What a hoopla has arisen over the fact that the first Jewish candidate to get to the homestretch of a Democratic presidential primary is making it his business to move the party formally away from its support of Israel.
At least to the degree that President Obama hasn’t already done so.
This story comes into focus with the announcement of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ nominees to the Democratic Party’s platform committee. The five — out of a total of 11 on the committee — are a parody of leftist politics.
They include a radical environmentalist, Bill McKibben; a Native American activist, Deborah Parker; and a particularly progressive congressman, Keith Ellison (D-Minn.)
The big news, though, is that Sanders’ surrogates include the pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby and the leftist professor Cornel West. They are two of the harshest critics of Israel on the national scene.
It’s not my intention here to suggest that any of these worthies ought to be excluded from the Democratic — or any other — Party’s political debate. But what does it say about Sanders that these are his platform writers?
“The first Jewish candidate to win state primaries and amass millions of votes,” writes the editor of the liberal Jewish Forward, “is also the one trying to steer the Democratic Party platform away from its full-throated support of Israel.”
The anti-Israel edge to Sanders’ surrogates is so pronounced that even The New York Times fronted a dispatch to mark the point. It warned that a “bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity.”
Nor does this seem to be unintended. West, a veteran of Harvard and Princeton, and Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, were themselves quoted by the Times as vowing to overturn what it called the party’s “lopsided support for Israel.”
Supposedly Hillary Clinton is going to resist this. But even her camarilla is a marker of how far the party has been shifting. One of her nominees is former State Department aide Wendy Sherman.
By dint of Sherman’s seniority at State, she could be considered Clinton’s main foreign-policy person on the platform committee. Yet Sherman’s claim to fame — or infamy — is as co-author of the articles of appeasement on Iran.
Those, remember, were opposed not only by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but also by the left-of-center opposition in Israel. And by majorities of both houses of the Congress — and not just Republicans.
As it stands, the only members of the Dems’ committee to have made support for Israel a main marker of their careers are those installed by the party’s national chairman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
It was she who put the former congressman Howard Berman on the committee. She also named its chairman, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland. Both have supportive records on Israel.
Then again, it turns out that Wasserman Schultz’s own hold on the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee is in danger, according to The Hill newspaper. It reports that Wasserman Schultz is seen as too “divisive,” meaning too anti-Sanders. If the congresswoman goes, it’s hard to imagine who could provide adult supervision to the platform writers.
The cynics might say that party platforms don’t matter anymore, not in the age of the Internet. Now the debate can be shifted by whatever thumb Mark Zuckerberg has put on Facebook’s trending algorithm.
Every once in a while, though, a platform offers a glimpse of where a party really stands. This happened at the 2012 Democratic Convention in Charlotte, when the press discovered that God and Jerusalem had been dropped from the platform.
It prompted the convention chairman to ask for a voice vote to correct the oversight. The “ayes” were eclipsed by the “nays.” The correction was rammed through anyhow, but not before the country, watching on TV, saw what the Democrats had become.
“Crass” is the word Abraham Foxman used, when I spoke with him Thursday, to describe Sanders’ moves on Israel. I detected a note of sadness in this aging hero of the Jewish struggle.
Foxman, after all, has spent his entire life laboring to end prejudice against, among many others, the Jews. Finally a Jew makes it into the homestretch for presidential nomination. And his agenda is to turn his party away from the Jewish state.