Jonathan S. Tobin
An election post-mortem should mean confronting rather than appeasing progressive antisemites. The future of a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus hangs in the balance.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), joined by fellow Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), departs from a news conference on restricting arms sales to Israel at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 19, 2024 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.
At least for now, the worst-case scenario for Israel has been averted. The decision by the Biden administration to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have mandated an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Gaza Strip was a setback for Hamas, as well as its allies and enablers in the international community. Had it passed, it would have prevented Israel from continuing efforts to mop up the remnants of the terror group and allowed Hamas to reassert control over parts of the area from which it launched the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
As important as that may be, what is uncertain is whether the motivations behind the veto will be reflected in the stands Democrats take in the coming years. With the party forced to ponder why exactly the voters rejected them in the 2024 election, both moderates and left-wingers are accusing each other of being to blame for the triumph of President-elect Donald Trump and the incoming GOP majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
It may be just one among many issues that will be part of the 2024 post-mortem debate. But their attitude towards Israel will be one of the key indications determining whether Democrats continue to drift to the left or move back to the center as they try to return to power.
No stab in the back
The American veto was contrary to the expectations of many in the pro-Israel community who feared that the lame-duck administration of President Joe Biden would stab the Jewish state in the back in much the same manner as did his old boss, former President Barack Obama. In December of 2016 with only a few weeks left in his term of office, Obama had ordered his U.N. ambassador not to veto a resolution that effectively branded the Jewish presence in much of Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria, as illegal.
The current resolution, which had the support of every one of the 10 non-permanent members of the UNSC (Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, South Korea and Switzerland) as well as the four other permanent members (the United Kingdom, Russia, France and China). But Washington had insisted that any ceasefire resolution must also explicitly state that the remaining 101 hostages still being held by Hamas somewhere in the Gaza Strip be released. The vetoed resolution mentioned the hostages but their theoretical release would have only come after Israel had been forced to stop its military pressure on Hamas. That would have guaranteed that their suffering would continue indefinitely and give the terrorists more leverage to demand more far-reaching Israeli concessions to secure the release of those captives who remain alive.
The veto might be a sign of an administration that—although it has been talking out of both sides of its mouth about the post-Oct. 7 war with Iran’s terror proxies—is still not ready to completely abandon Israel. Biden’s team of Obama alumni bitterly resents the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has courageously ignored most of their advice in the last year as he pursued victory over Hamas in the south and Hezbollah to the north. Many Democrats, including some inside the government as well as in Congress, were hoping for the administration to vent that resentment by letting a deeply prejudiced anti-Israel majority at the United Nations force Israel to let Hamas survive. The veto may well be an indication that even in the Biden White House, there is an understanding that punishing Israel for defending itself is immoral and against the strategic interests of the United States.
But with many questioning who is really in charge in Washington as an aging and visibly declining Biden seems increasingly detached from policy debates, it may also be a sign of the confusion and policy stasis that is inevitable in an essentially leaderless government.
Whatever the reason, the consequences of that decision shouldn’t be underestimated.
Had Biden let the current ceasefire resolution pass, it would have encouraged a triumphant Hamas to make good on its promises to inflict more barbaric Oct. 7-style horrors on Israelis. Yet barring a change of heart in the next two months (a possibility that can’t be discounted) before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, that danger has been averted.
In doing so, the administration has given some comfort to those who have not given up hope that a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus might be preserved.
Progressives embrace Hamas propaganda
Such hope has come under serious strain in the 13 months since the war on Hamas and other Iranian proxies began after Oct. 7. Democrats—most particularly, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—sought to balance their need to avoid alienating pro-Israel voters with a desire to avoid distancing the growing intersectional anti-Israel faction among Democrats. This faction, made up of not just the radicals of the far-left “Squad” in the House but of many of those who label themselves as “progressives,” has embraced Hamas propaganda about Israel committing war crimes and even the big lie about “genocide” in Gaza.
That’s the impetus for the push for Senate resolutions proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose goal was to prevent the transfer of offensive weapons from the United States to Israel. As the comments of those prominent Democrats and anti-Israeli groups that supported the measures indicated, the support for a ceasefire in Gaza on humanitarian grounds has morphed into an acceptance of the big lies spread by Israel’s enemies about Netanyahu pursuing “genocide” by deliberately seeking to starve Palestinians as well as the “indiscriminate” killings of civilians.
These charges have been refuted by those who have observed how scrupulous the Israel Defense Forces have been in trying to avoid civilian deaths. Jerusalem has also allowed humanitarian aid to flow continuously to Palestinians into Gaza, including areas controlled by Hamas, which steals the food and supplies for their own use. The claims about “genocide” and Israeli war crimes once only heard from radicals are now being voiced by more mainstream Democrats.
Given the overwhelming support for Israel among Republicans and the fact that many Democrats and the White House opposed it, Sanders’s effort never had a chance to pass even in a Senate still run by Biden’s party until it changes hands in January. But 18 Democrats, including some supposedly non-radicals like Sens. Dick Durban (D-Ill.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Ha.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.)—Schatz, Ossoff and Sanders are Jewish—joined with Senate left-wingers in seeking to disarm Israel.
The defeat of Sanders’s resolutions will, like the UNSC resolution, also be touted by pro-Israel Democrats as proof that the party has not abandoned the Jewish state. Still, the fact that so many Democrats were prepared to accept the misinformation about Israel’s actions promoted by antisemitic groups and others who are doing the bidding of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah in the United States is telling. It provides further evidence of the way that their party is increasingly divided about support for the Jewish state and ensuring the safety of American Jews under siege from leftists calling for Israel’s destruction and violence against Jews everywhere.
As indicated in an article by Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of The New York Times and an inveterate Israel-basher, the Democrats’ stand on Israel and the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism will be tested again before long. The unwillingness of many Democrats to vote for the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act—geared to ensure that the federal government uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of Jew-hatred when seeking to combat its spread on college campuses—is another indication of the effort to steer it further to the left.
Though outgoing Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has sought to postpone a vote on the act, he finally agreed to let it come to the Senate floor this week by tying it to another bill. Schumer’s own hypocritical betrayal of Jewish students was exposed by a House investigation of antisemitism at campuses like Columbia University.
Some 70 progressive Democrats and 21 GOP House members (including Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz) opposed it, though the Republicans did so out of a mistaken belief that its language identified Christian beliefs along with efforts to compare Israel to the Nazis as evidence of antisemitism. But many Democrats and the vast majority of Republicans will likely back it. Nevertheless, the debate within both parties about combating antisemitism and refusing to betray Israel signifies a lot about the future of American politics.
Election post-mortem
As is usually the case with election loss post-mortems, Democrats were quick to form a circular firing squad as both moderates and leftists sought to assign blame for Harris’s loss on their intra-party rivals, the candidate herself, Biden and anyone else they could think of.
Centrists want the party to free itself of the burden of defending radical ideologies like gender theory, critical race theory and intersectionality. Along with the party’s shift towards being the home of credentialed elites and its contempt for the working class, these toxic ideas have done much to tarnish the Democratic brand.
Left-wingers have spent the weeks since the election not just mourning Trump’s victory but accusing the half of the country that voted for him of being fascists, racists and misogynists. They want to double down on ideology, and blame Biden and Harris for being too centrist. In particular, they believe that the ambivalent policy towards Israel’s war on Islamist terrorists alienated young voters and others who might have turned out to support a party that embraced the Palestinian myth about Gaza genocide, Israeli war crimes and many other related issues.
This is deeply foolish since there were always more pro-Israel votes in the center to be lost by Harris’s inability to fully condemn the pro-Hamas mobs than on the antisemitic left, where left-wing extremists and Muslim Americans were demanding a more anti-Israel stand.
The logic of American politics dictates that Democrats will return to power when they shuck off the yoke of radicals. Doing otherwise is political malpractice and a gift to a GOP now faced with the challenge of governing. As Democrats face four years of a Trump 2.0 administration that is as pro-Israel as his first, the temptation to oppose everything he does may well shift even more in the party to the left as well as bolster the ranks of anti-Israel progressives.
For now, at least, in the halls of the United Nations and Congress, Israel can still count on some support from Democrats. But if a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus is increasingly a thing of the past, the threat comes almost entirely from a growing left-wing faction of the Democrats. The fate of that party, in addition to hopes to maintain support for the Jewish state on both sides of the aisle, may well hang on whether Israel-bashers continue to gain ground or are banished by responsible Democrats to the fever swamps of the far left, where they belong.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the 2023 North American Leaders’ Summit in Mexico City, Jan. 10, 2023. Credit: Sydney Phoenix/U.S. Department of Defense.
