Screenshot from Pete Buttigieg’s appearance on the podcast, Pod Save America.
Democrats and their base among the institutional Jewish community have come to realize that Israel is costing them votes, and they’re flailing desperately as they try to respond.
This desperation was on full display recently when former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has long been known to have presidential aspirations, embarrassed himself in an interview on the podcast, Pod Save America, hosted by several former officials in Barack Obama’s administration.
When asked about Gaza, the recent resolutions in the Senate calling for a suspension of arms sales to Israel, and the growing calls for recognizing Palestinian statehood, Buttigieg came back with a response so mealy-mouthed and non-committal that it unleashed a storm of criticism even from relatively moderate sectors.
“I think we need to insist that if American taxpayer funding is going to weaponry that is going to Israel, that that is not going to things that shock the conscience,” he said. “We — I think especially including voices who care about Israel, who believe in Israel’s right to exist, who have stood with Israel in response to the unbelievable cruelty and terrorism of Oct. 7 — I think there’s a reason why so many of those voices are speaking up now too,” he said. “Because this is not just something that is on its face and in itself a moral catastrophe. It is also a catastrophe for Israel for the long run.”
Palestinians appear only in vague reference. Buttigieg’s entire response centered on Israel and its supposed woes and missteps.
Buttigieg’s comments reflect an amoral person who is desperately trying to satisfy political pressures and who has no principled response to genocide. He neither supports nor opposes Israel’s actions as a matter of right and wrong; he is merely concerned with how they play politically, to voters, on one hand, and to major Democratic donors on the other.
In other words, Buttigieg responded like a typical centrist Democrat.
After a firestorm of criticism, Buttigieg tried to do damage control. While it quelled the mainstream criticism Buttigieg was most concerned with, his updated response remained unconvincing to anyone who cares not just about the genocide in Gaza but about elected officials standing for some kind of principles.
“It’s important to be clear about something this enormous and this painful. It’s just that it’s so enormous and it’s so painful that sometimes words can fail.” Buttigieg told Politico.
He said he would have voted for the joint resolutions of disapproval that Bernie Sanders recently brought in the Senate against the latest arms sales to Israel; he would recognize a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, and, most dramatically, that the U.S. should not sign another 10-year commitment of annual aid to Israel after the current one expires in 2027.
“I think as a parent, you see these awful images of starving children with their ribs showing and automatically, you imagine your own kids,” he added in an unconvincing attempt at humanizing his views.
If there is real concern there for Palestinians as people with rights and humanity that is no different from anyone else, it’s indetectable. It was a carefully calibrated statement, yet the calibration is uncertain. It’s clear that both Buttigieg and his advisers are in unfamiliar territory that they don’t know how to navigate.
Some Dems flail, while others surprise
Last week, at an event in Iowa, Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said that his position on Israel, Palestine, and Gaza, “has always kind of been evolving with the situation.”
That’s a stunningly cowardly statement during a U.S.-backed genocide, but it was an improvement over comments he had made shortly before.
Gallego told a crowd that “The people of Gaza are in this situation because Donald Trump is President.” When audience members pointed out that the genocide was started during, and fully backed by, Joe Biden’s administration, Gallego retorted, “Whatever, hey, this is your opinion, dude.”
Gallego then said he would consider backing the “conditioning” of aid to Israel, but that this was due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that he intended to occupy all of Gaza, which Gallego called a “red line” for him.
Apparently, genocide is not a red line for Gallego. Or, even if we want to grant that the label “genocide” is debatable (although it’s not), the killing of more than 18,000 children is also not a red line for Gallego.
Now, Gallego is apparently circulating a letter in the Senate calling on President Donald Trump to investigate and take action in response to settler violence in the West Bank.
This, too, reflects a floundering Democratic Party. The settlers and their violence are the perfect targets for meaningless action. A letter like Gallego’s—even if Trump responds and does everything it asks—will have no impact on the settlers or the ongoing annexation and gradual ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, much less the genocide in Gaza.
Indeed, it doesn’t even attempt to hold Israel accountable for such crimes, targeting instead a purportedly “rogue element” of settlers on the West Bank and ignoring the support those settlers get from the Israeli military, security forces, and the government itself.
Thus, it’s the perfect vehicle for a shill like Gallego to try to satisfy the pro-Israel donors he believes he needs for his political future and to respond to the growing calls from anyone with a shred of decency for the United States to end its support for the genocide in Gaza.
Gallego isn’t alone. Even New York’s Ritchie Torres, who has never seen an Israeli policy he didn’t love, has been forced to acknowledge the suffering in Gaza. “All parties, including the U.S. and Israel, have a moral obligation to do everything in our power to ease the hardship and hunger that’s taken hold in the Gaza Strip,” Torres stated several weeks ago.
The shift was perhaps clearest in Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Klobuchar is the very model of a centrist. She is from Minnesota, a state where pro-Israel lobbying has shown some of its greatest weaknesses, including its failure to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar and its embarrassing confrontations with Betty McCollum.
But Klobuchar is nothing like McCollum, much less Omar. She is a staunchly pro-Israel figure, and was among several Democratic senators to be photographed with the wanted war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his recent visit to Washington.
Yet when Bernie Sanders brought his resolutions of disapproval of the latest arms sales to Israel, Klobuchar supported Bernie’s resolutions. It shocked many, including me. Klobuchar was not among those Democrats who held the popular position, in 2020, of conditioning aid to Israel on its cooperation in the sham “peace process.”
Yet while Klobuchar, and a few other surprise senators give hope in the cynical world of politics, there is a long way to go.
What is absent is a principled position. Even Sanders, who is perhaps the most principled person in the Senate on this and many issues, cannot bring himself to see that this genocide grew out of a combination of racist Israeli nationalism and decades of impunity granted to Israeli extremism by the United States.
And a principled position is what Democratic voters are looking for. A wide range of views of Israel remains among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters, but there is much less diversity when it comes to the genocide in Gaza. The left and center of the United States electorate are clearly against this and want it to stop. Even enough of the right opposes it sufficiently for Trump to at least make a show of trying to stop it.
Opposing genocide is about as fundamental as can be on the value scale. People are seeing that supporting Israel’s genocide is, for most Democrats, a question of politics, and, at that, a question of pleasing elite political donors and lobbyists.
In other words, it’s about kowtowing to AIPAC, which has become a political albatross. It’s a political loser and an ethical black hole.
Yet, even so, Democrats like Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Gallego, and certainly absolute pawns like Torres remain reluctant to cross the line.
Pro-Israel groups on a mission to pull Democrats back
It is not only politicians who find themselves in a bind over Israel. American pro-Israeli groups, as well as some Israeli organizations, are trying to find the right balance of continuing to support Israel while also rekindling some affection for the state among liberals.
It started with a blatantly empty gesture by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) two weeks ago.
AJC sent $25,000 to the Archdiocese of New York to help repair the Holy Family Church in Gaza that was heavily damaged when it was targeted by Israel. AJC, of course, supported the blatantly absurd Israeli story that the church was hit by accident (Israel had targeted the church numerous times prior), and the political stunt had little impact.
It did, however, set the stage for the United Jewish Appeal-Federation donation of $1 million for humanitarian aid in Gaza.
The donation is going to IsraAID, an Israeli humanitarian organization. IsraAID is a genuine humanitarian group, but part of its mission has always been to use its humanitarian efforts to improve Israel’s image in the world.
Thus, when Israel offers humanitarian assistance to a disaster-struck country, IsraAID is often the means by which they can deliver it.
Of course, in Gaza, this presents difficulties on several levels. IsraAID can’t actually go into Gaza, but it turns out they have been working with Palestinian partners there.
IsraAID has been working in secret for the past year, trying to help Palestinian groups in Gaza navigate the many Israeli roadblocks—solid and bureaucratic—and helping to bring some meager amounts of aid into Gaza. Yet, while they were certainly keeping it secret to protect whomever they work with in Gaza, it is equally certain they would not have wanted the Israeli public to know what they were doing until now.
According to IsraAID, they began working in Gaza a year ago, after having worked in Israel for the first time in their own history following the October 7 attacks. To date, there has been no indication that IsraAID does anything beyond coordinating with the Israeli army and helping to get some supplies into Gaza, although their mere presence as an Israeli group raises understandable suspicions.
For the UJA, then, giving to IsraAID provides the salve for many of their own members who are not willing to oppose Israel’s genocide but are uncomfortable with the images of starving babies in Gaza. Since the group cannot actually go into Gaza, the money will go to supplies and to the Israeli organization’s overhead. It will make virtually no difference on the ground.
But the fact of the donation and the concomitant revelation that IsraAID has been working in Gaza will be very helpful for Democrats and pro-Israel groups who want to argue that the genocide is not the work of Israel as a whole but the product of a corrupt, right-wing prime minister who partnered with the most radical nationalists in his country. They will try to make this case despite Israelis themselves overwhelmingly saying they don’t care about people starving in Gaza.
This is precisely why the pressure on Democrats cannot let up, and must not be bought off with mealy-mouthed word salad and useless gestures. It must continue until Democrats, as a party, are taking a principled stand against not only Israel’s current genocide in Gaza, not only its impending genocide in the West Bank, but against a U.S. policy that has allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians of the most basic rights of life and liberty.
The current state of affairs is the result of Israeli racism, settler colonialism, apartheid, and nationalism. None of it can continue without our support. It’s time we expect our leaders to stop it.
