A thoughtful recent column in The Bulwark by former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro addressed an important question at a moment of rapidly shifting politics: how Democrats can have a better conversation about Israel.
Shapiro’s starting point is sound: the Party is being pressed by loud voices pulling in absolutist directions – Israel’s staunch defenders still demanding unconditional support no matter what the country does; fierce detractors unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of a national homeland for the Jewish people.
He is right to argue the case for a more nuanced path. But the Party’s approach won’t improve if the conversation focuses only on the U.S. relationship to Israel.
For decades, American politics on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been shaped by asking how candidate positions would play among supporters of Israel. Palestinians too often remained outside the frame.
That approach is now failing politically, morally, and strategically.
It alienates much of the Democratic base, ignores half the issue and misses the basic reality that there can be no long-term security for Israel while millions of Palestinians live without freedom, dignity, political rights, or security of their own.
Israel’s advocates may for years have considered it a win when our politics treated Palestinians as peripheral. In reality, this approach has helped entrench a status quo that is as disastrous for Israelis as it is for Palestinians.
The omission of Palestinians from mainstream Democratic politics – and literally from the stage of the Party’s national conversation – helps explain decades of policy that have failed to deliver peace, stability, or lasting security for either people.
At the same time, parts of the pro-Palestinian movement have begun to adopt their own form of absolutism – dismissing Israeli security concerns, denying Jewish historical roots in Israel, and at times treating a candidate’s or activist’s engagement with Israel itself as disqualifying.
That trend is not just wrong on principle. It is counterproductive. A movement committed to Palestinian freedom cannot succeed by narrowing the circle of who is allowed to participate.
Democrats must reject both forms of imbalance: the longstanding tendency to center Israel while marginalizing Palestinians, and the emerging tendency to frame Palestinian advocacy in ways that delegitimize Israelis and those who support Israel’s existence.
If Democrats hope to build a healthier and more sustainable approach to Israel-Palestine, we need to center the humanity, rights, and aspirations of both peoples equally.
That means recognizing a basic truth too often absent from American politics: Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve freedom, dignity, and security.
It also means recognizing that questioning aspects of U.S. policy toward Israel is not the same as questioning the U.S.-Israel relationship itself.
A truly “better conversation” for Democrats must look to recalibrate American policy in a way that advances both American interests and freedom and security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
For decades, the United States has lavished military, diplomatic, and political support on Israel while treating investment in Palestinian governance and self-determination as expendable.
The result has been a deeply unstable status quo in which one people’s security is heavily subsidized while the other lives without sovereignty, security or a credible political future.
Eliminating a political horizon and hope for Palestinians while granting Israeli governments a blank check helped create the dynamics of perpetual conflict and never-ending occupation.
The question, then, is whether American policy can be grounded more consistently in both our values and our strategic interests by treating both Israelis and Palestinians as human beings whose futures matter – and as two peoples whose long-term security is ultimately intertwined.
Shapiro asks important questions about American interests in the Middle East and how its relationship with Israel impacts them: regional stability, normalization, and effective competition with adversaries like Iran, Russia, and China.
But few of these critical American interests in the region can be advanced while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved.
Supporting Palestinian freedom, security, and self-determination must therefore be a core American objective – not an afterthought, but a central pillar of policy.
A recalibrated American approach should maintain a strong commitment to Israel’s security and future while also establishing a credible and consistent commitment to Palestinian rights, political dignity, and accountable Palestinian institutions.
That means aligning policy with principle: enforcing existing U.S. laws, ensuring American assistance advances both our interests and our values, and making clear that permanent occupation, displacement, and endless insecurity are neither sustainable nor acceptable.
Advocates for Israel and advocates for Palestine alike should recognize that their cause is not advanced by forcing the United States to choose between the two peoples.
This conflict will not end through force or through the disappearance of either people’s national aspirations.
There is only one viable path forward: a political resolution that recognizes the humanity, rights, and national aspirations of both peoples.
A better Democratic conversation should reject absolutism in either direction and begin from a simple principle: peace, justice, freedom, and security are indivisible.
A politics that refuses to fully see both peoples will ultimately leave both peoples less free, less secure, and further from peace.
If you appreciate the work J Street does, I hope you’ll consider making a grassroots contribution to ensure our voice is heard.
Thank you, Jeremy. As always, your statement and position is clear, precise and makes perfect sense. Keep staying on tack. It's bound to persuade all people of good conscience. The challenge is the condition of the body politic, ensconced in a limited perception of the world, or rather, transfixed to a material world.
Another brilliant article, Jeremy, with an eye on a sound political strategy. Love it!!!
Here is something I wrote recently which is similar to what you said yet also different since I tend to sometimes employ more incendiary, emotionally-charged language.
My comment below was a response to people using the term "Zionism" in a uniformly disparaging manner.
I do not agree with the broad-brushed approach of sweeping generalizations describing Zionists as if they were all the same type of evil. I think Liberal Zionists are actually good, fellow travelers for peace (like J Street) and I think some aspects of early, democratic, egalitarian aspects of Zionism were quite noble even if the Nakba itself was evil, but, in my view, it was a necessary evil given the lack of good options at the time. So I think it was the least evil of only evil options at the time, the best of bad options, immediately after the Holocaust. And yes, I know the idea of Zionism as an idea long predated the Holocaust. But I think those secularists who created the notion and idea of Zionism did so because they understood how deep and prevalent and vicious European anti-Semitism was at the time and they were trying to craft an answer to that unbridled hatred in a way that would save the Jewish people from the Holocaust they anticipated years before their time.
While it could be argued that Zionism is also an imperialist project to project Western power into the Middle East, that does not mean that was the only factor or sole motivation. So I would reject the argument that it is the sole reason. But I would not reject that claim outright as balderdash either. I think it wiser and more realistic to accept that possibility as one factor amongst a multiplicity of varying factors that brought Zionism to fruition when Israel was established. So I would not argue that it was the chief reason but rather perhaps more of a minor influential factor. There exists a myriad of motives and impulses for establishing the State of Israel, chief among them being the survival of the Jewish people which came into sharp relief during and immediately after the Holocaust. The tragedy of the Holocaust and the fact that it left nowhere (or very few places) for Jews to hide or run since most nations refused entry to millions of Jews trying to emigrate out of Europe (including the United States) meant that the only true safeguard for the Jewish people was to create a state of their own where they would be well protected. For a variety of reasons, it made sense to do this in the same geographic area their ancestors of two millenia ago when they were expelled by another European Imperial conquest---the Roman sacking of Jerusalem at the time of the fall of the Second Temple.
So in a way, in an inhumane and brutal way, the Nakba was a return back to the ancestral home of the Jewish people before being forcefully expelled by the Roman Imperialists at that time. Granted, it was an injustice to the Palestinians, who also have every right to their own State but it was still the lesser of all evil choices at the time. What else could Jews do? Just stay in Europe and get over it? Maybe keep getting murdered? Please. Be serious. It was better to displace 750K people than to acquiesce to being murdered. Lesser of only evil choices, that is Israel's founding in a nutshell. It was ugly, it was evil but it was a necessary evil and the least evil of only evil choices at the time. So that is the ugly, uncomfortable, cold reality.
With that said, however, what Israel has become today is a little more than a highly militarized, perpetual-war waging, aggressive, neo-fascist state captured almost completely by the Kahanist hard-right, namely, the settler class. This kind of government coupled with its expansionist policy in the context of maintaining an apartheid cannot be allowed to continue. It is pretty darn evil. So you should speak up and protest against any US tax dollars or weapons being sent to Israel until this policy changes. Ignore the inevitable accusations of antisemitism for the pure comedy that they are in this context and keep waging peace and justice. Do not relent. But think in more nuanced terms too. Do not fall prey to the absolutists of either extreme.
The world is not black-and-white; it is grey and complicated and nebulous and difficult to discern and understand. That fact is key to questioning everything you read, hear and see. All information should be subject to critical analysis, fact-and-evidence-based examination and genuine analytical rigor before deciding on your own what to believe with one key consideration in mind: that you may never fully understand it all but that you will also not let this lack of full comprehension paralyze you from action---to speak out, to write and to try to help inform others, and to compel them to such action too.
Wage peace and persevere!!!