The Democratic Party has become an anti- Israel party. The Left’s turn against the Jewish state has taken decades — it began in the 1960s — but former President Barack Obama put it into high gear, and it has accelerated under his militant heirs.
The Senate recently rejected a measure sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to block military aid to Israel. Forty of 47 Democratic senators voted for the bill, which sought to end assistance to a longtime U.S. ally not only while it was engaged in a war against enemies of the West, but while it was fighting alongside the United States against Iran, a shared antagonist.
Other recent developments signal a broad shift in Democratic support.
Rahm Emanuel, a former congressman and Obama’s chief of staff, recently said there should be “no more U.S. military aid — financial assistance from the taxpayers — for Israel.” He added that Israel was a “country like all other allies of ours, Japan, South Korea, the Brits, the Germans … the days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel are over.”
Emanuel is a potential candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. That he felt the need to declare this position is telling. And he is not alone.
Jake Sullivan, former President Joe Biden’s national security adviser and a senior aide to Hillary Clinton, also supports cutting aid to Israel.
The Democratic Party once broadly supported Israel, but there has been a sea change.
As historian Joshua Muravchik argued in his 2014 book, Making David Into Goliath, the far Left steadily turned against Israel after the Jewish state’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Even back then, when Arab nations vowed to drive the Jews into the sea, American leftist protesters carried signs declaring “Israel is the aggressor.”
Once Israel’s power grew, the Left began to hate it and unleash their antisemitism. The Soviet Union launched a propaganda campaign depicting Israel as an evil colonizer. Many on the progressive Left bought it, hook, line, and sinker, overlooking the fact that Jews have lived in the land of Israel for more than 3,000 years and have been recognized as its rightful denizens, even by Arabs, up until the middle of the 20th century.
Obama made the ejection of the Jewish state mainstream on the Left. His officials called for “daylight” between Israel and the U.S.
The U.S. has often disagreed with Israel in the latter’s seven-decade history and withdrawn its support, but the Obama administration meant more than this. Its officials blamed Israel for the lack of a Palestinian state, a calumny in light of Palestinian leaders rejecting no fewer than half a dozen opportunities for statehood in the past three decades alone.
Obama brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, which seeks Israel’s destruction. That deal, including the pallets of cash that were part of it, emboldened Iran. Obama’s own defense intelligence chief conceded that Tehran would likely use the money to finance its terrorist proxies.
On Oct. 7, 2023, those proxies invaded Israel and massacred more Jewish civilians than in any outrage since the Holocaust, slaughtering more than 1,200 people.
Obama and his national security aides, including Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor, were quiet for days afterward. They have since returned to castigating the Jewish state. In Michigan and elsewhere, Democrats campaigning for office have joined them.
Israel is a magnificent strategic ally, with military and intelligence capabilities superior to those of any other American ally. America gets this partnership at a very low price compared to the costs of its alliances with many other states. To end military assistance to Israel now, while it is fighting and winning a war for its survival, would not just be a disgrace but would also be strategically foolish.
The U.S. wants to pivot to the Pacific, and it needs an ally willing to protect American interests in other regions while carrying a share of the defense burden.
Israel, a model ally, is doing just that when too many other allies cannot or will not. This is a truth lost on today’s Democratic Party.