The last stand of pro-Israel Democrats
The DNC could have sent a message of partial support for the Jewish state. Instead, it encouraged the pro-Hamas left and delayed hopes for a comeback.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Aug 28, 2025
There was a time when the moderate adults in charge of the Democratic Party weren’t afraid to use their power to marginalize radical leftists who hate Israel. But as was evident at last week’s meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis, that is no longer the case.
The good news is that the party establishment, which is to say, most officeholders and officials like the national committee members, hasn’t yet been completely bulldozed by the far left. That was made clear when the DNC voted down a resolution declaring its support for a Palestinian state and a total arms embargo on Israel with no condemnation of Hamas, the terrorist attacks of Oct. 7 or a call for the release of Israeli hostages. It’s also true that a majority of those present were prepared to back a competing resolution proposed by chairman Ken Martin that, while calling for “secure and unrestricted delivery of humanitarian assistance” to Gaza and a ceasefire, also demanded the release of hostages held in the Strip and a two-state solution.
Such a resolution was far from a ringing endorsement of the U.S.-Israel alliance since it envisioned an end to the war without a surrender of Hamas. That, of course, would essentially reward the Palestinians with a state for starting the current war with the unspeakable atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7 . Since it included mention of the hostages and envisioned a future in which the Jewish state would exist—albeit via a two-state scheme that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected—that’s what passes for pro-Israel sentiment among Democrats these days.
A party divided
Just at the moment when pro-Israel Democrats could have rightly celebrated the defeat of the intersectional and antisemitic wing of their party, Martin decided that even as weak an expression of support for Israel as the one that he had proposed was a bridge too far for the Democratic Party in 2025.
Instead of proceeding with the vote, Martin withdrew the resolution, declaring that “there’s a divide in our party on this issue.”
Explaining his puzzling move to surrender to his party’s left-wing members just at the moment when he could have sent a message making it clear that they weren’t in charge, Martin resorted to the kind of contemptible double talk that ought to cause even the most cynical partisan hacks to blush.
“This is a moment that calls for shared dialogue,” Martin said. “It calls for shared advocacy, and that’s why I’ve decided today, at this moment, listening to the testimony and listening to people in our party, to withdraw my amendment and resolution,” he said.
Which is to say: He lacked the courage to stand up for even a watered-down expression of support for the Jewish state. Either that, or he is too much of a realist to pretend that the DNC members who voted down the pro-Hamas resolution weren’t truly representative of sentiment in a party whose voters have largely abandoned support for Israel.
Some Jewish Democrats did their best to spin this discouraging decision as somehow a victory for their side or at least a defeat for their opponents. But the truth is that Martin’s waving of the white flag on the issue exemplified that the last stand of the pro-Israel Democrats has already taken place and that, far from courageously defending their position, they have already surrendered.
The formal takeover of the DNC by the intersectional Israel-hating left wing of the party will likely have to wait until at least 2028. At that point, the faction led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) may finally vanquish the last vestiges of the old party establishment that forced Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden down the throats of Democrats in 2016 and 2020. They’re also the same crowd that set in motion the coup against Biden in 2024 after his mental incapacity became too great to cover up, and then former Vice President Kamala Harris’s incompetent and ultimately losing campaign against President Donald Trump.
Martin’s timorous retreat at the DNC gathering reflected the growing hate for the Jewish state among Democrats, who have swallowed Hamas propaganda about Israel committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip and deliberately starving Palestinian Arabs. With the legacy liberal media mainstreaming such blood libels, it comes as little surprise that the latest Gallup poll showed that only 8% of Democrats back Israel in its war against Hamas, while 71% of Republicans side with it.
A viral moment
Martin’s decision illustrated how far the party establishment has moved away from its traditional pro-Israel positions. It also brought to mind a time when one of his predecessors was prepared to lie on national television to ensure that Democrats went to voters with a pro-Israel platform.
At the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., the delegates were asked to adopt a change to the party’s platform declaring their recognition of the fact that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. The measure was deemed necessary by party operatives who understood that President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign had prioritized a Jewish charm offensive to make up for the way he spent his first three years in office attacking Israel.
But to the consternation of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was then serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the two-thirds majority needed in the voice vote to make the change was clearly lacking.
In an epically embarrassing viral moment, Villaraigosa asked the delegates three times to vote. Each time he did so, it was clear that a majority of those voicing their opinion were opposed to affirming that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. The platform plank was meaningless, since everyone knew that Obama had no intention of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—something that happened after Donald Trump won the 2016 election. But the convention delegates, who were largely grass-roots party activists and very much to the left of the leaders of the Democrats, were having none of it.
Rather than admit defeat, Villaraigosa simply declared that the platform plank had actually passed with a two-thirds majority, despite the fact that everyone in the hall and the millions watching on television knew that most of those present actually had opposed it.
That was the first time the shift among Democrats became obvious to the general public. But it was not something their leaders were ready to concede, and if it required them to falsify convention votes to deny it, then that’s what they were prepared to do, even if it made them the butt of late-night comedy show jokes.
Fast-forward 13 years to the DNC meeting in Minneapolis, and instead of engaging in Stalinist-style democracy like the Charlotte “vote,” Martin believes that there’s no way to keep his party in the pro-Israel column.
That shouldn’t have surprised anyone after his response to the victory of Democratic Socialist and BDS-supporter Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral primary in June. Like other party leaders, not even Mamdani’s refusal to condemn pro-Hamas chants like “Globalize the intifada” was enough to warrant a disavowal of his candidacy from Martin. To the contrary, he said that Mamdani and, by extension, his supporters who favor the destruction of Israel, are valued members of the Democrats’ “big tent.”
Clueless about why they’re losing
Martin’s choice not to try to pull Democrats back to the political center on Israel was consistent with much of what went on at the DNC meeting. Much of the proceedings demonstrated that the party is still primarily concerned with appeasing the woke left. It started with a cringeworthy “land acknowledgement” about meeting on stolen Native American property and got progressively worse after that. Subsequent presentations and speeches aligned the party with extreme trans activism, support for illegal immigrants, and opposition to enforcing the law and securing America’s border, as well as assertions that an interest in cracking down on crime was a symptom of authoritarianism.
The party’s priorities seem to be affirming Trump derangement syndrome and pandering to left-wing ideologues.
Taken as a whole, it was a reminder that the Democrats are still clueless as to why they lost to Trump last year. As even The New York Times conceded in a recent article, the party is “hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.” As the analysis pointed out: “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections—and often by a lot.”
These numbers show that there has been a staggering 4.5 million voter swing toward the GOP in the last four years.
This realignment is being fueled by a sense that the Democrats have abandoned the interests of the working class of all races for those of the credentialed elites. Part of that is their embrace of woke leftist ideas on a host of cultural and political matters, of which their abandonment of Israel plays just a small part. On issue after issue—whether immigration, crime, trans obsession, college campus radicalism—Democrats have consistently placed themselves on the losing side of 80% to 20% splits among Americans. All their complaints about Trump or even the administration’s failings can’t make up for that kind of poor political judgment.
Liberal power is also being severely cut back by Trump’s efforts to squelch the left-leaning administrative “deep” state that enabled them to stay in control even after losing elections. The fact that the corporate mainstream press is not nearly as powerful as it once was is also crucial. The media landscape is changing as alternative, independent media outlets and podcasts are where more Americans are now consuming news and opinion. As was evident in 2024, it’s a factor that is hurting the Democrats.
That doesn’t guarantee that Democrats can’t take back at least partial control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections, especially the already evenly divided House of Representatives. The GOP could be tripped up by a variety of factors, including extremism on the far right, some of whose adherents are starting down the same woke antisemitic and anti-Israel rabbit hole as the Democrats.
The path to a comeback
No victory in politics is permanent, and—for all of the triumphalism we’re currently hearing from Trump and the Republicans—sooner or later, the Democrats are going to be back in power.
For that to happen, they’re going to have to stop being hostages to the radicals on the intersectional left. That was how their revival after the last period of total GOP dominance in the 1980s was able to happen. That was when President Bill Clinton dragged them back to the center after Ronald Reagan took advantage of that generation’s Democrats’ willingness to anchor themselves to unpopular left-wing positions.
The same thing is going to be necessary for that inevitable turning of the political tables to occur. Suffice it to say that if the latest DNC meeting is any indication of how Democrats are thinking, then perhaps Vice President JD Vance (who is now the frontrunner to succeed Trump as the Republican candidate in 2028) could be forgiven for thinking that the current GOP moment could last beyond the next four years.
One of the main differences between the early 1990s, when centrist Democrats took back their party, and today is the role social media plays in strengthening extremists, as well as the sort of political discourse in which any deviation from ideological purity (whether on the left or right) is severely punished. The ideological bifurcation of journalism—in which Americans on different sides of the political aisle no longer read, listen or watch the same media outlets—also makes it harder for centrists to prevail in intra-party struggles.
That’s why the inability of centrist Democrats to make a stand at the DNC on the Middle East ought to discourage more than just the pro-Israel community.
With grassroots Democrats so thoroughly captured by the intersectional left—and therefore willing to swallow pro-Hamas propaganda—there may be no way to reconstruct a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. But as Martin’s decision indicated, by allowing their party to be intimidated by extremists when it comes to hostility to Israel, Democrats are signaling to the country that they are uninterested in the sort of sensible centrism that might carve out a path for their return to power.
By refusing to confront the pro-Hamas left, Democrats are doing more than harming Israel. They’re also pigeonholing themselves as a party that is currently too enamored of extreme ideology to be assured of success. As long as that is true, their time in the wilderness of political opposition is likely to continue.
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