by Rabbi Yaakov Menken in the Jewish News Syndicate

At this writing, businesses in downtown Chicago have been boarding up their windows in preparation for “mostly peaceful” protests during the Democratic National Convention. The purpose of these protests is ostensibly apolitical, given that the protesters intend to oppose the current position of both major American political parties and the Robert Kennedy Jr. campaign: supporting Israel in its battle against a genocidal, antisemitic adversary. The question, though, is whether that will remain the case after the convention—and whether pro-civilization Democrats, not to mention the DNC’s new list of sponsors, will cry foul.

Past conventions have seen a slow but steady decline in support for Israel in the party platform, ever since Barack Obama became the party’s nominee. The 2000 and 2004 platforms declared that Jerusalem “should remain an undivided city” as the capital of Israel; the 2008 version, however, said that although it “is and will remain the capital of Israel,” how it is governed should be “a matter for final status negotiations.”

The 2008 platform was the first to separate “Palestinians” from “Arab leaders.” Critically, it removed the “Palestinian” issue from the context of peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors, when in reality it was the hostility of the Arab League that created the “Israel-Palestinian conflict.” Only in the most current draft platform is there a new reference to “historic normalization” between Israel and Arab states; this is due to the successful Abraham Accords, signed just a month after the 2020 platform emerged.

In both 2004 and 2008, the party expected Palestinian refugees to find permanent homes in a Palestinian state, rather than Israel, and dismissed the notion that Israel might return to the 1949 armistice line as “unrealistic.” These positions disappeared in 2012 in a platform that explicitly referred to Palestinians as a “people” distinct from Jordanian and other Arabs—a claim that Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas himself would later reject. Despite Abbas’s own words, the 2016 version went even further, claiming that “Palestinians” needed an independent state for their “dignity.” Twice. That year was also the first time the platform declared Jerusalem a “matter for final status negotiations,” saying that it “should remain the capital of Israel” only after making this point.

This did not satisfy the “activists.” Delegates in 2016 flew the Palestinian flag on the convention floor while holding up signs in support of “Palestinian rights;” some said that Palestinian flags outnumbered the American ones. Others burned the Israeli flag outside while calling for violence against Israelis by chanting, “Long live the intifada.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the 2020 platform was worse, kowtowing to the antisemitic wing of the party. For the first time since 2000, the platform condemned “unilateral actions” but the example given was “annexation” by Israel, rather than a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. The platform maintained previous opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) as “unfairly” singling out and delegitimizing Israel, yet appended support for “the Constitutional right of our citizens to free speech” as if that were somehow at risk. Since the 2020 convention was held entirely virtually at the height of the COVID pandemic, there was no way to measure the strength of opposition outside in the streets.

Against this backdrop, the newest draft platform might seem a welcome reversal. “The United States strongly supports Israel in the fight against Hamas,” it says, along with “the United States wants to see Hamas defeated.” It touts “a strong coalition to counter and deter Iran,” “stand[s] against incitement and terror,” and seeks a Lebanon “free from the grip of Iran-backed Hezbollah.” It retains support for Israel’s “qualitative military edge,” opposition to BDS—albeit with that “free speech” proviso—and says that Jerusalem “should remain the capital of Israel,” though with that proviso that its governance “is a matter for final status negotiations.”

To call this platform an improvement, however, would be myopic. None of the foregoing positions are actually new, nor do they represent a turn back towards fairness to Israel. Instead, the platform repeatedly focuses upon the needs of the “Palestinian people,” as if “Palestinian” were a descriptor uniquely applied to Arabs. Never mind that this is antisemitic historical revisionism, erasing 2000 years during which, to the contrary, the only people identified as “Palestinian” were Jews.

These new, exclusively non-Jewish “Palestinians” also warrant the platform’s only mention of “food insecurity,” even though the World Food Program USA lists Israel, its territories, and Gaza nowhere among the “10 Countries Suffering the Most From Hunger,” and food insecurity affects tens of millions of Americans even today. It is difficult to explain this without referencing humanity’s long history of inappropriate finger-pointing at Jews.

The platform even disparages former president and current candidate Donald Trump for “refus[ing] to endorse the political aspirations of the Palestinian people,” as if Jordan never existed or Abbas never declared their people to be one and the same. Caring for “humanitarian suffering” in Gaza is appropriate in context, but when the DNC expresses support for a populace distinguished by support for antisemitic massacres to the exclusion of Ebola patients in the Congo, it’s appropriate to wonder what their true priorities are.

And don’t forget: This is merely the draft. Democrats have yet to produce a platform acknowledging that Vice President Kamala Harris is now at the top of the ticket. We also have no idea how many who supported the burning of Israeli flags outside the 2016 DNC might now be seated as delegates inside. The amended platform may be much, much worse.

What has also changed at the DNC is the list of sponsors. With the exception of AT&T, which, with its predecessors, has provided communications services to both major conventions for more than a century, this year’s corporate sponsors all seem to be new. Per The Chicago Tribune, these include United Airlines, McDonald’s, Archer Daniels Midland Co., CME Group, Cboe Global Markets Inc., and Peoples Gas.

It could be that these corporations, whose reputations are newly tied to the actions of this year’s DNC, are the only ones who can step on the brakes, preventing the party from lurching further into anti-Israel and antisemitic territory. It seems unlikely that backhand support for Hamas and genocide is what they signed up for, and they can condition support for the DNC and the Harris campaign upon a platform that—as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so aptly put it—favors civilization over barbarism. One can only hope that this will prove to be the case.

Originally published in the Jewish News Syndicate

Photo Credit: Steve Bott on Flickr