Pro-Israel lawmakers target DSA

The DSA Questionnaire At the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention in 2017, the group endorsed the BDS movement by an overwhelming majority. That resolution asserted that "socialists have a responsibility to side with the oppressed and are committed to their unconditional liberation." This was a extraordinary turning point for the organization, which had allied itself with the Israeli left at its birth. At the 2019 convention, the organization established a DSA working group specifically dedicated to BDS. Last week, NY1’s Zack Fink reported that DSA was sending a questionnaire out to New York City Council candidates that were seeking the organization's endorsement. “Do you pledge not to travel to Israel if elected to City Council in solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation?” reads one of the questions, “Even though foreign policy falls outside the purview of municipal government, gestures like travel to a country by elected officials from a city the size and prominence of New York still send a powerful message, as would the refusal to participate in them.” DSA was immediately condemned by groups like The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of New York, which organizes trips to Israel for city council members. “Elected officials should not be denied an immersive opportunity to deepen their understanding of Israel," said their executive vice president Michael Miller, "Including this demand – on the same day that a historic peace agreement was announced between Israel and the United Arab Emirates – reveals a policy undeniably singed by anti-Semitism." The questionnaire was also attacked by local lawmakers on Twitter. Manhattan DA candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein tweeted, "This questionnaire tells Jewish people seeking public office not to travel to their spiritual and cultural homeland. Only Jews, nobody else. I urge all of the other candidates for Manhattan DA to join me in repudiating this question and refusing to answer." "This is anti-semitism. Plain and simple," declared 11th district Democratic Rep. Max Rose. Ritchie Torres, the New York council member who recently won the 15th district's Democratic primary, offered his own response to the question: "When The Jewish Community Relations Council brought me to Israel for the first time back in 2015, I spoke to both Israelis and Palestinians, and among Israelis, spoke to both Arabs and Jews..heard various perspectives, asked hard questions, and came to more fully understand a conflict that is infinitely more complicated than media narratives make it out to be...denying yourself an opportunity to listen intently to voices on the ground and see the situation with your own eyes will make you no wiser as a person or public servant." The New York chapter of DSA pointed out that the question was developed in response to the many free Israel trips that are provided to U.S. officials in an effort to maintain the military bond between the two countries. “We are in no way opposed to trips in a personal capacity to visit family or for other personal reasons,” said a DSA spokesperson. This clarification did nothing to deter attacks on DSA. The pro-Israel lobbying group DMFI held a webinar featuring Rose and Torres this week and they booth took aim at the organization. Here was Torres responding to a question about being a pro-Israel Democrat: There's no doubt in my mind there's a silent majority for Israel, but a visible vocal minority is often mistaken for a majority and often has outsized influence over public discourse and public policy. Part of the problem is social media, which has the effect of amplifying the idealogical extremes. In New York City, we've seen the rise of Democratic Socialists of America, which is explicitly pro-BDS. The Democratic Socialists endorsed in about 11 races and won every single one except mine, so it's proven to be effective at winning elections and I worry about the normalization of antisemitism within progressive politics. I consider BDS the attempt to delegitimize Israel...any movement that embraces antisemitism is destined to rot from within. It strikes close to for me as an openly-LGBTQ person, because part of what it means to be LGBTQ is to live life with integrity and authenticity. If the message to those who are both progressive and pro-Israel, especially people of Jewish descent, is that in order to be part of the progressive community you have to renounce your identity and your history, and your ties to your homeland and you have to be in the closet...that to me is profoundly evil, that to me is a perversion of progressivism and that's something that pro-Israel progressives have to fight against, so it's incumbent for us to create space within the progressive movement for pro-Israel voices. Rose dismissed the many electoral victories that Torres referenced, calling DSA a "fundamentally weak organization that only wins races against weak opponents." However, he expressed concern about a wider pro-Palestine trend within progressive politics: If you consider yourself progressive, if you consider yourself a believer in universal healthcare, if you consider yourself a believer in building a society that attracts people of all races and nationalities, if you consider yourself a believer in a society that is welcoming and embraces that LGBTQ community, and so on and so forth then look to Israel to find a country that has achieved that! This notion that somehow to be progressive, you must be anti-Israel is horrible and false. It's something that we have to more aggressively push back upon. On the same day of that webinar, 52 members of New York's State Assembly (including a couple who were recently defeated by DSA-endorsed candidates) signed a statement denouncing the questionnaire, calling DSA antisemitic, and declaring that the group should not "be welcome in the halls of our legislature." I'll go out on a limb and say this move won't be considered an act of "cancel culture" by the pundits who regularly sound off about the alleged phenomenon. Interestingly enough, 2020 actually marks the 100th anniversary of five socialists being expelled from the New York State Assembly over their political beliefs. Here's some of the Evening Public Ledger report from 1920: Louis Waldman, August Claessens, Charles Solomon, Samuel A. DeWitt and Samuel Orr, all of New York City, the entire delegation of their party in the New York Assembly, were expelled from the Legislature today. By its action the Assembly established a precedent unique in legislative history in the United States. Never before has an entire party delegation been ejected from any legislative body. The majorities in favor of expelling the men, suspended on the opening day of the legislative session on charges of disloyalty, were substantial. The paper also notes that Assemblyman Martin G. McCue referred to the men as "traitors" and "whipped dogs" and that the socialists were "highly amused." I reached out to DSA's National BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group and asked them about the statement. Here's what they sent me: As Israel's settler colonial regime of occupation and apartheid escalates land and power grabs, our grassroots socialist movement is also building power--and public discourse is shifting in response. DSA has honored the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions as a tactic to pressure Israel to comply with human rights and international law since 2017. As our movement has gained ground in many facets of the US political landscape, including major electoral wins, those who hold power in the New York State Assembly are obviously very threatened by us, which means what we're doing is working. While NYC city council members are regularly taken on an expenses-paid propaganda trip to Israel, millions of Palestinians are still denied the right to return to their homes. By asking candidates to pledge not to travel on such political junkets, New York City DSA is saying loud and clear that a candidate who aligns themselves with a violent apartheid regime--a progressive except for Palestine--is no progressive at all. This anti-Palestinian, anti-democratic, McCarthyite statement being circulated in the midst of an anti-racist uprising across the country is indicative of the reactionary, racist, and out of touch views a minority of members within the New York State Assembly apparently hold.

U.S. Jewish life is ‘fragile’ –Bret Stephens peddles delusions to battle Beinart BY JAMES NORTH AND PHILIP WEISS AUGUST 7, 2020

For weeks we waited for Bret Stephens of the New York Times to address Israeli plans to annex the West Bank beginning July 1. Silence. Even as countless American supporters of Israel came out against the plans out of a sense of political urgency, Stephens had nothing to say. He was a lot like AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee, leading rightwing pro-Israel Jewish groups that in a defining moment of Israel’s existence couldn’t say a word for or against, and as a result have lost respect and power in the official community. Now Stephens has ended his silence. Why? Because of a unique threat: liberal Zionist Peter Beinart’s call for one democratic state between the river and the sea. In Stephens’s mind, this is a greater challenge to Israel’s future than the plans to annex the West Bank and formalize apartheid. Because Peter Beinart is undermining western support for the Jewish state. Even though Bret Stephens says Beinart’s plan is “feckless” and was last espoused by Muammar Qaddafi, and would reopen “rivers of blood” – still Stephens needs to take on the damaging idea in an opinion piece titled, The Siren Song of One State, lest it get any traction in feeble Western minds. It is partly Peter Beinart’s fault that annexation was even on the table, Stephens, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, explains. The only reason that Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to go forward with annexation is that he saw the process of “delegitimization” of the Jewish state proceeding apace in the west, now with Beinart’s support. Netanyahu saw Israel losing the ideas war and wanted to “take what it can get while it can get it,” Stephens writes. “The more Israeli is ostracized because it’s a Jewish state, the the less amenable it will be to make concessions of any sort.” This is delusory. The fact that many on the American left have stopped believing in a Jewish state — that makes Israel expand? Israel has been expanding through every kind of political weather for 72 years. Israel just wants more land for Jewish settlements, with no Palestinians on that land. Palestinians and their human and civil rights have nothing to do with the matter, in Stephens’s view. No, Israeli policy is determined by how much Israel is loved and respected in the west. And now that Israel is being “ostracized,” it must grab more land. Ostracized? Huh? The U.S. gives nearly $4 billion a year to this country, never questions how the aid is used, and Congress has said that any move to boycott or sanction Israel is anti-Semitic and Nancy Pelosi says the Capitol will crumble and fall before the Democratic Party stops loving Israel. What planet does Stephens live on? A very fearful one. Stephens predicts that the views of a “significant segment of American Jewish opinion are soon to harden into a moralizing anti-Zionism.” We wish this were the case, but again — what reality is Stephens reporting on? Beinart is a declared Zionist. 95 percent of American Jews support Israel, Jewish advocates tell us repeatedly. Anti-Zionists are marginalized, and labelled anti-Semites. It is amazing what sacrifices of mental powers an intellectual will make to try to foster support for Israel. But that’s not the worst. Stephens closes with an observation about American life that is completely unbelievable. It used to be that Israelis depended on a secure and thriving American Jewry to help stand up their fragile state. Today it is American Jewry that is fragile, threatened by dwindling cultural influence, stagnant demographic trends, increasing alienation from the Democratic Party and abiding discomfort with the G.O.P., and rising anti-Semitism — sometimes masked as anti-Zionism — from across the political spectrum. Should American Jews start looking for the exits — just as every other Diaspora community in history has done, and continues to do — they will be grateful to find a Jewish state that resisted the siren song of “one state.” Again, where is Stephens reporting from? The Democratic Party just cashiered any reference to occupation in its platform, surely out of deference to pro-Israel donors. Twenty-seven state governments are trying to crack down on BDS, again in compliance to Israel lobby efforts. Jews are secure in the U.S., and aiding Israel as we speak, with only mild mainstream demurrals. Physical threats? No doubt orthodox Jews in Brooklyn feel more insecure today than they did a few years ago, and Jews across the country feel more trepidation about going into Jewish spaces than they did before the rise of white nationalism in the Trump era. But Muslims and black people have also been victims of such violence, more than Jews; and Jews retain a strong presence in the American establishment, from the Supreme Court to the Senate to the media and other leading industries. Who is looking for the exits? This is pure fantasy. As Seth Rogen said in his famous podcast, why would Jews ever want to gather in Israel, where they are even more vulnerable, in some large measure because the Palestinian population is persecuted. Stephens himself chose to move here from Israel, as hundreds of thousands of other Israelis are choosing to do. If life is so fragile for Jews, you’d think he’d move back. Clearly Stephens and other pro-Israel flacks care more about the propaganda war than they do about what Israel is actually doing. Stephens has to raise the idea of another Holocaust or pogroms because someone has dared to breathe the words one democratic state, or tried to bring Palestinians into the U.S. discussion. For the same reason Israel supporters have gone ballistic over Seth Rogen saying the idea of a Jewish state is ridiculous and antiquated and makes no sense. The battleground is the American discourse, and pro-Israeli ideologues are getting their feelings hurt because they are losing the argument. Their crazed claims are revealing. Whenever anyone brings up Palestinian human rights, they desperately try and change the subject. Thanks to Dan Walsh.