The headline published by the far-left outlet The Intercept was spot on, even if most of the information in its article was slanted or downright false. In declaring that, “The Dam Breaks: Democratic Senators Overwhelmingly Reject Arms Sales to Israel,” the rabidly anti-Israel publication said nothing less than the truth. In the last year, the last vestiges of pro-Israel sentiment in the Democratic Party have more or less collapsed.
In the vote held on April 15, 40 of 47 Democratic members of the U.S. Senate voted in favor of one or two of the proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to stop the sale of bulldozers and 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. That this happened in the midst of an existential war that Israel is fighting against Iran, as well as its Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries, is shocking in and of itself. But the dramatic rise in the number of votes against giving Jerusalem the weapons it needs to deal with these enemies is what is most telling.
Pro-Israel Democrats are now the outliers
In 2024, when 19 Senate Democrats got behind a similar move by Sanders to “Block the Bombs” that were being used by Israel to attack Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, that was rightly considered a breakthrough for what was once thought to be a marginal element in their caucus. A year later, in 2025, a then-record 25 Democratic senators joined the Vermont Socialist in seeking to embargo arms to Israel. Now, by getting 40 of his colleagues to join with him, a clear message was sent to the last of the pro-Israel holdouts.
Just a very few years ago, those Democrats who wanted to sunder the alliance with the Jewish state in this manner could be characterized as outliers who represented a marginal faction of the party. Today, pro-Israel Democrats are the ones who must be considered out of touch with not just their fellow senators but with the party base that keeps them in office.
A New York Times article claimed that the major factor in flipping the totals on arms sales to Israel was the unpopularity of the joint war the United States has been fighting with the Jewish state against Iran. That’s certainly an important part of this debate. Still, the partisan motivations of those who think, as Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman does, that defeating President Donald Trump has become more important than opposing the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism is not the sole or even the most important determining factor in deciding how Democrats are going to vote.
What matters most is what party activists and grassroots Democratic voters think about Israel. And as poll after poll has shown, they oppose Israel and favor their terrorist enemies (65% to 17%) by almost as overwhelming a majority as Republicans back Israel (70% to 13%) over the Palestinians.
It’s Hasan Piker’s party now
Indeed, liberal writer Jonathan Chait was not far off the mark when he wrote in The Atlantic of the fear that Democratic officeholders have of a party base that has fallen under the spell of anti-Israel hatemongers like podcaster Hasan Piker.
Republicans may have their own problem with a similar antisemitic set, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and enablers like Megyn Kelly. But Democrats who don’t wish to bend the knee to their intersectional left-wing base are in a very different position than the GOP. The leader of the Republicans—Trump—had no problem kicking them out of the party and his MAGA movement for the offense of opposing the war on Iran and alliance with Israel. He did so not only because he isn’t the type to take orders from someone like Carlson, who is more of a Mar-a-Lago court jester than a policy adviser. He could do so with impunity, secure in the knowledge that whatever inroads the Israel-bashers and Jew-haters have made among young voters, the overwhelming majority of his supporters approve of his stances.
Senate Democrats, most of whom came into office pledging their undying support for the Jewish state, don’t have that luxury. Indeed, as Chait writes, they are on the verge of losing their party to the likes of Piker, as well as the academic, pop-culture and media elites who, as we’ve learned from their pushback against calls to isolate someone who hates America as well as Israel and the Jews, largely agree with him.
Chait’s proposed solution to the problem is to follow the path of the 40 Senate Democrats who are now on record backing a proposal that would disarm Israel in the middle of a war. He says they have choices. One is to abandon Israel and hold onto office. The other is to stick to the principles that got most of them elected in the first place—and be defeated in a future primary by an Israel-hating and antisemitic Democratic Socialist who will steer the party toward the hard left. It also means a Democratic Party in which members of the left-wing congressional “Squad” that includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), along with fellow Marxist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are no longer on the margins but in control.
They know he’s right because, as he put it, they can all read polls. And so, they are shifting their principles to accommodate the new ideological alignment toward people for whom one Jewish state on the planet is one too many. And if that means leaving Israel without the weapons and means to defend itself against its genocidal regional foes, that’s just too bad.
Were the Democrats who changed their votes in the last year to get in sync with the new fashionable antisemitic wing of their party—such as Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ruben Gallego (D-N.J.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—to admit to this, it would be disgraceful enough. But what’s truly awful about their stand is the disingenuous defenses of their position. They claim that they still support Israel, but think its democratically elected government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has engaged in reckless and needlessly brutal behavior by waging war on Iran, in addition to its terrorist allies in Gaza and Lebanon.
Missing from their hypocritical speeches is any mention of what they really expect from an Israeli government. Even Chait, who also claims to be a “liberal Zionist” disenchanted with Netanyahu but not Israel itself, had to acknowledge that the Jewish state has no current peace partner. At some point, even those who are willfully ignorant about events in the Middle East have to take notice of the fact that Palestinian Arabs don’t want a two-state solution, which liberal Americans still seem to think is the only answer to the conflict. Unlike them, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have decided to accept that Palestinians are saying “no” to any outcome other than the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of its people.
The atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, helped cement that viewpoint.
Israelis won’t commit suicide
Do Democrats really expect Israel, whether led by Netanyahu or any possible alternative that might defeat him later this year in the coming elections, to share their delusions after everything that has happened in the 33 years since the Oslo Accords? Do they think Israeli citizens will commit suicide to retain the world’s goodwill? Even those who will vote against Netanyahu understand that the terrorist attacks that took place on Oct. 7 were just a trailer for what the Palestinians want to do to the rest of the Jewish state.
The Piker wing of the Democrats knows this, too. The difference is that they support Israel’s extinction and think that the Jewish genocide this would entail is merely the just deserts that all “white” oppressors and settler-colonialists deserve.
The “moderates” who once made up the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party, but are now voting with the Israel-haters, may not want this. But they value their seats and the ability to move among their base without being accused of being supportive of the mythical genocide Israel is supposedly carrying out against Gazans more than they do the alliance with Jerusalem, let alone Jewish survival.
The party base isn’t aware that the “genocide” and “apartheid” blood libels aimed at Israel are all rooted in recycled Soviet propaganda and other myths validated by toxic “anti-racist” ideologies. Those whose knowledge is limited to what they see on their TikTok feeds or podcasts hosted by Piker—and his moral equivalents on the right—may not know they are being lied to. But the Senate Democrats who are pandering to their prejudices and appalling ignorance do.
Perhaps they can live with it because, as Chait notes, Israel isn’t going to allow itself to be destroyed, regardless of what the Democrats do, even if they retake Congress and the White House in the coming years. Truth be told, it is in the Jewish state’s interests, as Netanyahu himself has said, to eventually wean itself from U.S. military aid, even if doing so now, after more than two and a half years of continuous war, would be disastrous. Still, that aid is almost all spent on buying U.S. materials and constitutes as much of an assistance package to American arms manufacturers as it does to Jerusalem.
A deal with the devil
But Chait and other like-minded pundits, such as Friedman or Ezra Klein at the Times, are wrong if they believe that abandoning Israel in this manner will save the moderates who still claim to care about the Jewish state. By giving in to the hard left in this manner, they are, as The Intercept noted, allowing the dam that held their extremists in check to burst.
Like all such deluges, support for Israel isn’t the only position once held by Democrats that will be swept away. In its wake will come not only the normalization and acceptance of antisemitism, as is already manifested by the liberal media’s swooning over Piker. It will also involve adoption of the rest of the far left’s agenda, including open borders, a “Defund the Police” attitude toward crime and public safety, and AOC- and Mamdani-style Marxist economic measures.
Democrats aren’t wrong to think they are set up to make real gains this year because of both the usual anti-incumbent spirit of a midterm election, but also because of the setbacks faced by the Trump administration—many of them economic. And they believe turning on Israel will only further accelerate a shift in voter sentiment toward them. Yet the sort of thinking that animates the people they are appeasing isn’t limited to hatred for Israel and tolerance for Jew-hatred. It will inevitably lead to general radicalization that is deeply unpopular and will sink them far quicker than a principled stand in support of the Jewish state would. As the ominous saying goes: “First, they come for the Jews … .”
Confronting and refuting the antisemitic base of the Democratic Party won’t be easy for politicians who are, like most of their congressional colleagues on both sides of the aisle, more interested in power than principle. But they should realize that making concessions to their base’s anti-Israel prejudices won’t purchase their acquiescence on other issues. Those Democrats who are betraying Jerusalem now aren’t buying themselves time or space to further consolidate their hold on their party. Instead, they are making a deal with the devil from which there is no escape clause to enable them to hold onto their seats—or what’s left of their principles.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
