Stacking the Dem platform panel against Israel

I’ve been saying for a long time that the more liberal one is politically the less likely one is to support the Jewish state. The anti-Israel policy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton offers anecdotal proof; the vote by Democrats in favor of the Iran deal provide another example, and then, back in 2012, there was the removal by the Democrats of four pro-Israel planks from their platform.. 

When the platform changes were reported by this columnist, Democrats restored one of the four — the Jerusalem-is-the-capital-of-Israel plank; but they failed to restore a promise not to negotiate with Hamas as long as it refused to renounce terrorism, or a position that in a final deal Palestinian refugees would be resettled in a Palestinian state rather than flooding Israel with the purpose of removing its Jewish character, or that the 1948 armistice lines should not represent the final boarders between Israel and Palestine. 

A Pew Poll released last week backs up the qualitative judgements with quantitative evidence, finding that “views of Israel and the Palestinians have become more ideologically polarized. In early September 2001, just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there were only modest partisan and ideological differences in Israeli-Palestinian sympathies. But since then, and especially over the past decade, the share sympathizing more with Israel than with the Palestinians has increased among all ideological groups, with the exception of liberal Democrats.”

“The share of liberal Democrats who side more with the Palestinians than with Israel has nearly doubled since 2014 (from 21-percent to 40-percent) and is higher than at any point dating back to 2001,” according to Pew.

Based on people appointed to the platform committee of the Democratic National Committee by Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Bernie Sanders, we should expect that the Democratic Party will continue to back away from support for Israel.