Why are Democratic leaders still ignoring voters on Israel? | Norman Solomon

When the Democratic party’s governing body adjourned its meeting on Saturday in New Orleans, supporters of Palestine and an end of the genocide in Gaza had few reasons to celebrate. The Democratic National Committee had refused to give any ground to the large majority of the party’s voters with distinctly negative views of Israel.

Last summer, a Quinnipiac Poll found that 77% of Democrats agreed that “Israel is committing genocide.” Last month, an NBC poll found that registered Democrats – by a margin of 67-17% – were more sympathetic toward Palestinians than Israelis.

But the DNC continues to operate as if fully sealed off from the party’s voters on such matters. When the national meeting got under way on Thursday, the party’s resolutions committee proceeded to quickly discard a pair of resolutions critical of Israel.

One urged “an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory” as well as “pausing or conditioning US weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law”. Another included opposition to “military actions that endanger civilians or exacerbate repression” in Iran.

Those resolutions vanished in a matter of minutes as opponents shunted them aside to a snail’s-pace Middle East working group. That panel has scarcely met since it was announced last August by the DNC chair, Ken Martin. Only a minority of the panel’s eight members has a record of support for Palestinian rights, while several are fervent Zionists. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or compromising platitudes.

Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and former national security adviser to Kamala Harris, praised the DNC’s “rejection of two resolutions related to Israel”, which she called “out of step with the policies of the Democratic party”. That description was all too accurate. The resolutions were out of step with the party leadership because they supported the human rights of Palestinian people and opposed assaults on Gaza, Iran and other countries in the region.

When Soifer declared that “we’re grateful to DNC Chair Martin for establishing the Middle East Working Group last year,” it seemed to underscore that the panel has served as a stalling mechanism – deflecting efforts to get the DNC to actually take any stand against US support for Israel.

Outside of the Democratic leadership bubble, this extreme disconnect from the polled opinions of the party’s base might seem puzzling or even stunning. But party leaders are stuck in an anachronistic time warp, severely out of touch with – or contemptuous of – what most Democrats currently believe about Israel. Whether clueless or disingenuous, top Democrats keep insisting that the reality is not reality.

The New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who chairs the Democratic senatorial campaign committee, absurdly claimed last September that “nine out of 10 Democrats are pro-Israel”. Such assertions, whether based on wishful thinking or outright mendacity, reflect a determined unwillingness to face political realities.

That unwillingness manifests as political malpractice for Democratic leaders who are living in the past and alienating many in the party’s base. The dynamic is similar to how Kamala Harris’s refusal to distance from the Biden administration’s arming of Israel harmed her efforts to defeat Donald Trump in 2024.

The resolve to ignore the views of Democratic voters on Israel erodes the Democratic base, with party leaders carrying on as though moral concerns are not worth taking very seriously. In the process, official behavior at the top of the DNC indicates that decision-makers have risen to their level of moral incompetence.

In a recent essay, Ben Rhodes identified “a fatal blind spot within American liberalism, a devaluation of human life itself: the belief that a cohort of enlightened people could manage an empire while casting themselves as democrats”. That incisive observation, by a former deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, aptly describes the foreign policy mentality atop the Democratic party.

The “fatal blind spot within American liberalism” – with its “devaluation of human life itself” – has been on display at DNC meetings. In conversations, Martin has told me and countless others of his deep progressive commitments. And yet he has worked behind the scenes, ever since winning the position of chair more than a year ago, to make sure than no DNC resolution will emerge in any way critical of the Israeli government – which has been unequivocally judged by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to be guilty of genocide in Gaza.

The Democratic National Committee is a powerful model of what ails the party leadership at a time when the US-Israel alliance has been rampaging through the Middle East, terrorizing millions of people while leaving deaths and injuries and colossal destruction in its wake.

“There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves,” Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, wrote in his journal 35 years ago, at the time of the Gulf war. “We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”

But speaking such truth can be rare.

With few exceptions, the members of the DNC have been notably unwilling to break with the Democratic party’s power structure, and they routinely aspire to rise within it. That process is in sync with the US weapons pipeline continuing to supply Israel with armaments as it teams up with America to make war on a region in agony. But the DNC still cannot bring itself to make the slightest objection.

• Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy