Are Far-Left Candidates Pushing the Democrats Further Qway from Israel?
jns.org
Many worry that the leftward shift among Democrats in their opposition to Trump during this election season may bring the party closer towards the anti-Israel views found on the party’s far-left, as exemplified by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
By Sean Savage
(July 27, 2018 / JNS) Much like the 2016 presidential election, the 2018 midterm congressional elections are shaping up to be one of the most contentious in recent memory. Democrats are attempting to retake both houses of Congress in a bid to serve as a check on U.S. President Donald Trump and to rectify their embarrassing defeat in 2016. Yet for the American Jewish and pro-Israel community, the upcoming midterms and their results may also have a profound effect on the future of bipartisan support for Israel.
Many worry that the leftward shift among Democrats in their opposition to Trump during this election season may bring the party closer towards the anti-Israel views found on the party’s far-left, as exemplified by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
One of the biggest surprises so far in the primary season was the upset victory by Democratic Socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over incumbent New York City Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in a party primary in June.
Shortly after her surprising primary victory, Ocasio-Cortez was criticized for a tweet that said Israel was committing a “massacre” in Gaza, in reference to the deaths of more than 60 Palestinian rioters massed along the Israel-Gaza on May 14, most of whom were later acknowledged to be members of Hamas.
In July, Ocasio-Cortez again drew criticism in an interview with PBS’s “Firing Line” when she said, “I also think that what people are starting to see—at least in the occupation of Palestine—is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition and that to me is just where I tend to come from on this issue.”
When pressed to expand on her comments, she explained how “Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes. Oh, I think—what I meant is that the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes … ”
And then when asked again to clarify, Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged that she is not familiar with the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I am not the expert at geopolitics on this issue,” she said with a laugh. “I am a firm believer in finding a two-state solution on this issue, and I’m happy to sit down with leaders on both of these—for me, I just look at things through a human-rights lens, and I may not use the right words. I know this is a very intense issue.”
While Ocasio-Cortez has drawn much of the attention, other Democratic candidates, such as Ilhan Omar, Leslie Cockburn and Scott Wallace, have also been criticized for their anti-Israel views or ties to pro-BDS groups.
Omar, a Minnesota state representative who is vying to replace Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.)—himself a vocal critic of Israel during his tenure in the House and who has been tied to the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan—has previously accused Israel of “evil doings” in the Gaza Strip, calling it an “apartheid state.”
Similarly, Cockburn, the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s fifth congressional district, wrote a book back into the early 1990s titled Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship that has been panned for peddling conspiracies theories and smears that depict Israel as manipulating U.S. foreign policy. The New York Times noted in its review of the book at the time that it was dedicated to “Israel bashing for its own sake,” and that its message was that Israelis “are a menace” who are responsible for “everything that ails us.”
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