Saturday, July 25, 2020

Newsweek: The Democratic Party Can No Longer Be Described as Pro-Israel


For the past week or so, Democrats purporting to be "pro-Israel" have been laying the groundwork for release of the party's official 2020 platform. Their spin has been that they held the line against their party's ascendant anti-Israel progressive base. They needed that spin. 
Many lifelong Democrats who recognize Israel as a valued U.S. ally, who appreciate the existence of the world's only secure Jewish state and who oppose the unremitting terror campaigns of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas had grown concerned. 
They know that much as they may have admired the Obama-Biden administration on other grounds, its "daylight" doctrine had been an unmitigated disaster for Israel. In a stark, stunning and explicit departure from decades of bipartisan U.S. policy promising "no daylight" and "no surprises" between the allies, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry revealed Israeli intelligence, sabotaged operations and engaged in stealthy diplomatic attacks on the Jewish state—culminating in the notorious UNSC 2334 declaration that the mere act of Jews living in Judea is criminal. 
The party's progressive base has made no secret of its desire to pocket 2334 and orient American policy in directions increasingly antagonistic towards Israel—and increasingly dangerous to Jewish life. The purported "pro-Israel" Democrats needed a pro-Israel platform for assurance. 
But the Democratic National Committee released a platform 180 degrees off from the spin. It's so pro-Iran that the National Iranian-American Council, the de facto Iranian regime lobby in Washington, immediately "applauded" the DNC "for its forward-leaning platform commitments on issues of importance to the Iranian-American community." It demonstrates that President Obama's curious preference for the supremacists running the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than our traditional regional allies, has become mainstream Democratic ideology. 
Trump administration policies have brought the bloody Islamic Republic to its knees. The Democrats seek to restore its vitality by ending sanctions and re-entering President Obama's odious Iran deal. Every faction across Israel's notoriously fractious political spectrum agreed that this deal was an existential threat. Biden and the 2020 Democrats take the opposing view: Regime change is wrong; diplomacy and economic engagement can restrain the mullahs.   
Next up, the Gulf Arabs: A new generation of leaders have recently expanded women's rights, confronted Islamism, acted to curb terrorism, deepened ties to the U.S. and moved towards ending the Arab/Israeli conflict. Biden and the 2020 Democrats prefer to "reset" those warm relations in order to keep America's traditional Gulf allies at arms length.

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