The Israel debate America’s Democrats refuse to have

Support us US support for Israel is a hot-button political issue in American politics. Image: YouTube Screengrab This summer, House Democrats did something they’d mostly avoided for two years: they argued about Israel out loud. A doomed Republican amendment to strip aid to Israel forced two closed-door caucus meetings that several members described as intense. Then, leadership did what it usually does with this particular fight: it declined to resolve it and sent everyone home for recess. Asked directly where he stood on the amendment, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries only said that the party needed to “focus on actually achieving a two-state solution once and for all.” If you multiply that non-answer across two years of caucus meetings, primary results and dueling opinion pages, you get the current Democratic position on Israel: there isn’t one. The closest thing to an actual argument came last winter, when Ben Rhodes and Daniel Shapiro fought it out across The Times and The Atlantic. Rhodes’s charge was that reflexive deference to the Netanyahu government had cost Democrats moral standing and a generation of younger voters.

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