Liberal Zionism and the Democratic Party

“Israel is not the most important issue in this district,” exclaimed U.S. Representative Dan Goldman from the Democratic debate stage back in June, baffled by the prospect that his political career would soon be over because of his position on that very topic. Goldman was facing an insurmountable primary challenge from former New York City comptroller Brad Lander, whose momentum was buoyed by the rising wave of pro-Palestine sentiment engendered by Israel’s annihilatory war against Gaza. Lander had gone on the record opposing AIPAC, opposed a “blank check” to Israel, and had not only acknowledged the genocide in Gaza, but also the one in southern Lebanon, something few American politicians dared to touch. However, despite these bonafides, Lander shares a political identity with his erstwhile opponent: like Goldman, he is a self-professed Liberal Zionist.

Since October 7th and the start of Israel’s unabated genocidal campaign, the U.S.-Israel relationship has moved to the center of debates around the future of the Democratic Party, after it tried as hard as it could to ignore, smother, and bury the problem in the 2024 election and paid bitterly for it. Many Democratic politicians and groups supporting the party have taken to criticizing Israel’s wars, supporting significant cuts and even halts to arms shipments, while still maintaining, like Lander, that they do in fact still support the Jewish state. West Bank settler and current Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter has decried this kind of stance, saying it reeks of “duplicity,” remarking in May, “How can you be pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies?”

For those reading the room, giving some sort of offering to pro-Palestine voters has become a must for anyone looking to run not only for localities or states with large Muslim minorities, as has been the accusation by Republicans and other strong backers of Israel, but for anyone thinking of perhaps running for president in 2028. But amidst these overtures—which have not only entailed a change in rhetoric, but have resulted in actual legislative movements and political risks being undertaken—a question mark still hangs overhead about their honesty, and the potential consequences of misunderstanding the Palestinian question.

The recent case of Congressman Ro Khanna presents an instructive example. Having once voted to defund UNRWA based on spurious and fabricated accusations of terrorist infiltration, Khanna made a journey this July to the occupied West Bank, hoping to meet with Palestinians who had been ousted in favor of Israeli settlements. There, he encountered armed settlers who stopped the sitting congressman’s vehicle in the southern West Bank and detained him for more than an hour with the direct assistance of occupying Israeli soldiers. In the aftermath of this incident, Khanna was praised for his bravery, his willingness to place himself in the line of fire, and to do what many elected officials would not: to bring the Palestinian issue directly into his line of sight. His victory lap, however, stalled when Khanna was confronted with a question about Palestinian resistance to the violent settlers and armed soldiers he witnessed.

Interviewing Khanna for Drop Site News, Jeremy Scahill asked the congressman if, since he acknowledged the oppression and discrimination Palestinians suffered, it was justified for them to take up arms against the Israeli soldiers who were occupying their land. Clearly uncomfortable with being asked if the attacks on October 7th that targeted military bases were justified, Khanna replied that he did not think that “Hamas had a right to attack Israeli soldiers”, and that such violence did not advance “peace” or “Palestinian statehood.” Later, in responding to criticism from American journalist Jasper Nathaniel that Khanna was unwilling to place “on the same level playing field as every other people in the world,” Khanna demurred, maintaining that the best way forward for the Palestinians was “through non-violence and having America and the world recognize their claims to justice.” Khanna was willing to defend his previous vote to supply $1 billion to Israel’s Iron Dome, its rocket defense system that allowed it to enforce its crippling blockade and continuous wars on the Gaza Strip, but Palestinians exercising any kind of sovereignty or self-defense, as any other society would be entitled to, was unconscionable.

As the example of Khanna suggests, many Democrats are attempting to stake out a pro-Palestine position while refusing to see Palestine as a society like any other, only willing to entertain discussion of its rights if its future position does not threaten the West’s unfettered control over Middle Eastern affairs. A rhetorical acknowledgment of the humanity of the Palestinians can be made, and has been made, but truly acknowledging their sovereign right, and what would be required of American politicians if they did, still remains distant. The term for this position is the one Lander so eagerly pinned to his chest: Liberal Zionism. Despite attempts in the Western media to herald its permanent demise or impending rebirth, it continues to stumble around the political landscape, zombified, attempting to stake an untenable position between life and death.

The persistence of this phenomenon, against predictions made by some leftists prior to 9/11 that Israel would one day be simply cast off when it became too much of a burden, has seen a plethora of different explanations emerge. Much has been said about the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups, with the argument made that the tens of millions of dollars that organizations like AIPAC throw into elections has effectively “captured” the Democratic Party. Undoubtedly, AIPAC’s money machine has proved formidable and remains capable of swaying elections with multi-million dollar ad buys even as their name becomes increasingly toxic. But placing so much importance on lobbying and accusations of systematic blackmail risks drawing the conclusion that if AIPAC were to suddenly vanish, the Democratic Party would immediately be able to breathe in fresh air, and abandon Israel come the next election cycle. This article of faith underplays the degree to which the Democratic Party, beyond its relationship to lobbyists, has an inveterate ideological and strategic investment in the State of Israel.

Democratic politicians have long spoken of Israel being a liberal light in the Middle East, a symbol of Jewish self-determination and a safe harbor for refugees fleeing persecution and pogroms abroad. Invoking the Holocaust and outside threats is common across the political spectrum in the United States, but Democrats have long spoken of their admiration for Israel’s ostensible left-wing character, stemming from the country’s long history of labor politics espoused by prime ministers like Golda Meir. A defender of Liberal Zionism may argue that the Democratic relationship with Israel is distinct in the ways they espouse it from the Republicans, the kind of vision that cements itself in open expressions of military power and dogwhistles of “civilizational” allyship, but the upshot of these approaches has been the same. Israel is the bulwark of the West, therefore its borders need to be policed, and its people fought for. Israel is a home for Jewish refugees with nowhere else to go, therefore the “demographic realities” of Arab births, in the words of Senator Elizabeth Warren, need to be warned of and dealt with. 

Palestine, conversely, has consistently been treated as an arena in which democracy and free expression is conditional on America’s interests. The 2006 Palestinian elections that saw Hamas sweep into power in Gaza led numerous Democrats to lament that the organization, which received 44% of the vote, was even allowed to enter the elections to begin with; then-Senator Hillary Clinton suggested that the United States should have rigged the election. Hamas receiving a plurality of votes then became the bedrock to punish Gaza in perpetuity, with Democratic congressmen like Eliot Engel tersely remarking that Gazans had chosen to “embrace terrorism” instead of building democracy, and Senator Chuck Schumer pushing in 2010 to “strangle [Gaza] economically until they see that’s not the way to go.” But such thumbs on the scale existed before Hamas even entered the Palestinian political process, with many Democrats giving their support to a President Bush-led initiative to force President Yasser Arafat, belonging to Fatah, to step down amidst the Second Intifada, with future president Joe Biden expressing a desire to “marginalize” the elected Palestinian president who had signed the Oslo Accords because he was unwilling to “make peace”. This denial of sovereignty has continued into the present day, with many Democrats, as well as Republicans, refusing to entertain a future where Palestinians can pick their own leaders.

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Despite an increasing willingness on the part of Democrats to voice criticisms of Israel and its conduct in Gaza, few are willing to argue that such a shift should be permanent, or signal any kind of long-term change beyond Netanyahu’s leadership. One congressman, Jake Auchincloss, justified his vote to eliminate over $3 billion in military funding for Israel by arguing it actually laid the groundwork for even greater and more sustainable cooperation in the future, and that after new elections in which presumably there would be a different result, “an opportunity to renew the U.S.-Israel alliance on shared principles and a bipartisan basis” could emerge. That want for Israel to be back in America’s good graces is palpable in many Democrats in both House and Senate, outside government and inside it; phrases like “full reset” and “renewal” are commonly heard among Democrats who have begrudgingly realized how far Israel has gone, but are still waiting for the proverbial storm to pass.

In this fantasy of renewal, many Democrats profess the hope that Benjamin Netanyahu’s eventual removal from office will pave the way for the end of such madness, that a peacemaker like Yitzhak Rabin will emerge once again in a landscape that becomes more right-wing with each passing year. But who, in this thought exercise, would be the savior of this project?

Some liberal media outlets have already begun to coalesce around the figure of Gadi Eisenkot, former IDF Chief of the General Staff, as the man who could bring about this reset. Eisenkot’s history as the originator of the Dahieh Doctrine, the policy of disproportionate punishment and destruction of civilian neighborhoods that laid the groundwork for the annihilation of Gaza, is of no matter. But if not Netanyahu and Eisenkot, then who? Naftali Bennett, the leader of Together, who once criticized Netanyahu for allowing Bedouins to settle too close to Jewish cities? Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s Democrats who decried the idea that the settler moniker for the West Bank, “Judea and Samaria”, was a right-wing term? What of the Arab parties, whom most of the Jewish political establishment refuse to sit in government with? Despite claims of  mass support in Israeli society, joint Israeli-Arab initiatives like A Place for Us All poll at only 0.5% of the Israeli electorate, well under the 3.25% threshold to be elected to the Knesset.

Those in power in Israel, and those who are poised to take power should Netanyahu be defeated in October, agree about what Palestine should be: a neutered, non-sovereign, non-existent state, its ostensible territory placed under Israeli “security control” with no real future to speak of, with the explicit belief that the Arabs will either leave on their own accord, be expelled, or die. Democrats who have come around on the issue of Gaza will of course claim that they oppose all of this. They want a future for the Palestinian people, a prosperous one, one in which Arabs and Israelis can get along in the land they both share, and one in which freedom is unassailable. But what real path exists for sovereignty for Palestinians when even in their ideal reality Palestinians remain fundamentally disenfranchised and the Middle East remains under America’s divine hand?

While the infamous Trump Peace Plan prior to 2023 featured a humiliating archipelago of Palestinian land, unable to control its own borders and indefinitely at the mercy of Israel’s will, Democratic proposals have not been much better. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all called for “demilitarized” Palestinian state during their presidencies. Chris Van Hollen, another prominent critic of the war against Gaza, signed onto a resolution calling for the same. Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, and others had signed onto a different resolution that said that any Palestinian state must first guarantee Israel’s own security, and that Hamas must unilaterally disarm and relinquish their democratically-elected power in order for a future Palestine to be in the good graces of the world.

Israel is a depreciating asset, one that has “lost its luster, but not its value” in the words of Lebanese writer Badr al-Ibrahim. Even as the Democratic Party has seen candidates backing Palestine win their primaries and shift the Overton window, one can almost set a watch to their eventual compromises, knowing that such positions cannot survive unfettered for very long within a party that still backs Israel and America’s superpower status to the hilt. Without much real possibility of internal reform within the Democratic Party, those in the U.S. pushing for a break in this country’s relationship with Israel, are better off placing their hopes elsewhere. What form that takes is theirs to consider, but on the other side of the world, the unsustainability of that relationship may finally be reaching the perihelion, as what was supposed to be a quick war to assert American and Israeli joint dominance has dragged out into a 6-month fight that has seen the US military footprint in the Middle East diminish against its will, and generals consider decisions on whether to protect Israel or to protect the “homeland”. In the words of Yemeni president Mahdi al-Mashat, “The era of attacks without a price is over.”