In the aftermath of the big Democratic National Committee in New Orleans that ended on April 11, supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security adviser to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise — not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while it was supposedly hard at work.
On April 10, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well, at least as a charade for delay and obfuscation.
The day before that derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning U.S. weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”
That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”
Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”
The claim that the task force had met “once a month,” when in fact it had scarcely met, led me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that misinformation. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”
The basic problem with the working group is not merely that it hasn’t done much of anything in the eight months since DNC Chair Ken Martin announced it with great fanfare. The underlying hoax is that it was deliberately set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.
The basic problem with the DNC’s working group is not merely that it hasn’t done much of anything. It was deliberately set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.
Polling is clear. Three-quarters of Democratic voters agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and a large majority are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis, by a four-to-one margin. But only a minority of the Middle East Working Group’s eight members has a record of supporting Palestinian rights, while several are firm supporters of Israel. This oil-and-water mix seems destined to generate stalemate, or nothing more than platitudes. But stalemate and platitudes appear to be just fine from here to the horizon, as far as DNC leadership is concerned.
These kinds of stalling mechanisms, along with scant real representation, are nothing new in intra-party politics. In this case, an unfortunate boost has come from James Zogby, who for decades bravely worked inside the Democratic Party and elsewhere to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to U.S. foreign policy.
As the most prominent person in the Middle East Working Group, Zogby has hailed it as an important step forward. Aligning himself with Martin’s approach from the outset, he said that the new chair’s move to set it up was “politically thoughtful.”
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Zogby can remember when, in the 1980s, party leaders did not want to hear the “P-word,” meaning Palestinians. He has portrayed the current sparse intra-party discussion related to Israel as major progress. “Don’t count me among those who left New Orleans complaining of defeat,” Zogby wrote in an April 14 piece for The Nation.
After that article appeared, I spoke with Zogby, and he summarized his approach this way: “I have a tendency to feel like sometimes there are little victories, and I latch onto them. Moving to catch up to where Democrats are.”
Compare that approach to this assessment days ago from Mike Merryman-Lotze, the American Friends Service Committee’s director of Just Peace Global Policy: “The failure of the DNC to take even minimal action in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is shameful.”
When my RootsAction colleague India Walton loudly interrupted the DNC’s business as usual during its general session 10 days ago, she was challenging a political culture of conformity that has ongoing deadly consequences. The context involves a simple and crucial choice — between excessive patience and an urgency grounded in life-and-death human realities. Those realities exist very far away from the transactional atmosphere of entrenched political institutions.
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All this matters for at least two profound reasons: One is that, on the merits, silent or euphemistic complicity with Israel’s methodical policies in Gaza and the West Bank, which many observers have described as ethnic cleansing and genocide, is abhorrent.
And given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel could do serious damage to the voter turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time. (Polls have shown that was the case with Kamala Harris’ losing 2024 presidential campaign.) “Eight-in-10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents currently have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69 percent last year and 53 percent in 2022,” the Pew Research Center reported last week.
In these dystopian times, when realism is more important than ever, it’s a grave mistake to let rose-colored glasses distort our vision, or to substitute unmerited patience for vital urgency.
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from Norman Solomon
