right, but this moment isn't exclusive to them. There was ample warning that attitudes are changing towards Israel/Palestine affairs in American politics, yet Israel supporters were caught flat footed because many of the core institutions of a civil society - the media, universities, and membership-based organizations like unions - have already been dominated by their adversaries. Palestine supporters mobilized in Muslim and Arab communities threatening not to vote for Biden if he continued to give support for Israel. In desperate need of reliable votes in states like Michigan and Arizona, BIden has indeed adjusted his stance accordingly. If anything, my criticism is toward the politicians of both sides, Israeli leaders, AIPAC, and Jewish institutions like the ADL and AJC that saw this iceberg far ahead and only sought to protect the status quo. By compromizing its self-reliance, Israel is tying its future to the indulgence of the American political system, a choice that seems less wise by the day.
🇮🇱’s existence depends on 🇺🇸’s election cycle…not good. 🤦♀️