This past week, the global community largely condemned the Israeli government for a strike on a hospital in Gaza that killed 20 people. Israel’s strike killed five journalists, including Maryam Abu Daqqa, who worked for The Independent’s sister site Independent Arabia.
Ever since the Israeli government began its Gaza-based response to the October 7th terrorist attack in Israel — where Hamas invaders killed more than 1,100 people and took some 200 hostages — the issue has threatened to split the Democratic Party.
This week, the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting became the latest battleground for the party’s split on Israel. Progressive activists had wanted to put forward a resolution to withhold military aid to Israel, while DNC Chairman Ken Martin put forward a resolution calling for humanitarian aid to Gaza and an end to the war.
Martin’s resolution passed while the one put forth by progressives failed. Then Martin did the most Democratic Party thing possible: he retracted his resolution and announced the creation of a task force.
But if Democratic elected leaders and party officials still remain largely supportive of Israel, their voters are moving away from them on the issue.
On Wednesday, a Quinnipiac University poll showed that 50 percent of Americans think Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
But the divide is even more stark along party lines: While only 20 percent of Republicans think that Israel is committing a genocide, a whopping 77 percent of Democrats say the Jewish State is.
The poll also showed that while Americans are roughly split on which side they sympathize more with, 63 percent of Democrats said their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians than Israelis. It also found that 63 percent of Democrats think the United States is too supportive of Israel and 75 percent of Democrats oppose sending more military aid to Israel.
The numbers paint a fairly clear picture. And even Democratic senators, members of that stodgy old bastion of conventional wisdom and hawkish foreign policy, have had enough. Last month, 26 Democratic senators joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to withhold the sales of certain arms to Israel.
Even moderates like Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who is the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, joined the resolution. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), the freshman former CIA analyst, missed the vote for an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. When The Independent asked her about it, she said she put out a statement on the matter.
“I just put out a giant statement, two pages long,” Slotkin said, adding she would have voted for the resolution. When The Independent followed up last month, she again referred to the same “statement.”
Lest anyone think the Quinnipiac poll is an outlier, YouGov and The Economist also commissioned a poll and found that U.S. adult citizens’ sympathies are about split between Israelis and Palestinians, a plurality of 44 percent of Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians.
And lest anyone think that number is padded by people who did not turn out last year, 45 percent of people who said they voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 said they sympathized more with the Palestinians.
The Democratic Party’s relationship with Israel and Palestine reflects its big-tent nature. The party has been the political home of a majority of Jewish Americans since the turn of the 20th century as it championed itself as representing the downtrodden and the excluded. Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel in 1948.
But many Democratic voters, including many Jews, now see Palestinians as victims of a right-wing ultra-nationalist government in Israel that seeks to remove them from a land they consider their home. And it looks like their sympathies have aligned as much.
Martin’s initial resolution and then subsequent formation of a subcommittee will likely be seen as delaying an inevitable tide shift that occurred in the Democratic Party on guns and abortion.
A perfect example? Prior to his job as DNC chairman, Martin led Minnesota’s state party. And both of his senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, joined Sanders’ resolution.
