Maya Alleruzzo/AP Photo
Israeli Americans gather outside of the U.S. Embassy Branch Office to protest against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government to overhaul the judicial system, in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 7, 2023.
The Bibi earthquake is shaking up the Democratic Party.
Last week, two not entirely overlapping groups of House members sent letters decrying the efforts of Israel’s Netanyahu government to greatly diminish the powers of its judiciary and to move closer to a de facto, and at least partially de jure, annexation of the West Bank.
Ninety-two of the 213 House Democrats signed a letter to President Biden to “share our deep concern” regarding the events in Israel. “We urge you,” the letter concluded, “to use all diplomatic tools available to prevent Israel’s current government from further damaging the nation’s democratic institutions and undermining the potential for two states for two peoples.”
The letter was initiated by three long-standing leaders of the House’s liberal bloc: Connecticut’s Rosa DeLauro, Illinois’s Jan Schakowsky, and Massachusetts’s Jim McGovern. The signatories ranged from such Progressive Caucus leaders as Washington’s Pramila Jayapal and Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan to more centrist members like Stephen Lynch and Seth Moulton, both from Massachusetts. The two groups of House Democrats most conspicuously absent from the list were the House leadership and the Squad—for quite different sets of reasons.
While the letter praises Biden for his recitation of first principles that bind Israel and the United States, quoting his statement that both nations are “built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary,” its entirely visible subtext is to urge the administration to be more forceful in condemning Israel’s slide toward illiberal democracy and its suppression of Palestinians, and to make clear that if the administration does become more forceful, they will have its back. That was a subtext that Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his deputies did not want to publicly affirm. As well, their signing on to the letter could give AIPAC, the network of Israel-can-do-no-wrong campaign funders, reason to direct all of its donations to Republicans in the 2024 congressional races.
The fact that the members of the Squad also chose not to put their names on the letter (like all House Democrats, they were asked to sign) has several possible explanations. The letter’s praise for Israel’s historic adherence to democratic norms—an adherence that Palestinians and Israeli Arabs have had ample reason to question—doubtless affected their decision.
The second of last week’s letters wasn’t sent to Biden, but rather, to Netanyahu, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, and Knesset Minority Leader Yair Lapid. Drafted by liberal stalwart Jerry Nadler of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it was signed by 16 of the 22 Jewish House Democrats (most of whom also signed the letter to Biden), and focused on Netanyahu’s efforts to enable his right-wing Knesset majority to override the rulings of Israel’s Supreme Court. After noting their long support for the Israeli state, the signatories expressed their apprehensions that Bibi’s “reforms” could shove Israel far from its status as a democratic state. “A tenet of modern democracies is protections for those citizens with minority status, whether political, ethnic, or religious,” the authors wrote. “We are deeply concerned about the impact these changes would have on people and groups not in the majority, including Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox and Reconstructionist Jewish populations in Israel.”
The subject of the discussion is the diminution, if not outright dismantling, of Israeli democracy.
As I’ve noted recently, Jews in the diaspora, invariably minorities themselves, have historically been among the leading defenders of minority rights and, hence, of the judiciary, the one branch of democratic government that can overturn majority rule when it impinges on minority rights. In that sense, the relationship between (minority) diaspora and (majority) Israeli Jews always held the potential for collision, but it’s taken the abusive, sectarian majority that Netanyahu has assembled to bring that collision about.
In the U.S., of course, the Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and Reconstructionist Jewish populations mentioned in the Nadler letter, as well as the secular Jews who go unmentioned, constitute the clear majority of American Jews. Many of their organizations, most prominently the Union for Reform Judaism, have made clear their concern that the parties of ultra-Orthodox Jews that play a key role in Netanyahu’s government will enact laws declaring that none but the Ultras are really Jews, and are thus entitled to, among other things, Israeli citizenship. That would be a law that any Supreme Court in Israel’s history would instantly strike down, which is one reason why Bibi’s administration wants to strip the Court of most of its power. (Another reason is that Bibi wants the bribery and other charges now pending against him in the courts to be dismissed by Knesset fiat.)
That 16 of the 22 Jewish House Democrats signed the Nadler letter likely mirrors the percentage of American Jews who are appalled by Israel’s new turn toward ultranationalism and exclusivist, primitive religiosity. It also almost surely understates the percentage of Jewish Democrats who reject Bibi’s assault on democracy. That said, there were only two Jewish House Democrats who parroted AIPAC’s opposition to their colleagues daring to comment on Israel’s gallop toward authoritarianism (though authoritarianism has inherently marked its occupation policies).
A statement from New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer (one of the rightmost House Democrats) and Florida’s Jared Moskowitz (whose district is home to many elderly retirees who can still remember the bright promise of Israel’s early years) asserted that “regardless of our personal views and concerns, Congress should not publicly intervene in ongoing negotiations of a key democratic ally. Doing so, especially in a partisan way, could undermine those negotiations toward a positive outcome.”
The fact that Bibi’s proposals are now subject to democratic debate and negotiation in Israel was also included in the talking points that AIPAC put out to its network. “The issue of judicial reform is being passionately debated within Israel and is working its way through the Knesset,” AIPAC asserted, as if this made everything copacetic. The subject of that discussion, however, is not whether to impose, say, a tax on cigarettes, but the diminution, if not outright dismantling, of Israeli democracy. AIPAC’s talking points complained that the DeLauro letter “unconstructively calls on the U.S. to alter its carefully balanced approach and more forcefully pressure Israel,” as if a “careful balance” between advocating for preserving democracy and clamming up at the prospect of autocratic creep was the balance that America should strike.
Sixteen of the Jewish House Democrats signed the Nadler letter, and two put out a statement against it. What about the other four? The most deliberately nuanced of the quartet is California’s Adam Schiff, who is now also seeking the Senate seat from which Dianne Feinstein will step down in 2024. When I asked Schiff’s office about his declining to add his name to either the DeLauro or the Nadler letter, they referred me to an interview he’d given to Jewish Insider, in which he said he was “deeply concerned about the composition of this new governing coalition and the participation of some of the more extreme voices within Israeli politics.” But Schiff also added, “The United States and Israel need to continue working together in our mutual national security interests but also to further our shared values.”
By contrast, the two other California Democratic House members (neither Jewish) seeking Feinstein’s seat—Oakland’s Barbara Lee and Irvine’s Katie Porter—signed the DeLauro letter. Porter had been one of 15 House Democrats who recently traveled to Israel on a trip organized by J Street, the leading Jewish organization advocating for a West Bank withdrawal and a just two-state settlement with the Palestinians, as well as a longtime thorn in AIPAC’s side. The 15 Democrats constituted the largest congressional group that J Street had ever taken to Israel, much to AIPAC’s displeasure.
Perhaps as a gesture to propitiate the AIPAC crowd, Porter subsequently gave an interview to that same Jewish Insider, in which she gushed over the mental acuity Netanyahu had exhibited when he met with the delegation, deeming herself “extremely impressed with his willingness to kind of grapple with us.” (As to the actual positions Bibi so brightly advanced, she remained largely mute.) Porter also mentioned that she’d received briefings from California AIPAC officials before the trip.
What we see in the two letters, and the lists of signers and non-signers, is first and foremost the split in the American Jewish community—more accurately, communities—and its refraction in Democratic divisions as well. AIPAC represents a dwindling share of American Jews outside of Republicans and the ultra-Orthodox, but it still punches above its weight in the nontrivial matter of campaign funding.
In the 2022 midterm elections, AIPAC and what was effectively its campaign arm, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), outspent all comers to oust Democratic primary candidates who’d dared to criticize the Israeli right, most particularly liberal Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, who was also president of his local synagogue, and who surely spoke for most Jewish Democrats in criticizing Israeli governments in general for abridging Palestinian rights, and the ultra-Orthodox in Bibi’s coalition in particular for pushing for a more theocratic state. What was notable about DMFI’s campaigns was that the attack ads they ran didn’t focus on Israel at all—they often involved themselves in districts that weren’t heavily Jewish—but on whatever else they could come up with, verifiable or otherwise.
The fate of Andy Levin doubtless troubles the sleep of Schiff, Porter, the Democrats’ House leadership, and probably even the White House. Like those Florida retirees, Biden is also old enough to remember when Israel was the cynosure of liberals’ eyes. What’s left of that Israel, last week’s letters point out, may soon crash and burn. Democrats are calling on the president, forcefully if implicitly, to do more to avert that catastrophe.
