Hillary & Bernie Leave No Room for Pro-Israel Democrats

There is no question about it: this is not your parents’ Democrat Party.

Why? Because the Democratic Party of President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders has decisively, and shamelessly, turned anti-Israel. And any remaining friends the State of Israel — the world’s lone Jewish State, and America’s closest, most trusted ally in the Middle East — has left in the Democratic Party are afraid to speak up, let alone do anything to stop this.

Standing with our allies is an important part of governance; it’s a cornerstone principle of democracy itself. And so is the continued fight against bigotry, acts of hatred, and anti-Semitism, which include efforts designed to undermine any of our nation’s allies, specifically the despicable BDS movement, which aims to undermine the sovereignty of Israel.

It’s why the Town of Hempstead, America’s largest township, was among the first municipalities in New York State to adopt legislation prohibiting our government from doing business with individuals or companies that boycott the United States, Israel, or any of our allies. Our local law ensures that our township only contracts with entrepreneurs who are friendly and reject acts of hatred and economic hostility. Nassau County also passed a similar measure sponsored by Legislator Howard Kopel. Both measures, introduced by Republicans, passed with unanimous bipartisan support.

Shockingly, this level of clarity is largely absent when it comes to elected Democrats on the federal level. A Pew Research poll a few weeks ago found that more self-described liberal Democrats sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel. According to the nonpartisan Pew organization, “the share of liberal Democrats who side more with the Palestinians than with Israel has nearly doubled since 2014 . . . and is higher than at any point dating back to 2001.”

This unfortunate trend has been building for years. During President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, the Democratic National Committee’s initial platform dropped longstanding language declaring that Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel. As a major New York paper opined, when “embarrassed party officials tried to reinstate that clause on the convention floor, they were met with raucous boos from the delegates. They gaveled the measure through as passed — even though it clearly hadn’t.”

Four years later, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’s handpicked DNC Platform Committee is chock-full of radical Democrats who are stridently anti-Israel. Even Israel’s decidedly left-leaning Haaretz decried the Democrats for choosing the “wrong people” to change their platform on Israel.

They most certainly did!

The DNC Platform Committee is packed with handpicked Clinton–Sanders anti-Israel members. Former congressman Howard Berman is the committee’s only stalwart supporter of the U.S.–Israel relationship. The former congressman from California must contend with anti-Israel vitriol spewed by other committee members such as Professor Cornel West, Dr. James Zogby, Congressman Keith Ellison, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee.

Dr. West, a graduate of Harvard and Princeton universities, fervently promotes the BDS movement with his full-throated support for boycotting the Jewish State. West is on the record claiming that he, as an academic, could not find one historical link between the Jewish people and Israel. He has published claims that the “U.S. supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians,” and describes Gaza — a territory the Israeli government transferred fully to the Palestinians a decade ago as a means of initiating a renewed peace process — as “not just a ‘kind of’ concentration camp, it is the hood on steroids.”

West’s noxious views about Israel closely align with fellow DNC Platform Committee member and Democrat pollster James Zogby, a prominent Arab-American activist, who, among other outrageous opinions, has described Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal. Dr. Zogby has written that “the plight of Palestinians is to the Arabs what the Holocaust is to Jews.” Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute, has played a key role in attempts to include language into the Democratic Party’s platform that recognizes Palestinian “dignity,” opposes Israel’s “occupation,” and denounces “settlement activity” in what the proposed inclusions refer to as Palestinian lands, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Congressman Keith Ellison, another member of this ill-conceived committee, has compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, and strongly advocates that Israel give security concessions to Hamas. Ellison previously compared President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and, reported the Washington Post, had numerous past associations with the Nation of Islam and its virulently anti-Semitic leader, Louis Farrakhan. It’s no wonder the Republican Jewish Coalition calls Congressman Ellison “an anti-Israel zealot.”

Politico reported, during a DNC Platform Committee hearing in Washington, that West and Zogby pushed for the use of the term “occupation” to describe Israel’s control of Palestinian territories in the party’s 2016 platform. Such wrongheaded views are rapidly becoming mainstream principles of the new Democratic Party of Obama–Clinton–Sanders. And it’s an alarming development that is being welcomed with open arms by a growing number of Democratic leaders.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a handpicked Hillary Clinton representative to the DNC Platform Committee, joined Congressman Ellison in urging the Obama administration to pressure Israel to allow increased humanitarian relief into the Gaza Strip for Palestinians. Not only has the need for humanitarian relief to Gaza proven overblown, most of the so-called relief that has been sent to Gaza has been used by Hamas to construct “terror tunnels” for planned military infiltrations into Israel proper. Congresswoman Lee also railed against a resolution condemning the 2009 U.N. report on the war, reviled by the mainstream pro-Israel community as a slanderous distortion of actual events.

Rounding out this unholy cast of career Israel-bashers on the committee is Wendy Sherman, who helped negotiate both the Iran and North Korea nuclear deals. As one national media editorial page wrote, “With that background, one would be forgiven for fearing that the result of these negotiations will be a DNC platform resembling the Hamas charter.”

The partisan gap over Israel remains wide. The Pew Research Center conducted recent surveys showing that “three-quarters of Republicans say they sympathize more with Israel . . . [while] just 7% say they sympathize with the Palestinians.” The margin is enormously narrower with Democrats: 34% of those surveyed sympathize more with Israel while 33% side with Palestine.

Unfortunately, this isn’t in the old Democratic Party; it’s today’s Democratic Party.

Even in the 1940s, President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, knew it was right to recognize Israel’s right to exist — and to stand up for the new Jewish State — despite fierce opposition from his own State Department, including Secretary of State George C. Marshall, as well as former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers, such as Isaiah Bowman. But Truman never backed down from doing what was right.

But that was then. Today, the prevalence of these dangerous anti-Israel voices in the Democratic Party led by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders is more disturbing than ever before, especially as they gain influence. We should all be gravely concerned that these are the voices writing the platform and setting the Democratic agenda for the next four years.

All this evidence leaves one great impression on voters’ minds: Hillary Clinton and Democrats have much to explain on Israel. What is their real position? How can we trust them? Why are they allowing anti-Israel zealots to hijack their agenda-setting platform committee? Secretary Clinton, Senator Sanders, and the Democratic National Committee should know that in government and politics, rhetoric only gets you so far in the face of incontrovertible facts.

Anthony J. Santino is the Hempstead Town Supervisor. He was elected in November 2015 on the Republican, Conservative, Independence, and Tax Revolt lines with over 60% of the vote. A staunch supporter of Israel, Santino previously represented the Five Towns on the Hempstead Town Board.