Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Photo
President Joe Biden listens at a informal dialogue and working lunch at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on Nov. 16, 2023.
By now, it’s clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driving a rift into progressive, liberal, and Democratic Party ranks that may be as deep as the one caused by the Vietnam War. Whether it will be as lasting as the divisions of the ’60s remains to be seen. What is clear now, however, is that the political consequences this time around may be much more severe.
Absent the Vietnam War, Hubert Humphrey would probably not have lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon. In a Biden-Trump contest next year, Israel-Palestine could be one more nail in the Democrats’ coffin. And for all of his depredations and paranoia, Richard Nixon posed a petty threat to American democracy, while Trump poses a massive one.
What, then, are Democrats to do? As Michelle Goldberg has outlined in The New York Times, the efforts by Democratic Majority for Israel to recruit candidates to run in primary elections against members of the Squad, and to fund their campaigns with many millions of dollars (a good deal of which comes from Republicans and corporate interests seeking to squash economic progressives) would only widen those rifts and guarantee that many young voters and voters of color—key elements in the Democratic base—would either stay home or vote for protest candidates in next November’s elections.
Is there anything that the Biden administration and the Democrats—two groups that, of necessity, we need to consider separately—can do to narrow this yawning chasm?
As to the administration, it needs to get much more serious about prompting a two-state solution than any previous administration has ever been. It needs to condition all aid to Israel on that nation’s agreement to permit the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within a brief period of time. That begins with having the Palestinian Authority govern Gaza and continues with the withdrawal of most, if not all, Israeli settlements from the West Bank. Keep in mind that the current Netanyahu government is in place only because it’s propped up by settler extremists and the ultra-Orthodox, against whose rule most Israelis have been passionately demonstrating throughout much of this year.
I suspect that Israelis, in the aftermath of October 7, would only accept the creation of a real Palestinian state if the U.S. pledged to have its own troops patrol the borders. Peacekeeping forces under a U.N. mandate don’t have a track record of actually keeping the peace, which is just one reason why the only border patrollers Israelis would accept would have to be American. That might be a hard sell here in the U.S., but it would be the carrot offered Israel to accompany the stick of cutting off aid should Israel not move to a real two-state solution.
That’s what Biden needs to do. What about the Democrats?
Piling the wartime rift in party ranks atop Biden’s other manifest electoral vulnerabilities is something the Democrats need like a hole in the head.
If Biden does put such a proposal on the table, it would not only be a singularly serious move by the U.S. to resolve the hundred-plus-year Israel-Palestine conundrum, but also a way to begin to knit together Democratic ranks here in the States. AIPAC and Hamas wouldn’t go for it, but most Democrats, I think, would, including those Democratic elected officials now caught in the crosshairs of this conflict. And it’s not just the Squad who are caught in the crosshairs; it’s also many Democrats up for election next year, very much including Biden himself.
And what about Biden himself? The most common emotion among Democrats thinking about next year’s election is fear that Biden will lose to Trump. I’ve repeatedly made the case that other Democrats would fare better than Biden in next year’s presidential contest. While any one of them will have baggage of their own, they won’t have the baggage of Biden’s age, or of his current record during Israel’s war in Gaza, which, support it or oppose it, is inherently divisive. (For that matter, they won’t have the baggage that weighed Hubert Humphrey down in 1968: As Johnson’s vice president, Humphrey had supported and was continuing to support the Vietnam War. Once Johnson withdrew from the race and Humphrey entered, the veep’s political identity boiled down to his support for the war, which was his chief liability in his struggle against his Democratic primary opponents, the anti-war Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.)
Any Democratic governor, say, should one enter the race, would have to take a position on the administration’s record so far, but that record would not be his or her own, and if that candidate could focus on the kind of two-state solution offensive that I hope Biden could adopt, there would be an even better chance that some of the intraparty rift could be healed. And if Biden doesn’t move heaven and earth for a two-state solution, well, that candidate could.
In other words, piling the wartime rift in party ranks atop Biden’s other manifest electoral vulnerabilities is something the Democrats need like a hole in the head. Maybe Biden can heal these rifts once the current war is over and mitigate his other vulnerabilities as well.
But maybe not. Governors, take heed.
