The Guardline
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.
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.”
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.
