In the latest fight to expose the yawning chasm between Democratic Party members and their leaders on Israel, the Democratic National Committee on Thursday shot down symbolic resolutions targeting AIPAC and arms transfers to Israel.
Members of a resolutions committee meeting in New Orleans rejected one symbolic resolution that would have condemned AIPAC’s role in party primaries and tabled a pair of resolutions that called for conditioning military aid to Israel.
Polls show that Democratic Party members are increasingly skeptical of Israel and supportive of Palestinians — a shift that hasn’t been reflected in the party’s official position.
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Instead, party leaders rejected the AIPAC resolution and referred the hot-button issue of arms transfers to Israel to a task force created by DNC Chair Ken Martin, which has yet to produce concrete results since it was created in August.
Allison Minnerly, the DNC member from Florida who sponsored the AIPAC resolution, said the votes exposed serious shortcomings on the part of leadership.
“It says that the Democratic Party just isn’t willing to have a hard conversation, isn’t willing to stand up, and just misses the mark when voters need it the most,” she said. “It is an embarrassing display of cowardice.”
The DNC member chairing the meeting, Ron Harris, said the arms transfers resolutions would be better handled by the task force, whose work he defended.
“Just for the record, this isn’t one of those things where you kick it down the line, and a committee where things go to die. These are people working really hard over a very thorny issue, and taking the time that it takes,” he said.
The proposals before the DNC committee on Thursday once again put party leaders in the hot spot after an earlier resolution from Minnerly last August called for a ban on arms sales to Israel.
Minnerly’s latest resolution highlighted the millions of dollars AIPAC spent to influence recent Democratic primaries in Illinois before reaffirming the party’s commitment to “reducing the role of corporate money and large-scale outside spending in Democratic primaries and general elections.”
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AIPAC in recent years has dumped tens of millions of dollars into Democratic primaries via a super PAC called the United Democracy Fund. It has taken an increasingly aggressive stance against anyone who questions U.S. support for Israel — including one pro-Israel congressional candidate who said he was open to conditioning military aid on respect for human rights.
The group’s heavy-handed role in recent Illinois campaigns drew fire from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who blasted AIPAC when he won the Democratic Party primary for the 9th Congressional District.
In response to the growing backlash, AIPAC’s supporters have called its critics “antisemitic,” a charge echoed during the Thursday meeting when one member said that to single out AIPAC would be to “pick on the Jews.”
Separately, another resolution called for pausing weapons transfers to Israeli military units accused of human rights violations and recognizing Palestinian statehood, and a third called for conditioning military aid to Israel in compliance with international law in light of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran.
Those resolutions were referred to the task force.
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Great question. I wish I had good answers for this because I’d be jumping in and doing it too. It’s going to take some work. I have some concepts of a plan I’ve been iterating on, wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts on this.
A big piece of the puzzle is going to be getting rid of FPTP and implementing national ranked choice (or star) voting, then electing officials who will promise to get rid of the electoral college. These alone would make the US system much more democratic, and enable us to elect a 3rd party official much more easily. We can do this at the state level, one state at a time. If a particular group gets really good at organizing and making it happen in a given state, maybe they can get crowd funded to help proliferate the cause to other states.
From there, it’s a matter of organizing to get required signatures for party representation in the various state elections. I think this probably works best starting at the local level, and we can start building towards that moment now with our various groups for organized labor, anti ice, socialism, etc. I don’t know if we necessarily need to galvanize nationally behind a single party, so long as each state is putting forward candidates who will represent the people’s interest above donor interests.
Once we have those people in office, they must use the power of Congress to restructure the Supreme Court. It’s broken right now due to the highly partisan judges. Right now there are 9 judges, I think we should add 10 more and do so with a mandate that they must overturn Buckley v Valeo and Citizens United. Those two disastrous decisions are what makes it possible for the legal bribery to take place which wholly captures our politicians. Take away the bribes, and all of the sudden they have to be accountable to voters again, instead of corporate/billionaire interests. And perhaps most importantly, would not be doing Israel’s bidding at every turn.
There are many other tweaks and improvements we could make from there, but the only other one I’ll mention here for now is that the new Congress should also restore the Fairness Doctrine for news media. Without it, American mainstream news has become full on propaganda. We should not be aiming to brainwash our own people to such an extent, or at all for that matter. A well educated populace is crucial for maintaining a healthy, vigilant democracy. This could go a long way towards restoring something like that…although as the boomers die out, so too does the relevance of mainstream news, so this one can easily get a bit more into the weeds once you consider the breadth of content consumed by younger generations.