Requiem for the Pro-Israel Democrat How the party of Truman became the party of Mamdani by Daniel J. Samet
https://www.commentary.org/articles/daniel-samet/democrats-break-up-with-israel/
The Democratic Party’s long-running love affair with Israel is over. Like most breakups, this one has turned ugly. The signs are omnipresent.
Washington Democrats are a case in point. Prominent Democratic politicians decry Israel’s supposed sins in Gaza and spare the culprit, Hamas. In 2024, then–Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer literally demanded the removal of Benjamin Netanyahu, the duly elected prime minister of a democratic ally in the grip of an existential war. In July 2025, 27 Democratic senators—a majority of their caucus—voted to withhold military assistance to Israel. Bernie Sanders, who led the legislative charge, bemoaned the fact that “American taxpayer dollars are being used to… support the cruelty of Netanyahu and his criminal ministers.” In August, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the House) said the war in Gaza was a “genocide.”
Democratic politicians at the local level have assumed an even more venomous affect. New York City’s likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, refused to denounce the genocidal cry “globalize the intifada” and opposed a day of Holocaust commemoration. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who runs the third-largest city in America, has worn a keffiyeh in public and called Israel’s actions “genocidal.” Staffers for Omar Fateh, who has a good shot at being the next mayor of Minneapolis, applauded the attacks of October 7, 2023.
The anti-Israel animus in the Democratic Party could very well accelerate. Democratic politicians lag behind the party’s grass roots when it comes to the Jewish state. Activists routinely protest Democratic leaders they see as too sympathetic to Israel. The numbers indicate that the rest of the party is with the activists. According to a recent Pew poll, 69 percent of Democrats view Israel unfavorably. That’s an astounding number for a party once admiring of the Jewish state.
“I saw a Palestinian senator, his name is Schumer. He’s a great Palestinian,” President Trump said this summer of the Democratic leader. “He’s become a Palestinian, he has abandoned the Jews.” In the comment was the very Trumpian mélange of overstatement and truth. Schumer, a self-styled shomer, who dubbed himself a “guardian of the people of Israel,” was once a stalwart Zionist voice in Congress. No more.
The pro-Israel Democrat is on his deathbed. And he was, for decades, a fixture of the American political scene. His death came, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, gradually, then suddenly. Democrats were adamant Zionists for decades. In 1991, for instance, 62 percent of Democrats supported Israel. They then grew increasingly critical of Israel before becoming outright hostile. The reason? The Democratic Party has fallen more and more into the thrall of far-left theories holding that Israel is a “settler-colonialist” oppressor deserving of scorn, not succor.
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The Democratic affinity for Israel was on display as early as 1948. Then it was President Harry Truman, a partisan Democrat if there ever was one, who overrode his own Department of State in recognizing the nascent State of Israel just 11 minutes into its life. Truman recognized that the Jewish state would be friendly to America, and he lent U.S. recognition accordingly. Supporting his decision were many rank-and-file Democrats who believed that it was the right thing to do.
Democrats liked much about Israel. They adored its cause. Zionism was about the rebirth of the Jewish people—and the advancement of progressive ideals. Democrats, whose id then as now was driven by gentry liberals, looked on with approval as the collective farming communities known as moshavim and kibbutzim spread throughout the Holy Land. The Jews tilling its soil were secular and economically radical, traits that made them even more appealing to Americans who considered themselves forward-thinking. To them, Israel represented a land of promise and equality. Burnishing this image was the bestselling Leon Uris novel Exodus (1958), adapted into a Hollywood epic starring Paul Newman two years later. Exodus told an uplifting story of strapping Jews determined to build in the desert a country of their own. Democrats identified strongly with it.
Indeed, some of the strongest supporters of Israel in the Democratic Party hailed from its left flank. Left-winger Henry Wallace, who served as vice president under Franklin Roosevelt before being removed from the Democratic ticket in 1944 for Harry Truman, was a true-blue Zionist. Running for president four years later as the Progressive Party candidate, Wallace blasted Truman for, among other things, being inadequately pro-Israel. Wallace and his far-left confreres cherished Israel because they could adduce it as proof that socialism could deliver equality, prosperity, and security.
Republicans had less sympathy for the Jewish state. Some, like Jewish Senator Jacob Javits of New York, were ardent Zionists, but their ranks were far thinner than on the Democratic side. Republicans disliked Israel’s socialist project, which some feared was Soviet Communism in disguise. And GOP presidents in particular tended to view Israel with more disfavor than did Democratic ones. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon never warmed to Israel as Democratic presidents did (although, in 1973, Nixon arguably or-dered the most far-reaching American intervention on Israel’s behalf until Donald Trump’s involvement in the strike on Iran’s nuclear program in 2025). Republicans tended to be more transactional in their approach to foreign policy. They appreciated what the oil-rich Gulf Arab states brought to the table and saw little value in Israel.
Far from being incompatible, as is often alleged today, liberalism and Zionism went hand in hand. Liberals saw in the Zionist project not only the flourishing of human rights and human dignity but also the resilience of the underdog. Small, poor Israel had fended off attacks by much larger Arab foes intent on destroying it. Its fight for survival inspired those on the left. Support for Israel was consistent with one of the central tenets of American liberalism: aiding the downtrodden. Strengthening support for Israel was the fact that this generation of Democrats was painfully aware of the Holocaust. They saw what had befallen the Jews when they lacked a state of their own, and they resolved that no such thing should ever be repeated. The answer was Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land.
Liberals were literally enamored of Israel’s founding generation of Labor politicians, from David Ben-Gurion to Moshe Dayan to Golda Meir (who grew up as Goldie Mabovitch in Milwaukee). They were Jewish Davids in resolute defense of their country against Arab Goliaths.
The three Kennedy brothers—John, Robert, and Ted—were all liberal icons and staunch Zionists. “Israel had given new hope to the persecuted and new dignity to the pattern of Jewish life,” John said while campaigning for president in 1960. He won 82 percent of the Jewish vote against Nixon that year.
JFK enacted policies favorable to Israel once in the White House. He supplied the Hawk missile, the first major weapon Washington sold Jerusalem, despite the objections of many in his administration. He told Foreign Minister Golda Meir that there was “a special relationship” between the two countries. His murder was deeply mourned in Israel. “The Government and people of Israel, and I personally, are shocked and deeply grieved by the tragic and dastardly assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” wrote Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who called the fallen American “a stout friend of Israel.” Israelis are still fond of JFK, and for good reason.
Robert and Ted had pro-Israel credentials as strong as their brother’s. While a young newspaper correspondent, RFK reported from Mandatory Palestine on the eve of Israel’s establishment in 1948. His visit imbued him with a Zionism that he would never relinquish. Throughout his political career, RFK’s increasingly progressive views, whether on domestic affairs or the Vietnam War, never precluded support for Israel. He supported military aid, a position that likely cost him his life when he was gunned down by Palestinian nationalist Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. Throughout his 47 years in the Senate, Ted Kennedy backed weapons sales and furnished strong verbal support. He was, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said upon his death, “a great friend of Israel.”
Joining Robert and Ted in Congress were other emphatic Zionists, such as Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington State, who backed Israel for strategic as well as ideological reasons. Hawks in the Democratic Party appreciated that Israel was helping to foil Soviet expansion in the Middle East. The party’s Cold Warriors, who were disproportionately Southern conservatives, grew more and more supportive. The stronger the Jewish state became, the easier it was to reconcile the U.S.-Israel relationship with national-security objectives. Congressional Democrats routinely favored pro-Israel legislation and challenged presidential policies of both parties that they deemed unfair to the Jewish state.
It helped that the American Jewish community, which was overwhelmingly Zionist, was very close to the Democratic Party. While sedulously working to maintain a nonpartisan image, mainstream Jewish organizations were full of and led by Democrats. Jacob Blaustein, who served as president of the American Jewish Committee, was a Democratic donor and insider. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was founded in 1954 before rising to prominence in subsequent decades, was mostly staffed by Democrats. It and other pro-Israel organizations helped consolidate the Democratic Party’s Zionist consensus.
Still, not all Democrats in Washington supported Israel with the same enthusiasm. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the influential Foreign Relations Committee and known for his dovish views on the Cold War, saw little strategic advantage in close ties with Israel. He preferred keeping it at arm’s length in favor of “an evenhanded policy in the Middle East.” He also resented what he considered the outsize influence of the pro-Israel lobby. Yet Fulbright was very much in the minority in his party.
The Six-Day War of 1967 vindicated their pro-Israel case. Israel’s stunning victory, not least its defeat of Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria, underscored that the Israelis could hold their own against their foes. It sent a powerful message to President Lyndon Johnson, who hastened the supply of advanced weaponry, notably F-4 Phantom jets, after the war. LBJ and many of his co-partisans were impressed by Israel’s military power and considered it an asset for the United States. Democrats had supported Israel on emotional grounds; now there was a strategic case to be made for it. Israel’s victory strengthened its standing in Washington.
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Yet the opposite was true for the cultural left. Student activists had previously been some of the strongest supporters of Israel. Following the Six-Day War, they turned against the Jewish state. Campuses seethed with anti-Israel bile. New Left mouthpiece Students for a Democratic Society soon tarred Israel with the worst of all slurs: imperialist. It and like-minded groups instead embraced the nascent Palestinian cause. The Palestinians, these Marxists believed, would help launch the global socialist revolution promised by their ideology, and they therefore deserved approbation. Zionism was no longer socialism’s harbinger. It was its assassin. Making the campus climate less hospitable for Israel were gobs of money coming from rich Arab countries like Saudi Arabia. They funded research holding Israel as one of the foremost causes of turmoil, if not the foremost cause, in the Middle East.
Leading scholars soon took up the anti-Zionist cause. Edward Said, a professor at Columbia University who wrote the 1978 book Orientalism, rallied fellow academics against Zionism. He asserted that Israel was an appendage of Western colonialism. The theories of Said and his bedfellows over subsequent decades displaced more-moderate scholarly outlooks toward Middle Eastern politics. Israeli “New Historians” like Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim assailed the Jewish state’s founding and bolstered the academic case against it. Middle Eastern Studies departments became anti-Israel. Students soon imbibed a Manichean view of the region. Zionists were wicked. Palestinians were just.
Outside of academia but deeply influenced by it, the Washington Democrats of the 1970s (many of whom had become politically minded at elite colleges) grew more critical of Israel. Their disenchantment accelerated in 1977, when Menachem Begin and his Likud Party won the Israeli elections. Their victory rocked Israeli politics. For the first time in its history, the right would govern the country. Begin was no Labor Zionist. He had led the Irgun paramilitary organization, not the more mainstream Haganah. The latter was acceptable to American liberals, who had been taught by the Ben-Gurions and their supporters to view Begin and the Irgunists as a trigger-happy terrorist mob.
Begin the politician opposed socialist policies and favored implementing capitalist reforms. He advocated a robust Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. Inside Israel, he depended on the political support of conservative Mizrahi Jews, not liberal Ashkenazi Jews. Israel’s Labor Zionist consensus had shattered, replaced by a more right-wing, assertive, and religious form of Jewish nationalism. Liberals there and here took exception to it. Begin’s victory presaged the arrival of future Israeli leaders like Netanyahu who had little in common with the Labor Zionists of old. American liberals found it harder and harder to see themselves reflected in a more conservative Israeli body politic.
President Jimmy Carter regarded Begin’s rise to power with alarm. Although the two men established a working relationship that culminated in the brokering of peace between Israel and Egypt, Carter never was fond of Begin’s Israel. His administration betrayed the Jewish state when, in 1979, Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, one of the most senior African Americans in government, clandestinely met with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, contravening American assurances not to legitimize the PLO.
Young took the fall by tendering his resignation, which some black organizations blamed on Zionist political power. Jesse Jackson claimed that “the Klan didn’t move on Andy,” intimating that Jews were the guilty ones. Richard Hatcher, the mayor of Gary, Indiana, remarked that, among blacks, “the trauma of the departure of Andrew Young certainly creates an amount of confusion over who your friends are and who your enemies are,” the implication being that Carter might not be able to count on black support in the following year’s presidential election. Blacks felt that one of their own had been felled by Zionists, and they held them responsible.
African Americans and white liberals were souring on Israel. This attitude reared its head two years later, when the New York Times called the application of Israeli sovereignty to the Golan Heights “gratuitous acts.” Once out of office, Carter went further than the Gray Lady when he labeled Israeli policies in Judea and Samaria “apartheid.” Carter was also known to posit that if his share of the Jewish vote had not plunged in 1980, he, and not Ronald Reagan, would have won the election.
Carter’s sour grapes attitude was easy to dismiss, but it was an early warning sign. As liberals felt freer and freer to criticize Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and the war in Lebanon in 1982, something different was occurring across the aisle. Republicans were slowly but surely shedding their reluctance to embrace Israel. Their party was becoming much more Zionist. It had discarded its earlier reticence to embrace the Jewish state.
This had to do in part with the increasing pull of evangelicals on the party. Pro-Israel pastors like Billy Graham grew disillusioned with the Democratic Party and instead rose to prominence in Republican politics. Graham and his fellow evangelical leaders deplored the preponderant influence of liberals on the Democratic side and preferred the conservative positions of the Republicans. They helped reorient the Republican Party in a more pro-Israel direction. The movement of evangelicals, who by the 1990s were favoring Republicans over Democrats by significant margins, from one party to the other made the Republican Party more Zionist. And as the War on Terror intensified, Republicans increasingly valued Israel’s counterterrorism expertise.
Republicans’ growing affinity for Israel hardly meant that most Democrats were turning against it. The latter remained pro-Israel. Consider something that used to be relatively noncontroversial for Democrats: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Only one Senate Democrat (Robert Byrd) voted against the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and called for the U.S. Embassy to be moved there from Tel Aviv. That the move didn’t happen until 2018 was, perversely, a sign of the need to pay lip service to American support. The changing politics of the Jerusalem issue reared its head at the Democratic National Convention in 2012. Needing approval from two-thirds of delegates to adopt an amendment to the party platform recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, DNC Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa failed to secure that majority after three votes. He finally overruled the more than one-third of very audible delegates opposed to the amendment and passed the motion anyway amid a chorus of boos.
When President Donald Trump announced in 2017 that he would formally recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocate the embassy, Democrats were less than enthused. Many of them criticized the president’s decision, including Senators Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy and Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, all of whom had voted for the legislation 22 years earlier.
What explained the drastic shift that occurred in less than one generation? The breakdown of the peace process in the new millennium contributed mightily. Liberal Democrats had greeted the Oslo Accords of the 1990s with delight, convinced that all Israel needed to do was channel John and Yoko and give peace a chance. Their enthusiasm turned to horror as the Oslo process failed. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Yasser Arafat spurned Ehud Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state at Camp David in 2000, and the second intifada engulfed the area as an immediate consequence of Barak’s offer.
Although most Democrats abhorred Palestinian suicide bombings, a growing number blamed Israel for the impasse. They viewed Israel’s security barrier and construction of Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria with revulsion, convinced that this was evidence of anti-Arab discrimination, if not apartheid. They lamented what they deemed the hard-line policies of Ariel Sharon, who came to power in 2001 and won another landslide victory in a second election in 2003. Liberal Americans reviled him, and grossly unfair media coverage contributed to Israel’s falling reputation among Democrats. For example, multiple mainstream outlets, including the Associated Press and the New York Times, circulated a photograph of a bloodied American Jewish student named Tuvia Grossman with a baton-wielding Israeli policeman behind him. The stories claimed that Grossman was a Palestinian truncheoned by an Israeli cop, but the reality was that a Jewish man had been beaten by Palestinians. Corrections ensued, but not before the public-relations damage had been done. By the time the second intifada ended in 2005, Democrats were less supportive of Israel than they had been five years earlier.
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It was in this context that Barack Obama rose to power. His presidency energized the party’s anti-Israel wing with dreams of hope and change. To Obama, they imputed their desires for a decidedly less Zionist foreign policy. Yet Obama hardly ran as an anti-Israel candidate. He prayed at the Western Wall during a trip to Israel in summer 2008 and called the Jewish state a “miracle.” His record in the White House was something wildly different. He and his administration were at loggerheads with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which they regarded with skepticism if not derision. They struck a deal with Iran that exchanged billions of dollars for temporary restrictions on its nuclear program. They considered Washington’s traditional orientation toward Israel and the Gulf Arab states mistaken, preferring to pivot toward Iran and its Shia clients. They went beyond mere opposition to Israeli “settlements” in Judea and Samaria, abstaining from a 2016 United Nations Security Council vote holding that the presence of Jews in East Jerusalem was illegal.
All the same, Obama refrained from going too far in the anti-Israel direction. He defended Israeli military actions during the 2014 war with Hamas. He inked a memorandum of understanding with Jerusalem supplying $38 billion in military aid over 10 years. He resisted the desires of the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party to break more resolutely with Jerusalem. Obama’s presidency did not sound the death knell of the pro-Israel Democrat, but it heralded the decline.
Growing hostility to Israel among Democrats coincided with the Obama era’s awokening. The party’s liberal class grew more and more obsessed with immutable traits such as race and gender and began to view all issues, including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, through the lens of victim and victimizer. In 2016, 40 percent of liberal Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians than with Israel, compared with 18 percent in 2001. As the party grew more secular and progressive, it no longer had a reflexively pro-Israel base like the Republican Party’s.
The Democratic Party’s position on Israel moved closer and closer to that of anti-Zionist academics. Intersectionality, the theory that all forms of discrimination are connected, came to be seen as representative of the Middle East. That spurred Representative Rashida Tlaib to remark that “the freedom of Palestinians is connected to the fight against oppression all over the world.” Tlaib was voicing an attitude held by more and more Democrats in a party increasingly sympathetic to the “Queers for Palestine” crowd.
The turn happened with breakneck speed under Joe Biden, Obama’s unlikely heir. Biden long fancied himself a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist. Yet the aging Delawarean was swimming against anti-Israel currents in his party. After Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, Biden’s default initial full-throated support for the latter clashed with the younger anti-Israel Obama retreads in his administration and the activist class. Biden’s view of the Jewish state, molded in the shadow of the Holocaust, made way for one much more opposed to Zionism. He soon criticized Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and said that pro-Hamas protesters “have a point.” He had a feeble response to the anti-Semitic upheaval that took over campuses far and wide.
Today it is untenable to argue, as Representative Jerry Nadler did in a 2021 New York Times op-ed titled “Democrats Have Not Changed Their Position on Israel,” that the party is not anti-Israel. The evidence supports the reverse. Some, like Senator John Fetterman, Congressman Ritchie Torres, and, to some extent, Governor Josh Shapiro, can still tout Zionist bona fides. But their stances are arresting because they have become so rare in the Democratic Party. They are now exceptions to the rule.
As Millennials and Zoomers, both of whom are far less Zionist than Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, take the reins from older generations, expect Democrats to grow even more hostile. There will be no more Chuck Schumers, whose rhetoric at least has been generally pro-Israel even if his actions have shown a degree of sheer cowardice almost without parallel, and more and more Zohran Mamdanis—who believe that their hostility to Israel is an element of their growing success and influence.
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