On the menu today: Way back on October 11, 2023, New York City Council Member Tiffany Cabán called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Now, at that point, Hamas had just massacred civilians in 21 communities, killing 1,195 people including 38 children. The Israel Defense Force had barely begun its retaliation for the atrocity, but the answer in the mind of Cabán was clear: Everyone should stop shooting and accept a permanent cease-fire. To some of us, this sounded like allowing Hamas to get a free shot at Israelis and then preventing the Israelis from hitting Hamas back.
Two days later, on October 13, a then-little known state senator by the name of Zohran Mamdani joined the call for a cease-fire: “Now is the moment for all people of conscience to call for a ceasefire and no more military funding.” The same day, another Democratic socialist state senator, Julia Salazar concurred: “A ceasefire is urgent. Please implore your federal elected officials to take every action they can to stop this from continuing.”
On October 28, 2023, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her call. “Some may dismiss a ceasefire as naïve or worse. Yet who has a plan for what follows this destruction? What do we call that?”
Mamdani offered a statement on Twitter yesterday that declared “Today’s scenes of Israelis and Palestinians are profoundly moving” but also said that “we have watched as our tax dollars have funded a genocide.” At least Mamdani acknowledged that the cease-fire occurred.
AOC’s X feed had nothing about the cease-fire in the past few days. Nor has Cabán’s. Nor Salazar’s.
For two years, prominent leftist Democrats have been screaming their heads off to get a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and now they’ve finally got one. But suddenly, it’s as if the issue just doesn’t interest them anymore. It’s like a Men in Black neuralyzer has wiped the issue of the Gaza Strip from their memories. It’s shameless, hilarious, and deeply revealing about how the Democratic Party perceives issues and America’s role in the world. Read on.
There’s Nothing to See Here, Apparently
There is a fairly widespread mythology within the ranks of the Democratic Party that one of the big reasons Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election is because Joe Biden and his administration were too pro-Israel and insufficiently sympathetic to, or helpful to, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Harris herself believes it; in her book 107 Days, she wrote, “I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians.” “But he couldn’t do it: While he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”
(Madam Vice President, cut your old boss some slack. Approaching age 82, he couldn’t passionately state much of anything in that final year in office.)
The only problem is that the available evidence doesn’t support this theory. What is true is that the Democratic Party’s chattering class is vehemently opposed to the Israeli government of Bibi Netanyahu and passionately supportive of the Palestinians. But they represent a tiny sliver of the electorate, almost entirely in deep-blue states. When it comes to presidential elections (and most Senate and U.S. House elections, for that matter) they’re utterly irrelevant and walk around in steadfast denial of that fact, convinced they represent a large and pivotal demographic in elections.
Groups like the Institute for Middle East Understanding conducted a survey of 474 voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but who voted for a candidate besides Kamala Harris in 2024. They found “29 percent of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024 say ‘ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ was the top issue affecting their vote choice, with the economy a close second at 24 percent.”
Now, you’re a smart reader; you’re probably squinting and saying, “Wait a minute, that’s less than one third of this particular demographic, so that’s not a particularly high percentage.”
And when you dig into the numbers, you find that when asked, “Did the Biden administration’s policy of providing taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel make you more likely to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, or less likely], or make no difference?” 61 percent answered “made no difference,” and 7 percent said it make them more likely to vote for Harris. For about seven out of ten people who jumped off the Biden bandwagon between 2020 and 2024, Biden’s support for Israel was either a non-issue or a small factor making them want to support Harris.
Somehow from these numbers, the IMEU concluded,
The Democratic Party needs to come to terms with the real reasons it lost the presidency in November, including that after over a year of unprecedented protests and calls for Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel, party leadership failed to listen to its own voters who overwhelmingly want their government to end its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The national exit polls taken in 2024 come to a dramatically different conclusion: Gaza was the preeminent issue for only a particularly small slice of the electorate. In the national exit poll, 31 percent of respondents said U.S. support for Israel was “too strong,” another 31 percent said it was “not strong enough,” and 30 percent said, “just right.” But only 4 percent of voters nationwide ranked “foreign policy” as their top issue.
In the state of Michigan, which has a significant number of Arab Americans, Harris lost by 80,103 votes. In the exit poll in that state, 29 percent of respondents said U.S. support for Israel was “too strong,” another 27 percent said it was “not strong enough,” and 37 percent said it was about right. Again, just 4 percent of voters statewide ranked “foreign policy” as their top issue.
I mention all this to explain why we saw a relatively muted response from Democrats to yesterday’s joyous news. Sure, a lot of Democrats just reflexively seethe when they see Donald Trump getting a hero’s welcome in the Israeli Knesset; they interpret world events as a zero-sum game, where any win for the president is a triumph for the forces of darkness, even if the release of hostages held in captivity for 738 days is a consequence of that triumph. Even NBC News felt compelled to point out that most Democratic lawmaker statements about the cease-fire act is if it just happened, out of the blue, with no role by the president or his administration:
Democrats are heaping praise on the peace deal struck between Israel and Hamas, which unlocked the release of all living hostages in Gaza. But there are two words most Democrats are omitting when discussing the peace agreement: “Donald” and “Trump.” . . .
The divide between celebrating the deal while ignoring the man who helped broker it highlights the politically tricky terrain Democrats find themselves in. They want to laud the potentially historic peace agreement without giving credit to Trump, a figure they and their voters largely loathe and whose actions throughout the war have drawn criticism.
Our Brittany Bernstein points out:
Pro-Israel actor and comedian Michael Rapaport called out several celebrities over their silence, including Mark Ruffalo, John Cusack, Lorde, Hannah Einbinder, and Javier Bardem.
“CEASEFIRE is NOW, where are these people?” Rapaport asked in a social media post. “The war in Gaza is ending. The so-called ‘genocide’ is over.”
“Because it was never about peace. It was about performance,” he added.
Einbinder, who wore an “Artists4Ceasefire” pin to the Emmys and then used her acceptance speech to say, “Free Palestine and f*** ICE,” did later share a post about the peace deal. “We are elated by the Gaza ceasefire news,” the post read, in small type. In a larger font, it adds, “Now the world must hold Israel to account for 2 years of genocide.” Bardem, for his part, later posted extensively about the deal on Instagram, including celebratory videos of the hostages’ release from Hamas captivity. He did, however, post clips questioning why the cease-fire was not reached sooner and suggesting the Trump peace plan is “another way of continuing the occupation” of Gaza.
I mean, they’re Hollywood types, they only weigh in when they feel like it, which is one of the many reasons you shouldn’t get your geopolitical strategy and foreign policy advice from the Hulk and Martin Q. Blank, even if you love their performances.
But the activist class in the Democratic Party also believed that the point of the cease-fire was to halt the Israelis and effectively punish them, as well as save the Palestinians and — intentionally or not — save the remaining members of Hamas. In the minds of the hard-left anti-Israel types, if the Israeli Knesset is thrilled with the cease-fire, then it can’t be a good cease-fire.
You know who demonstrated the ability to give Trump credit yesterday? Joe Biden:
I am deeply grateful and relieved that this day has come — for the last living 20 hostages who have been through unimaginable hell and are finally reunited with their families and loved ones, and for the civilians in Gaza who have experienced immeasurable loss and will finally get the chance to rebuild their lives.
The road to this deal was not easy. My Administration worked relentlessly to bring hostages home, get relief to Palestinian civilians, and end the war. I commend President Trump and his team for their work to get a renewed cease-fire deal over the finish line.
Now, with the backing of the United States and the world, the Middle East is on a path to peace that I hope endures and a future for Israelis and Palestinians alike with equal measures of peace, dignity, and safety.
It’s worth noting that the obstacles mentioned in yesterday’s otherwise-cheery newsletter are already manifesting. Hamas has only turned over four of the 28 bodies of murdered hostages that they agreed to release. Hamas gunmen are conducting public executions of those they’ve deemed “criminals and collaborators with Israel,” so the whole “disarmament” is still a long ways away. And apparently some Palestinians aren’t clear on where the borders are:
Hamas said that several Gaza residents were killed by the Israeli military, saying it was a violation of the cease-fire agreement. The Israeli military said suspects crossed a so-called yellow line which delineates where Israeli troops can be stationed inside Gaza, breaching the cease-fire deal. The military said it opened fire after the suspects didn’t comply with attempts to distance them from troops.
It’s possible that Monday will remain the best day in the Middle East for a long, long while. That’s why we savor those days.
Reprinted with permission from National Review by Jim Geraghty.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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