The Costs of Being Prematurely Correct

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor to Barack Obama, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, co-host of Pod Save the World and author, more recently, of All We Say: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches, and Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center, Washington DC. We’ll discuss the Democratic Party’s rapid transformation on Israel-Palestine: What explains it, what are the new terms of debate, how will this shift shape the midterms and the 2028 presidential election. And will Republican politicians follow suit? Please join us. Cited in Today’s Video Congressman Jake Auchincloss’s previous statements about military aid to Israel. B’Tselem declared Isarel an apartheid state in 2021. Things to Read (Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.) In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane reports on whether the left can continue its winning streak in the Senate race in Michigan. Ben Linder describes what he saw while traveling with Representative Ro Khanna in the West Bank. For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I talked to Abed Abou Shehada, a community organizer from Jaffa, about the tension between power and purity in Palestinian politics. I talked about Israel-Palestine on the Comedy Cellar’s podcast, Live from the Table. On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia. See you on Friday, Peter VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: The shift in the Democratic Party on Israel is so rapid that I think we really haven’t encountered anything like this in my lifetime in terms of the rapidity of a shift in what is considered mainstream political opinion within a party since the debate about gay marriage, you know. That’s the last debate that I think shifted as rapidly as this one. You’ll remember that Barack Obama was elected publicly opposing gay marriage, which was the position of virtually everyone in the Democratic Party. And virtually by the end of the Obama administration, an overwhelming number of Democrats are supporting it, and even the Republicans are throwing in the towel. And now we’re seeing a kind of version of this on Israel-Palestine, where the condition of ending U.S. military aid, which even a year or two ago was a very marginal position among elected Democrats, really only the furthest left fringe of elected Democrats held this position. Now you see that it’s become the mainstream Democratic position, that roughly half the Democrats in the House voted for this amendment by Thomas Massey that would have ended all U.S. security assistance to Israel. And the Massey amendment was so broad that probably if you had a somewhat more narrowly tailored, carefully written amendment, it would have gotten more than even half of these votes. And again, this was a position that probably would have just had a handful of Democratic votes just a year or two ago. I think part of the reason this shift is happening so rapidly is that, like the issue of gay marriage, this is an issue on which there was already a very large gap between what many Democratic politicians believe privately and what they would say publicly. And so, in a way, people could switch so fast because you didn’t really need to convince them of the position. They just needed to be convinced that they could publicly articulate views that they probably had already privately held. And once they realized that actually you could be against AIPAC and still win politically, that it might even be advantageous to be on that position, I think that helps to explain this stampede. And this is the way politics is supposed to work, right? Most politicians are not conviction politicians in the sense that they take positions that put their political careers at risk because they believe it’s the right thing to do. They follow the wind politically, and