In The Arc of a Covenant, his book about the relationship between the United States and Israel, the US historian Walter Russell Mead observes that the Jewish state is “a speck on the map of the world” that nonetheless “occupies a continent in the American mind.” Judging by the passions unleashed in the current war between Israel and Hamas, this applies as much to Israel’s detractors as it does to its friends.
The ferocious antagonism toward Israel—emanating largely but not exclusively from the political Left—has put President Biden and his party in a tough spot. Amid a broader identity crisis, the Democratic Party is now riven over the question of America’s most intimate strategic partnership in the Middle East and the nature of its global role. This is dangerous politically for Democrats—unless they act swiftly to resolve their contradictions and offer a coherent design for American power in a tumultuous world, the bitter polarization within their coalition may produce a presidential defeat in November.
The pressures arising from the present war between Israel and Hamas have exposed and exacerbated the yawning gap between the Democratic old guard and an ascendant activist base that seeks to transform US foreign policy. A growing number of progressives have expressed their displeasure with the establishment and have begun to challenge Biden’s leadership. Indignant at the handling of the war, this faction has become a thorn in the flesh of the administration, which has responded by trying to placate Arab-American and Muslim leaders.
When Biden aides recently arrived in Michigan to conduct “community outreach,” one of the figures they met was Osama Siblani, editor of Arab American News and a sympathizer of Hamas and kindred jihadist movements. On the heels of the savage Hamas raid in Israel, Siblani joined a rally at which he denied that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Confronting this faction carries risks for Biden and his surrogates, but it is surely better than simply wishing or hoping that it will disappear of its own accord. The threatened boycott of the Democratic Party by this lunatic fringe, and the sordid attempt by the party to curry favor with it in response, could effectively wreck Biden’s re-election bid.
The consequences of the budding mutiny on the Left are of great interest, as are the factors motivating it. It cannot be understood without recognizing what Ezra Klein calls the “awkward shape” of the modern Democratic Party—a party defined by its commitment to the working classes even as it has ceased to retain their support. The Democrats’ new upscale constituency has brought political attitudes and allegiances that sit uncomfortably with those of traditional blue-collar Democrats. This mixture of old and new has sown ideological confusion. “It has become both the party of progressivism and of preservation,” writes Klein, “the party that promises both to defend American institutions and to reform them.”
This description of the party’s protean character rings true, but it omits that different factions are responsible for these dueling instincts. The Democratic coalition is not, in other words, a unified force extolling a complex hybrid vision of preservation and progressivism. Rather, it is split between increasingly hostile camps of preservationists and progressives. This fractious and contradictory quality has simultaneously diluted the party’s message, diminished its credibility, and dented its appeal.
As a result, despite some favorable social and economic trends in the country—from the decline in violent crime to reduced inflation—the Democratic ticket looks a lot more vulnerable than it did just a few months ago. A majority of Americans in the latest Harvard CAPS-Harris poll strongly or somewhat agree (page 44) that a vote for Biden this year is really a vote for President Kamala Harris. Signs of the president’s accelerating cognitive decline, and the bipartisan lack of confidence in his running mate, have some Democrats—and the few remaining anti-Trump Republicans—worried that Trump will prevail by default. The prospective Republican nominee’s best hope of re-election is to divide and conquer the Democrats, and progressives seem to be happy to help.
The intraparty conflict on the Left is evident across a wide variety of issues, but nowhere more so than in the contentious debate over US support for Israel. A bloc of disgruntled younger voters has recoiled from Biden’s support for Israel, which they consider an “oppressor” state in the international order. According to a recent YouGov poll, fully half of self-described Biden voters deem Israel’s campaign against Hamas to be “a genocide” against Palestinians. Since October, a well-organized band of activists has been repeatedly heckling the president for ignoring Palestinian suffering and risking American involvement in a widening war in the Middle East.
Whether out of genuine sympathy or an abundance of caution, party leaders have tried to split the difference, maintaining solidarity with Israel while seeking to placate this simmering rebellion. It isn’t customary for the organs of progressive opinion to depict radical factions threatening to abandon the party in a presidential election year in such an uncritical light. Disaffected Democrats opposed to, say, the administration’s onerous regulation of the energy industry, or its laxity regarding illegal immigration, have not been granted that liberty.
But it has become painfully apparent that another standard obtains for activists who have responded to the war in Israel and Gaza by proclaiming their readiness to bolt from the Democratic Party and sit out the election. Facing this potential scenario, high-ranking Democrats and prominent members of the media have been reduced to demagogy and semi-coherent pandering, even when the threats of defection have been explicit.
Take Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished Palestinian academic at Columbia University. Khalidi has made the unsubstantiated claim that “this administration has been worse for Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims than the Trump administration.” His conclusion? That he cannot vote for Biden in good conscience, and that anyone with a “moral sense” should likewise refrain from doing so.
The Biden administration has been unreliable and often incompetent in its stewardship of US foreign policy, but Khalidi’s argument fails in several ways. First, it implies that the interests of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are uniform when they are actually highly discrepant. Do the interests of Lebanese Druze bear any resemblance to those of Iran’s Shia theocracy? Do Coptic Christians share the political commitments of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt? Is there much overlap in the interests of Fatah bureaucrats in the West Bank and Hamas fighters in Gaza? The presumption that such a diverse array of communities could be served (or disserved) at the same time belies essential facts and makes a scholar look both politically and morally confused in the eyes of any thinking person acquainted with the affairs of the Middle East.
Moreover, President Trump did not merely arm and fund Israel—a regular feature of every US administration dating back to the Yom Kippur War—but he also signaled to the Israeli public and the Israeli political class that the US had no serious political or strategic obligations as regards the Palestinians at all. In four years of Trump, the worst tendencies in Israeli politics, including Benjamin Netanyahu’s galloping illiberalism and the settlers’ dream of annexing the West Bank, gathered momentum with scant pushback from a distant and distracted Washington.
Khalidi also ignores the counterfactual question of what might have happened had Hamas launched its attack on Trump’s watch. There is no reason to think that Trump would have served the “Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim” interests (whatever Khalidi and his ilk imagine those to be). If the American establishment is “blindly” supportive of Israel, as those Democrats scuttling away from Biden suggest, then why did it refuse to endorse Trump’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and to bring no pressure to bear against the settler project in the West Bank? By any measure, the Trump core of the Republican Party has been truly blind in its support of Israel, as well as deaf to the plight of the Palestinians.
At a minimum, it is reasonable to assume that Trump would have been unable and unwilling to restrain Israel’s retaliatory response in Gaza. Just as any Israeli Prime Minister would have struck back with overwhelming force against Hamas after its attack on October 7, so any conceivable American president would have strongly supported Israel in that endeavor. To reward Trump on account of Biden’s generic backing of Israel is perverse.
This may not be a part of a larger partisan realignment underway in American politics. (It seems exceedingly unlikely that pro-Palestinian activists will be found donning MAGA hats along with their kaffiyehs anytime soon.) But it would be complacent to assume that the lingering split over Israel could not deprive the incumbent president of critical votes in key swing states. And in such a scenario, the Democrats would not only lose the White House. Without the restraining presence of Biden at the helm, the party may well be delivered into progressive hands. At which point, Israel would become a partisan issue in American politics for the first time since its creation in 1948.
