Van Hollen Says Democratic Party Must End Whitewashing, Admit ‘Complicity’ in Gaza Genocide

A senior Senate Democrat said his party needs to own up to its "complicity" in Israel's genocide in Gaza and attacks on Palestinians, and warned against reinstating the foreign policy officials from the Biden administration who have enabled them.

In a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)—a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has visited the occupied Palestinian territories multiple times since October 7, 2023—wrote that "Democrats need to face a hard truth," that their party "has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values."

Seeming to recognize the overwhelming shift in opinion against Israel among the US public, and especially Democratic voters, over the last two-plus years, the senator said Americans “do not want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or what human rights organizations and scholars have determined to be genocide in Gaza.”

The things he witnessed firsthand while visiting the region—the ruins of Gaza left behind by US-provided bombs, the "apartheid system" in the West Bank, and the accelerating forced displacement of Palestinians by violent West Bank settlers—he said, were the responsibility of "both Republican and Democratic administrations."

While noting President Donald Trump's role in legitimizing Israel's expansionist project during his first term, Van Hollen said former President Joe Biden "failed to reverse most of these actions, even as Israel elected the most extremist government in its history" and after October 7, "failed to use US leverage as Israel imposed devastating collective punishment on the people of Gaza."

He said Democrats must pursue a “last-gasp effort” to revive the idea of a “two-state solution,” which he acknowledged Israel’s gradual annexation of the West Bank has made increasingly untenable.

"Presidents have paid lip service to that goal even as Israeli settlements stretched into the West Bank. This time must be different. The United States must draw a red line against Palestinian displacement, and we must enforce it," Van Hollen said, calling for the US to restrict “offensive” weapons to Israel until it agrees to a plan to end the occupation of Palestinian territory and one for a two-state solution.

Van Hollen said “Democrats must stand firm against... headwinds” like the powerful influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has used its vast resources to target candidates who criticize Israel.

"Primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues, especially if, as a legislator, he or she voted to send [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu bombs even as his government imposed a total blockade on Gaza," Van Hollen said. "Nor will they support a candidate who plans to re-enlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity."

"Democrats failed to meet the moment in 2024," he concluded. "Americans were rightly fed up with Democratic hypocrisy and complicity in the gross violation of the values we profess to hold dear. That, in turn, hurt our credibility with voters. We cannot let that happen again."

Van Hollen’s message comes as many of the senior figures who architected Biden’s “blank check” policy toward Netanyahu attempt to rehabilitate their images in a Democratic Party where Israel is now persona non grata.

As Harrison Mann—an ex-intelligence professional who resigned in protest over Gaza—recently wrote, these officials are “popping up everywhere” in the second Trump era with words of measured contrition.

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged in March during a speech at Harvard that the US “maybe” could have acted more quickly to force Israel to accept a ceasefire, "such that the suffering the people endured, the loss of the children, so many others, could have been averted." Jake Sullivan, Biden's former national security adviser, now says that the US should withhold weapons from Israel, a policy he opposed during his time in the White House.

Prior to Van Hollen, another top Democrat, Sen. Brian Schatz (Hawaii), the caucus’s chief deputy whip, made a similar plea—without naming names—that the next Democratic presidential administration cannot simply invite these same establishment figures back into positions of authority.

"I’m not into black listing anyone from future work in their area of expertise, but I do think it’s fair to want a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers in the next democratic administration," Schatz wrote on social media Sunday. "It’s not like the same 120 people are the only people who know anything."

Van Hollen has previously been more pointed in saying that figures in both parties who supported the genocide "should be held accountable for US complicity in the man-made humanitarian disaster, indiscriminate killings, and massive destruction we have witnessed in Gaza."

Adam Johnson, a journalist at The Intercept who recently wrote a book about the role of the media and the Biden administration in "selling" the genocide to the American public, criticized Van Hollen for refusing to use the term directly (instead defaulting to the less explicit phrase "ethnic cleansing").

However, Johnson said it was a good sign [that] this is becoming more and more conventional wisdom.“ He said the ”next step“ was to ”name names and make specific commitments" regarding the policies the party should and should not promote in Israel and Palestine.