How and Why Democrats Are Turning a Crack In Support Between the U.S. and Israel Into a Chasm

The United States for decades has had interesting relationships with a lot of countries in the larger Middle East, mostly for strategic and economic reasons. The U.S. has only had, however, one true ally in the region, one that shares a common thread of adhering to Western democracy and values, and that is the state of Israel. 

Our presidents have come and gone, but the policy of the United States towards Israel has always been that there’s no daylight between us and the Israelis on the big things, even if politically, there was interference going on between the two countries. 

In 1996, President Bill Clinton, soon after his reelection was secured against Bob Dole, sent a team of political gurus, headed up by the legendary James Carville, to run Ehud Barak’s campaign to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu. Clinton, years later, admitted to the plan, although he said he at least had the sense to undermine and interfere with Israeli elections quietly. Netanyahu won, despite Clinton’s efforts.

In 2015, $350,000 of U.S. taxpayer dollars were routed by way of State Department grants to OneVoice to again defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in favor of someone more amenable to a two-state policy. Again, Obama did this quietly, trying to keep his hands clean, at least in the public eye. Netanyahu again beat his opponents, both in Israel and in Washington, D.C.

In neither of those two situations did the Democratic Party face the level of anti-Israel animus in their base that we see today. The Democrats then were pursuing the two-state policy, which has been a pipe dream that any leadership entity in the Gaza Strip or West Bank is unwilling to accept. If you listen to Palestinians or supporters of a “Free Palestine”, their desire is for a one-state policy – from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, Palestine will be free. There is no land from east to west from those two waterways in which Israel can remain if Palestine gets the rest of the land. And yet, the American political left clutches onto this failed classroom theory that a two-state solution and only a two-state solution can bring peace, regardless of the reality on the ground in the region. 

Joe Biden is now facing the worst of all political storms. He’s a believer in the failed two-state solution policy as the only way forward, even with Donald Trump’s foreign policy team showing with the Abraham Accords that economic accords can be reached between Israeli and Arab states when they unite around a desire to combat a common enemy in Iran. The Abraham Accords destroyed the argument behind the two-state solution, and Joe Biden doesn’t have the political or rhetorical ability to put that genie back in the bottle. 

Biden’s position is also complicated by the October 7th attacks by Hamas, and how much that event galvanized internal Israeli support to take on the existential threat by terrorists all around them and remove it root and branch, no matter the cost, and regardless of who around the world is with them or not. To the vast majority of Israelis, any idea of a two-state solution is a fantasy. And in reality, if you ask the anti-Hamas wing of the Democratic base, headed up by Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, they’re not for a two-state solution, either. They’re firmly in the ‘from the river to the sea’ camp. 

Biden is seeing polling in Michigan go south as Muslim-Americans, typically voting Democratic, are either staying home in the primaries or voting uncommitted. And the polling must be bad enough that Biden is desperate to apply a little two-state solution magic within the Democratic Party. But he’s got to walk a fine line, and a line that’s thinning by the day, in appeasing the growing anti-Israel wing of his base with the Jewish-American voters which have been rock solid for the Democrats for decades. 

New York Senator Chuck Schumer was chosen to deliver the message last week to call for regime change not in Iran, not Russia, not China, but in Israel. Netanyahu, it was decided, is the problem, not the Hamas terrorists who raped, killed, and kidnapped over 1,300 Jews, including some Americans. He gave his address from the well of the Senate, something truly unprecedented. Regime change of an ally has never been called for from the floor of a legislative chamber in Washington. How did Joe Biden react to Schumer? Thumbs up.

Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, in a White House press briefing Monday, exploited the gap between the U.S. and Israel even further. 

Sullivan is equating Netanyahu appearing as a guest on American television advocating Israel’s position with a major leader in the Democratic Party calling for regime change on the Senate floor, backed up by the American president. Nowhere in Israel’s legislative body, the Knesset,b will you hear an Israeli legislator calling for regime change in Washington, D.C. It just doesn’t happen. It’s actually anti-Israel libel in which Sullivan is engaging. 

Even worse, Sullivan is admitting the U.S. is interfering with Israeli politics, but playing whataboutism by claiming falsely Israel interferes with our elections more than we do in theirs. It’s like the old expression ‘Now that we’ve established that you’re for sale, we’re just haggling over the price.’ This comment takes what isn’t supposed to be daylight between the two nations, not a crack of light showing, and turning it into a canyon. It’s dangerous both in what it signals to our enemies internationally, and it’s dangerous because it encourages anti-Semitism here. For example, this is what passes for rational analysis on MSNBC by Joy Reid.

Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin are the same, in Reid’s eyes, because they’re intentionally prolonging wars to stay in power. Left out of her analysis is that Putin instigated the war against Ukraine and has committed countless atrocities and war crimes on innocents threatening NATO countries that if he eventually wins in Ukraine, he’ll absorb them to form his dream of a reconstituted Soviet bloc. Netanyahu did not start this war. Hamas started this war. Hezbollah is engaging in this war. Houthis in Yemen are injecting themselves into this war. Iran, ultimately, greenlit this war, financed the effort, and supplied the weaponry with which Hamas could fight it as long as they has. The IDF has suffered casualties specifically because of its painstaking and methodical attempts to take out terrorists while minimizing harm to innocents. Putin has shown no such care. There is no comparison at all between Netanyahu and Putin. Only an anti-Israeli partisan Democrat flirting with anti-Semitic libel would think otherwise. 

So why continue with this Biden strategy? Why use Schumer to be the bagman to attack Netanyahu, and by extension, the vast majority of Israelis who support the war effort against Hamas and other terrorists that threaten them? Because with a majority of American Jews, the two-state solution is still the best option or the least worst option. It’s the lifeline Biden is trying to use to keep American Jews in the fold and yet give enough red meat to appease the Tlaib wing and keep them at bay. 

Conventional wisdom would tell you that all of this is being done to protect Joe Biden’s flank in Michigan. That’s certainly true to the extent that Dearborn, and their tremendously high population of Muslim-American Democrats. But as Hugh Hewitt discussed this week with former Iraqi coalition government spokesman, podcaster, and author, Dan Senor, what all of the Israel statements are meant to shore up is Joe Biden’s presidential chance in Pennsylvania. 

Quite simply, the Philly suburbs are populated heavily by Jewish-American voters who tend to vote Democratic, at least historically. They’re on the fence right now, frightened by what they see in rising anti-Semitism being embraced and coddled within the Democratic Party. Biden’s trying to signal some normalcy by focusing on the two-state solution, which he thinks resonates with his Jewish voters. He’s also diverting attention away from his fecklessness in the Middle East by blame-shifting everything on Benjamin Netanyahu, as though it’s only the Prime Minister who is interested in keeping this war going, not the Israeli population writ large. As Senor quite rightly says, Joe Biden can’t win the presidency without winning Pennsylvania, and he can’t win Pennsylvania without winning the Philly suburbs.

Biden’s emerging electoral strategy is a willingness to sacrifice Nevada and Arizona, states he won in 2020, so long as he can retain the blue wall of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Those are the three states you’ll continue to see Biden visit, albeit feebly. Time will certainly tell if this gambit will pay off in November, but one thing is certain. Thus far, the anti-Israel Democratic base has not successfully been appeased, the protests of Democrats by Democrats at rallies and speeches all across the country continue, and chaos looms for Democrats in Chicago at their convention this summer. And all of that, along with rising anti-Semitism on college campuses, is only adding to the anxiety of the Jewish-American voters Joe Biden can’t afford to lose.

Watch polling in Pennsylvania. It’ll be the leading indicator of which way this election will turn.