Pirate's Cove

The NY Times’ Nathan Thrall has a long, long, long piece on the politics of the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to Israel, which starts out with a long discussion of how the Democrats were drafting their 2016 platform. The Hillary folks were sympathetic towards Israel, arguing against much of the toxic language against Israel and against the BDS movement so popular with the Leftist base. The Sanders folks, though, were very much for slamming Israel to the point of moving from being anti-Israel to being anti-Jew, which so often happens when people start down the road of slamming Israel and taking the side of the Palestinians

How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics

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Democrats and Republicans reported similar levels of sympathy for Israel from the late 1970s until the early 2000s. But in the past decade, a series of polls by the Pew Research Center show, a yawning gap has opened between the parties, with nearly three times as many Republicans as Democrats expressing more sympathy for Israel than for the Palestinians. These changes are driven, in part, by demographic trends. More than one-quarter of voters in the midterm election were white evangelicals, who, together with Jews, are the most pro-Israel religious group in the country, and who since the 1970s have largely supported the Republican Party. At the same time, some of the least pro-Israel groups — black people and Hispanics and the religiously unaffiliated, according to a 2018 Pew survey — have become a larger share of Democratic voters. Many blacks and Hispanics draw strong parallels between the discrimination they have suffered at home and the plight of Palestinians. As the Democratic Party is pulled toward a more progressive base and a future when a majority of the party will most likely be people of color, tensions over Israel have erupted.

In the past several months, a fierce debate over American support for Israel has periodically dominated the news cycle and overshadowed the Democrats’ policymaking agenda. In January, Republicans introduced a bill — the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 — backing legislation adopted in more than two dozen states that denies state contracts to or bars state investments with American individuals or groups who support boycotts of Israel or who refuse to sign oaths affirming they will not boycott Israel. Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a freshman Palestinian-American and one of two Muslim congresswomen, tweeted that the bill’s sponsors “forgot what country they represent.” A month later, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a freshman Somali-American who is the other Muslim congresswoman, tweeted that American politicians’ defense of Israel was “all about the Benjamins” — $100 bills — and later added that she was referring to the political influence of Aipac. As the furor grew, she apologized and deleted the tweet. A few weeks later, the storm over her remarks still raging, Omar said at a panel of progressive lawmakers, including Tlaib, that she wanted “to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

In the face of widespread criticism of Omar for wittingly or unwittingly deploying anti-Semitic tropes about “dual loyalty” and Jewish money controlling United States policy, Democratic leaders announced they were working on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. But in response to objections from progressive lawmakers and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who argued that Omar was singled out because she was a woman of color, the draft resolution was revised to condemn not just anti-Semitism but also anti-Muslim discrimination, upsetting some Jewish Democrats. The following day, President Trump told reporters: “The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They’ve become an anti-Jewish party.”

Again, what we see is that the attempts to slam Israel lead to anti-Semitism. This is rampant on many, many college campuses, where the BDS movement takes on a decidedly pro-Palestinian tone, and then the sympathies for the Palestinians (who lost the wars they started) turn towards hatred of Jews.

In 2018, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll of more than 1,500 Americans. Among Democrats who self-identified as liberal, nearly twice as many said they sympathized more with the Palestinians than with Israel. In 2016, a University of Maryland poll found that 60 percent of Democrats supported economic sanctions or taking more serious action in response to new Israeli settlements.

You can’t sympathize with terrorist and terrorist enablers and not end up hating Jews.

Members of the Democratic Party’s progressive activist base, by contrast, find themselves light years from their representatives in Washington. The Movement for Black Lives, the racial-justice coalition that includes the Black Lives Matter network, has called for supporting divestment campaigns with the goal of ending American military aid to Israel; the Democratic Socialists of America has endorsed B.D.S. Kate Gould, a lobbyist for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group dedicated to peace, justice and environmental stewardship, told me that generally even progressive members of Congress frame development aid for the Palestinians merely as help for people who are suffering. There is rarely any acknowledgment, she says, “that they are suffering because we are funding their oppression. Hello! You do know that we are funding the occupation?”

You used to have college kids running around with kiffeyahs on, scarfs worn by Palestinians for the Intifada, a terrorist action against Israel. Those kids are now adults and part of all these hardcore leftist groups, even leaders in them. And they’re bringing their Israel hatred turned Jew hatred views to the Democratic Party mainstream.

There is a lot more to the article. A lot. Worth the read. Further, we cannot assign anti-Israel nor anti-Jew beliefs to all Democrat, let’s be clear. Even some who want to be a little tougher on Israel are not necessarily anti-Israel. But, the movement is getting larger and more overt in the Democrat party as the younger crowd gets involved.

Read: NY Times: Why, Yes, Democrats Really Are Anti-Israel And Anti-Jew »