War Made Invisible – How America Hides the Human Toll or Its Military Machine
Recent Articles:
- The Winner at the DNC’s Latest Meeting? Israel, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
- Why are Democratic leaders still ignoring voters on Israel?
- While Distancing from AIPAC, Most 2028 Democratic Hopefuls Are Still Embracing Israel
- DNC Approach to Israel Is Political Malpractice and Moral Failure
- Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues
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The Winner at the DNC’s Latest Meeting? Israel, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.
By Norman Solomon
In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise – not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.
Last Friday, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article this way: “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well – as a charade for delay and obfuscation.
The day before the derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning U.S. weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”
That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”
Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”
The falsehood that the task force had met “once a month,” when actually it had scarcely met, was enough reason for me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that (mis)information. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”
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Why are Democratic leaders still ignoring voters on Israel?
Decisions at the latest Democratic National Committee meeting emphasized the disconnect between the party’s leadership and its base
By Norman Solomon / The Guardian
When the Democratic party’s governing body adjourned its meeting on Saturday in New Orleans, supporters of Palestine and an end of the genocide in Gaza had few reasons to celebrate. The Democratic National Committee had refused to give any ground to the large majority of the party’s voters with distinctly negative views of Israel.
Last summer, a Quinnipiac Poll found that 77% of Democrats agreed that “Israel is committing genocide”. Last month, an NBC poll found that 67% of Democrats felt more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis, compared with 17% who felt more sympathetic to Israelis.
But the DNC continues to operate as if fully sealed off from the party’s voters on such matters. When the national meeting got under way on Thursday, the party’s resolutions committee proceeded to quickly discard a pair of resolutions critical of Israel.
One urged “an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory” as well as “pausing or conditioning US weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law”. Another included opposition to “military actions that endanger civilians or exacerbate repression” in Iran.
Those resolutions vanished in a matter of minutes as opponents shunted them aside to a snail’s-pace Middle East working group. That panel has scarcely met since it was announced last August by the DNC chair, Ken Martin. Only a minority of the panel’s eight members has a record of support for Palestinian rights, while several are fervent Zionists. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or compromising platitudes.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and former national security adviser to Kamala Harris, praised the DNC’s “rejection of two resolutions related to Israel”, which she called “out of step with the policies of the Democratic party”. That description was all too accurate. The resolutions were out of step with the party leadership because they supported the human rights of Palestinian people and opposed assaults on Gaza, Iran and other countries in the region.
When Soifer declared, “We’re grateful to DNC chair Martin for establishing the Middle East working group last year,” it seemed to underscore that the panel has served as a stalling mechanism – deflecting efforts to get the DNC to actually take any stand against US support for Israel.
Outside of the Democratic leadership bubble, this extreme disconnect from the polled opinions of the party’s base might seem puzzling or even stunning. But party leaders are stuck in an anachronistic time warp, severely out of touch with – or contemptuous of – what most Democrats currently believe about Israel. Whether clueless or disingenuous, top Democrats keep insisting that the reality is not reality.
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While Distancing from AIPAC, Most 2028 Democratic Hopefuls Are Still Embracing Israel
In sharp contrast to confronting the immorality of arming Israel’s genocidal policies, simply promising not to take AIPAC money is easy.
By Norman Solomon
After decades of bipartisan deference to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the likely contenders for the next Democratic presidential nomination have been distancing themselves from the powerful organization. The shift is significant. But disavowing AIPAC has become a box-checking exercise, useful for politicians who remain firm supporters of Israel.
Polling last month found that registered Democrats – by a margin of 67-17 percent – were more sympathetic toward Palestinians than Israelis. For elected officials on automatic pilot for Israel, such numbers are a big jolt. In response, the evident quest is to satisfy the majority of Democratic voters who have negative views of Israel, while at the same time not angering its supporters.
While AIPAC and perhaps other pro-Israel groups must now cope with being shunned by many Democratic politicians, the implications for U.S. policy toward Israel are another matter. The Times of Israel reports that “none of the potential 2028 Democratic Party candidates has embraced AIPAC,” but the ultimate goal of such organizations is to prevent federal officeholders from impeding the massive pipeline of American weapons to Israel or fracturing the U.S.-Israel military alliance.
“It’s not just avoiding AIPAC money,” Congressman Ro Khanna told me. “It’s the guts to take them on with clear policy.” Khanna has stressed that “what matters more is the clarity of calling what happened a genocide and stopping military sales to Israel used to kill civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.”
As vocal opponents of U.S. arms shipments to Israel, Khanna and Senator Chris Van Hollen are unusual in the field of expected Democratic presidential candidates. That’s why the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, singled them out for denunciation last month at the ADL’s national conference, complete with the timeworn technique of insinuating antisemitism.
In sharp contrast to confronting the immorality of arming Israel’s genocidal policies, simply promising not to take AIPAC money is easy. As if to show how valueless such a pledge can be, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear stuck like glue to standard pro-Israel talking points during a national interview this spring. Along the way, he refused to call what Israel has done in Gaza “genocide,” complaining “that’s becoming one of those new litmus tests that we said we would never do as a party again.”
(Khanna replied with a pointed tweet saying: “Yes, standing up for human rights is the most basic litmus test. Our party needs a new moral direction.”)
The governor getting the most attention for 2028, California’s Gavin Newsom, has offered assurances that he will never take AIPAC money. In an early March interview, he seemed to compare Israel to an “apartheid state” – but later emphatically backtracked, expressing regret over using the word “apartheid” and declaring: “I revere the state of Israel. I’m proud to support the state of Israel.” That expression of reverence came more than three weeks after Israel had initiated its current wars on Iran and Lebanon.
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DNC Approach to Israel Is Political Malpractice and Moral Failure
By Norman Solomon
When the governing body of the Democratic Party convenes next month, it will face a challenge to its support for Israel. The Democratic National Committee has evaded the fact that large majorities of Democrats oppose continuing military aid to Israel and believe it has committed genocide in Gaza. The stage is set for jarring discord when the DNC’s 450 members gather in New Orleans.
An NBC poll released this week underscores the depth of the DNC’s political folly. The results were lopsided, by a 67-17 percent margin in favor of Palestinians, when the survey asked Democrats: “Are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?”
The DNC leadership has stayed on a collision course with political realities about Israel. Last August, while a Gallup poll was showing that just 8 percent of Democrats approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, DNC chair Ken Martin said at a meeting of delegates from across the country that “there’s a divide in our party on this issue.” He didn’t acknowledge that the crucial divide is actually between the party’s leadership and Democrats nationwide.
At that summer meeting, amid contention over U.S. policies toward Israel, Martin withdrew his party-line resolution after it won and after a pro-Palestinian rights measure lost. He called for “shared dialogue” and “shared advocacy,” announcing that he would appoint a task force “comprised of stakeholders on all sides of this to continue to have the conversation.” Martin declared that “this crisis in Gaza is urgent” and an “emergency.”
But the “emergency” lost its urgency as soon as the DNC adjourned and the media spotlight disappeared. Six months passed before the first meeting of the task force, which by then had been downgraded to a “working group.”
The working group’s convener (selected by Martin) is James Zogby, a longtime advocate for Palestinian rights. Zogby had greeted Martin’s task-force announcement with praise, calling it “politically thoughtful” and a recognition of “the reality that the status quo has become unacceptable and untenable.”
But more than six months later, the status quo remains undisturbed as the DNC’s Middle East Working Group proceeds at a snail’s pace. And the composition of the eight-member panel makes it foreseeably incapable of reaching its purported goal to “help us sort out how our party deals with America’s policies in the Middle East.”
The working group is an oil-and-water mix of fully incompatible views on Palestinian rights and Israeli power. Some on the DNC panel want an embargo on U.S. arms to Israel, while others firmly oppose any such step. One member of the working group, Andrew Lachman, has led fights inside the California Democratic Party to thwart actions or statements critical of Israel. He is currently the president of Democrats for Israel – California.
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Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues
By Norman Solomon
When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.
Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. “Truth and Consequence,” being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.
“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.
The book’s subtitle – offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” – could hardly be more timely.
Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.
At the center of “Truth and Consequence” are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.
“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.
“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”
“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.
“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”
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The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think
By Norman Solomon
California Governor Gavin Newsom has made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires in the state. Many national polls now rank him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, but aligning with the ultra-wealthy is not auspicious for wooing the party’s voters. Last year, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters reported that a whopping 86 percent of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”
Newsom has drawn widespread praise for waging an aggressive war of words against President Trump. But few people outside of California know much about the governor’s actual record. Many Democratic voters will be turned off to learn that his fervent opposition to a billionaire tax is part of an overall political approach that has trended more and more corporate-friendly.
A year ago, Newsom sent about 100 leaders of California-based companies a prepaid cell phone “programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself,” Politico reported. One note to the CEO of a big tech corporation said, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.” While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food – in a state where 7 million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.
The latest Newsom budget, released last month, continues his trajectory away from social compassion. “The governor’s 2026-27 spending plan balances the budget by dodging the harsh realities of the Republican megabill, H.R. 1, and maintains state cuts to vital public supports, like Medi-Cal, enacted as part of the current-year budget,” the California Budget & Policy Center pointed out. “Governor Newsom’s reluctance to propose meaningful revenue solutions to help blunt the harm of federal cuts undermines his posture to counter the Trump administration.” The statement said that the proposed budget “will leave many Californians without food assistance and healthcare coverage.”
So far, key facts about Newsom’s policy priorities have scarcely gone beyond California’s borders. “National media have focused on Newsom as a personality and potential White House candidate and have almost completely ignored what he has and has not done as a governor,” said columnist Dan Walters, whose five decades covering California politics included 33 years at The Sacramento Bee. “It’s a perpetual failing of national political media to be more interested in image and gamesmanship rather than actual actions, the sizzle rather than the steak, and Newsom is very adept at exploiting that tendency.”
Walters told me that Newsom “has generally avoided direct conflicts with his fellow millionaires, such as discouraging tax increases, and has danced between corporations and labor unions on bread-and-butter issues such as minimum wages. He’s also quietly moved away from environmental issues, most notably shifting from condemnation of the oil industry for price gouging and pollution to encouraging the industry to increase production and keep refineries operating.”
Newsom angered climate activists last fall by signing his bill to open up thousands of new oil wells. Noting that “Newsom just championed a plan to dramatically expand oil drilling in California,” the Oil and Gas Action Network said that he “can’t claim climate leadership while giving Big Oil what it wants.” Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben, responded by denouncing “Newsom’s Big Oil backslide” and accused the governor of “backtracking on key climate and community health commitments.”
Great efforts to curb the ubiquitous toxic impacts of PFAS “forever chemicals” hit a wall in October when Newsom vetoed legislation to ban them in such consumer items as cookware, dental floss and cleaning products. “This bill had huge support from both within the state and beyond, and yet, apparently, the governor was interested only in the one sector opposing it – the cookware industry,” said Clean Water Action policy director Andria Ventura. The organization put the veto in context, observing that “the governor seems determined to move away from his pro-environment past.”
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Ending Republican Control Will Require Overcoming the Democratic Leadership
“The fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight.”
By Norman Solomon
The past year has completely discredited any claim that choosing between the Democratic and Republican parties would be merely a matter of “pick your poison” with the same end result. In countless terrible ways, the last 12 months have shown that Donald Trump’s party is bent on methodically inflicting vast cruelty and injustice while aiming to crush what’s left of democracy and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leadership persists with the kind of elitist political approach that helped Trump win in 2024. Hidebound and unimaginative, Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries have been incapable of inspiring the people whose high-turnout votes will be essential to ending Republican control of Congress and the White House.
The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively counter bogus right-wing populism. And so, the fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight.
Advocates for progressive change will remain on the defensive as long as the Trump party is in power. With the entire future at stake, social movements on the left should have a focus on organizing to oust Republicans from control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.
The point isn’t that Democrats deserve to win – it’s that people certainly don’t deserve to live under Republican rule, and ending it is the first electoral step toward a federal government that serves the broad public instead of powerfully destructive and violent elites. Like it or not, in almost every case the only candidates in a position to defeat Republicans for the House and Senate this year will have a “D” after their name.
Democratic Party leaders have dodged coming to terms with reasons why their party lost the White House in 2024, preferring to make a protracted show of scratching their chins and puzzling over the steep falloff of support from working-class voters of all colors. The Democratic National Committee’s refusal to release its autopsy report, assessing what went wrong in the election, underscores the party’s aversion to serious introspection.
Cogent answers are readily available, but top Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries refuse to heed them. If the party wants to regain and expand support from working-class voters, it must fight for programs that they clearly want.
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Why is the Democratic party hiding its 2024 autopsy report?
By Norman Solomon
If the DNC isn’t open and transparent about why they lost, then how can we be sure they will learn their lesson this time?
The Democratic National Committee’s decision to block the release of its own autopsy report on the 2024 election is stunning but not surprising. Averse to unpleasant candor, the Democrats’ governing body functions more like a PR firm than a political organization devoted to grassroots capacities for winning elections. The party’s leaders pose as immune from critique, even if they have led the party to disaster.
Unwilling to depart from the party establishment’s culture of conformity, the DNC has remained under the Biden-Harris shadow throughout 2025. Release of an official autopsy might have shown that party leaders actually want to encourage public discourse about the missteps that enabled Donald Trump to become president again. But the DNC is proceeding as if there’s nothing to be learned from the tragic debacle of 2024 that its leaders don’t already know – and they don’t need to share their purported wisdom with anyone else.
In early December, the DNC featured Kamala Harris as the keynote speaker at the semi-annual meeting of its 450 members. Predictably, her formulaic speech received a standing ovation. No matter that in recent months, on the long book tour promoting her campaign memoir, Harris was notably incapable of responding with any coherence to questions about why as vice-president she claimed that Biden was fit to run for president in 2024 or, for that matter, to be president for another four years.
The DNC’s refusal to release its autopsy is in keeping with a pattern of evading hard truths that led virtually every elected Democrat in Washington to go along with President Biden’s insistence on running for re-election until his awful debate performance in late June 2024. Meanwhile, big majorities of Democratic voters were continually telling pollsters that they didn’t want Biden to run again.
An autopsy report with any value would not dodge such matters. Nor would it elide sensible questions about how much money went to insider consultants and advertising contractors as the Harris campaign managed to spend $1.5bn during the hallowed 107 days of her presidential campaign last year. An autopsy might also probe the moral and political consequences of nominee Harris continuing to toe the Biden line for huge arms shipments to Israel while its military continued to slaughter Palestinian civilians in Gaza; during the campaign and afterward, polling showed that she would have gained a substantial boost of votes by calling for an arms embargo.
Months ago, news accounts surfaced that release of the DNC’s autopsy would be postponed until after the November election. The draft autopsy reportedly avoided casting blame on Biden or Harris or other Democratic leaders. But as it turned out, even such a tepid autopsy would be too hot for the DNC leadership to handle.
In mid-December, when DNC chair Ken Martin announced the decision to withhold the autopsy from public view, his rationale reeked of elitism, perfumed as pragmatism: “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.” The actual message to the party’s base – including millions of loyal volunteers and small donors – was that they couldn’t be trusted to know what party chiefs have learned from a report based on hundreds of interviews with people in all 50 states. At the DNC, the political calculus is that the basis for sharing such information should be need-to-know, and ordinary Democrats don’t need to.
Martin’s explanation for hiding the autopsy – his claim that winning in the future would be hampered by the “distraction” of assessing the past – is backwards. Public candor about why Democrats lost the White House is not a “distraction” – it’s vital for disrupting the party’s repeated compulsion of making the same mistakes all over again.
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We Need to Know How Corporate Democrats Made President Trump Possible
By Norman Solomon
Ten years after Donald Trump first ran for president, he stands at the helm of Titanic America. How did this happen?
No factors were more pivotal than the outlooks and actions of the Democratic Party leadership. Scrutinizing them now is vital not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a clear focus on ways to prevent further catastrophe.
Here’s actual history that corporate Democrats pretend didn’t happen:
2016: Hillary Clinton offers more of the status quo. Her allies in the Democratic Party pull out all the stops so she can win the party’s presidential nomination. With a big assist from the Democratic National Committee, she prevails over the strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders – but her campaign trail goes downhill from there. After rallying behind Sanders’s genuine progressive populism, many young people don’t trust the pseudo-populism of Clinton’s campaign. She has earned a millennial problem, and it prevents her from becoming president.
2017: Democratic Party leaders can hardly blame themselves or their nominee for the virtually unbelievable circumstance of the Trump presidency. A critical focus on Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street won’t do. Neither will critiquing her thinly veiled contempt for the progressive wing of the party. But blaming Trump’s victory on Russia becomes an obsessive theme.
2018: The Democratic leadership is mapping out a battle plan for the midterm elections in November. At the same time, a key priority is to thwart the inside threat posed by progressive forces. Establishment Democrats are keeping a watchful eye and political guns trained on Bernie Sanders.
2019: Democrats take control of the House, and a large cast of political characters is off and running for the party’s presidential nomination. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren are at the left edge, while more than a dozen others jostle for media attention. For elites determined to retain undemocratic power, seeing either Sanders or Warren in the Oval Office would be the worst possible outcome.
2020: Early in the year, the economic populism of the Sanders campaign continues to catch fire, while many forces team up to function as fire extinguishers. The Democratic Party establishment acts to smother the grassroots blaze. After Joe Biden’s fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary puts his campaign on life-support, rescue comes eighteen days later from South Carolina, where Biden wins a landslide primary victory – and then several corporate-friendly contenders quickly drop out of the race and effusively endorse him. When Biden clinches the nomination, progressives largely close ranks behind him to defeat Trump. Biden squeaks through.
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Democrats in Congress Are Out of Touch With Constituents on Israeli Genocide
By Norman Solomon
Last month, some House members publicly acknowledged that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. It’s a judgment that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unequivocally proclaimed a year ago. Israeli human-rights organizations have reached the same conclusion. But such clarity is sparse in Congress.
And no wonder. Genocide denial is needed for continuing to appropriate billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, as most legislators have kept doing. Congress members would find it very difficult to admit that Israeli forces are committing genocide while voting to send them more weaponry.
Three weeks ago, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced a resolution titled “Recognizing the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Twenty-one House colleagues, all of them Democrats, signed on as co-sponsors. They account for 10 percent of the Democrats in Congress.
In sharp contrast, a national Quinnipiac Poll found that 77 percent of Democrats “think Israel is committing genocide.” That means there is a 67 percent gap between what the elected Democrats are willing to say and what the people who elected them believe. The huge gap has big implications for the party’s primaries in the midterm elections next year, and then in the race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.
One of the likely candidates in that race, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), is speaking out in ways that fit with the overwhelming views of Democratic voters. “I agree with the UN commission’s heartbreaking finding that there is a genocide in Gaza,” he tweeted as autumn began. “What matters is what we do about it – stop military sales that are being used to kill civilians and recognize a Palestinian state.” Consistent with that position, the California congressman was one of the score of Democrats who signed on as co-sponsors of Tlaib’s resolution the day it was introduced.
In the past, signers of such a resolution would have reason to fear the wrath – and the electoral muscle – of AIPAC, the Israel-can-do-no-wrong lobby. But its intimidation power is waning. AIPAC’s support for Israel does not represent the views of the public, a reality that has begun to dawn on more Democratic officeholders.
“With American support for the Israeli government’s management of the conflict in Gaza undergoing a seismic reversal, and Democratic voters’ support for the Jewish state dropping off steeply, AIPAC is becoming an increasingly toxic brand for some Democrats on Capitol Hill,” the New York Times reported this fall. Notably, “some Democrats who once counted AIPAC among their top donors have in recent weeks refused to take the group’s donations.”
Khanna has become more and more willing to tangle with AIPAC, which is now paying for attack ads against him. On Thanksgiving, he tweeted about Gaza and accused AIPAC of “asking people to disbelieve what they saw with their own eyes.” Khanna elaborated in a campaign email days ago, writing: “Any politician who caves to special interests on Gaza will never stand up to special interests on corruption, healthcare, housing, or the economy. If we can’t speak with moral clarity when thousands of children are dying, we won’t stand for working Americans when corporate power comes knocking.”
AIPAC isn’t the only well-heeled organization for Israel now struggling with diminished clout. Democratic Majority for Israel, an offshoot of AIPAC that calls itself “an American advocacy group that supports pro-Israel policies within the United States Democratic Party,” is now clearly misnamed. Every bit of recent polling shows that in the interests of accuracy, the organization should change its name to “Democratic Minority for Israel.”
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