So What If the Democrats Are Divided on the Middle East? Embrace It

The marquee Democratic U.S. Senate primary of the Midwest is being fought over the Middle East.  

As no clear frontrunner has emerged in Michigan, a state with significant Arab and Jewish populations, the three top candidates appear to be pursuing distinct sets of voters in their quest for a plurality.  

U.S. Representative Haley Stevens defines herself as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and is backed by AIPAC PAC, which calls itself the “largest pro-Israel PAC in America.” State Senator Mallory McMorrow is supported by J Street PAC, the electoral arm of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, which has expressed “strong opposition to both the Iran war and to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.” McMorrow has also sworn off money from AIPAC. Former public health official Abdul El-Sayed has touted the support of influencer Hasan Piker, who said last month, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” 

When it comes to the Middle East, they don’t disagree on everything. Each has expressed opposition to the war with Iran. But, as candidates in hotly contested primaries tend to do, they seem eager to focus on their differences.  

Both McMorrow and Stevens attacked El-Sayed for campaigning with Piker. Both McMorrow and El-Sayed have criticized an AIPAC PAC fundraising appeal supporting Stevens in concert with the incumbent Republican from Maine, Susan Collins. In March, when an AIPAC video featured Stevens declaring support for “standing alongside the only democracy in the Middle East,” El-Sayed responded, “Good to know. I stand with Michigan.”  

The conflicts that ravage the Middle East are of enormous importance to human dignity and global stability, and candidates for federal office should share their views on how to resolve them with voters. Yet Democrats should be wary of their primary elections becoming de facto referendums on Middle East policy. 

Campaigns tend to reduce extremely complicated situations to simplistic binary litmus tests. We are already seeing this happen with candidates asked whether they believe Israel is committing genocide and deserves continued military aid. The subtext of such questions is to determine which candidate is on the good guy’s side and which is on the bad guy’s side.  

But good and bad cannot be so cleanly delineated. Both Israelis and Palestinians deserve the human rights of freedom and peace. Both the far-right Israeli government and Hamas, which is still in control of much of Gaza despite last October’s (tenuous and fraying) ceasefire agreement that is supposed to install a technocratic administration, have denied them freedom and peace with their murderous policies.  

If the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu deserves to be called “genocidal” because over two years its military killed more than 70,000 and displaced 2 million, then one should not hesitate to extend the same to Hamas for killing 1200, three-quarters of whom were civilians, on one day. The difference in scale and duration of their operations is due to the size of their respective arsenals, not the grotesque nature of their objectives. Each renounced the two-state peace process begun 30 years ago by now-diminished entities, the Israeli Labor Party and the Palestinian Fatah party. Each would fully displace or rule over the other, without regard to body count, if given the opportunity.  

Faced with two warring camps uninterested in reconciliation, what America can do to foster peace is hardly obvious, if even possible. Even when there was a two-state peace process, actual peace was elusive, though abandonment of it led to the carnage on and after October 7. Expecting Democrats to coalesce around a perfect white paper solution is unrealistic, since no such white paper exists.  

In turn, what we should expect from Democrats is what we’re seeing—a wide range of positions. If current polling holds, the next Senate Democratic caucus will feature Graham Platner of Maine, who says, “Not a single taxpayer dollar should be spent on arming and defending a country that commits a genocide,” and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who says, “I’m always going to vote whatever supports Israel [be it] military, financial, intelligence.”  

But Democrats need not let Platner, Fetterman, or whoever emerges from the Michigan primary define their party on the Mideast, when most Democrats’ views fall somewhere in between. 

There’s no question that rank-and-file Democrats have been turning away from Israel. According to NBC News, in 2013, Democratic registered voters sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians 45 percent to 13 percent. Today, it’s more than reversed, with 67 percent sympathizing with Palestinians versus 17 percent with Israelis. Moreover, a huge generation gap has opened, with 55 percent of senior citizens expressing “positive” views of Israel and only 13 percent of voters under 35 saying the same. 

However, you get different poll numbers if you compare Israel to Hamas, as the Harvard-Harris poll recently tested. In that poll, Democrats support Israel over Hamas by a wide 66 percent to 34 percent margin. Again, we see a big generation gap, with voters under 25, regardless of party, only modestly siding with Israel over Hamas: 54 percent to 46 percent.  

Perhaps most illustrative of the gradations of public opinion comes from an April poll from The Economist/YouGov, which asked, “Do you favor the U.S. increasing or decreasing military aid to Israel?” and offered a range of options. Democrats were divided, with 23 percent supporting maintaining or increasing aid, 21 percent supporting a decrease, and 35 percent supporting a complete cutoff.  

Foreign policy, however, should not be driven by simplistic poll questions. We need not sympathize with one persecuted people over another. Even though it’s increasingly common to see anti-Israel street protesters chant, “Israel should not exist” and “We don’t want no two states,” the juxtaposition of those slogans reminds us why a two-state solution is the only path to freedom and peace for Palestinians and Israelis. Just as the current one-state arrangement subjugates the stateless Palestinians, the erasure of Israel as a state would subjugate Israelis.

If most Democrats underscore their desire for a resurrection of a two-state peace process that would serve both Israelis and Palestinians, it will be easier to tolerate a range of views within the party on the best way to achieve peace, while also subtly marginalizing untenable, unpopular positions such as an outright embrace of Hamas, however in vogue that might be in radical circles. (Among all respondents in the Harvard-Harris poll, Hamas was deemed “favorable” by just nine percent.) Making it clear that the Democratic big tent has room for differing views would avoid treating the remaining primaries as partywide Mideast policy referendums, after which whichever faction comes out on the short end feels unwelcome in the party.  

After all, Democrats should want to be seen as the party united around making life more affordable for average Americans, not the party unproductively tearing each other apart over the most intractable foreign policy issue of the last 80 years.