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Three Winners at the Latest DNC Meeting: Israel, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? Because, of course, the sidelining worked.
Apr 16, 2026
In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the US-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.
Last Friday, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article this way: “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well—as a charade for delay and obfuscation.
The day before the derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning US weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”
Given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time.
That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”
Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”
The falsehood that the task force had met “once a month,” when actually it had scarcely met, was enough reason for me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that (mis)information. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”
The basic problem with the working group is not only that it hasn’t done much of anything in the nearly eight months since DNC Chair Ken Martin announced it with great fanfare. The underlying hoax is that it was set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.
Polling is clear. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and a large majority are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. But only a minority of the Middle East Working Group’s eight members has a record of supporting Palestinian rights, while several are firm supporters of Israel. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or mere platitudes. But stalemate and platitudes appear to be just fine from here to the horizon for DNC leadership.
Such stalling mechanisms and scant real representation are as old as the political hills. In this case, an unfortunate boost has come from James Zogby, who for decades bravely worked inside the Democratic Party and elsewhere to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to US foreign policy.
As the most prominent person in the Middle East Working Group, Zogby has hailed it as an important step forward. Aligning himself with Martin’s approach from the outset, he said that the new chair’s move to set it up was “politically thoughtful.”
Zogby can remember when, in the 1980s, party leaders did not want to hear the “p-word”—Palestinians. He has portrayed the current sparse intra-party discussion related to Israel as major progress. “Don’t count me among those who left New Orleans complaining of defeat,” Zogby wrote in an April 14 piece for The Nation.
After that article appeared, I spoke with Zogby, and he summarized his approach this way: “I have a tendency to feel like sometimes there are little victories, and I latch onto them. Moving to catch up to where Democrats are.”
Compare that approach to this assessment days ago from Mike Merryman-Lotze, the American Friends Service Committee’s director of Just Peace Global Policy: “The failure of the DNC to take even minimal action in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is shameful.”
When my RootsAction colleague India Walton loudly interrupted the DNC’s business as usual during its general session a week ago, she was challenging a political culture of conformity that has ongoing deadly consequences. The context involves a simple and crucial choice—between excessive patience or urgency that’s grounded in life-and-death human realities. Those realities exist very far away from the transactional atmosphere of entrenched political institutions.
All this matters for at least two profound reasons: One is that, on the merits, silent or euphemistic complicity with Israel’s methodical policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide is abhorrent.
And given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time (as polls have shown was the case with Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign for president). “Eight-in-10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents currently have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69 percent last year and 53 percent in 2022,” the Pew Research Center reported last week.
In these exceedingly dystopian times, when realism is more important than ever, it’s a grave mistake to let rose-colored glasses distort vision and substitute undue patience for vital urgency.
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The DNC Approach to Israel Is Political Malpractice and Moral Failure
No matter how much the DNC leadership tries to shunt it aside, the burning issue of US policy toward Israel will not go away.
Mar 18, 2026
When the governing body of the Democratic Party convenes next month, it will face a challenge to its support for Israel. The Democratic National Committee has evaded the fact that large majorities of Democrats oppose continuing military aid to Israel and believe it has committed genocide in Gaza. The stage is set for jarring discord when the DNC’s 450 members gather in New Orleans.
An NBC poll released this week underscores the depth of the DNC’s political folly. The results were lopsided, by a 67-17 percent margin in favor of Palestinians, when the survey asked Democrats: “Are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?”
The DNC leadership has stayed on a collision course with political realities about Israel. Last August, while a Gallup poll was showing that just 8 percent of Democrats approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, DNC chair Ken Martin said at a meeting of delegates from across the country that “there’s a divide in our party on this issue.” He didn’t acknowledge that the crucial divide is actually between the party’s leadership and Democrats nationwide.
At that summer meeting, amid contention over US policies toward Israel, Martin withdrew his party-line resolution after it won and after a pro-Palestinian rights measure lost. He called for “shared dialogue” and “shared advocacy,” announcing that he would appoint a task force “comprised of stakeholders on all sides of this to continue to have the conversation.” Martin declared that “this crisis in Gaza is urgent” and an “emergency.”
But the “emergency” lost its urgency as soon as the DNC adjourned and the media spotlight disappeared. Six months passed before the first meeting of the task force, which by then had been downgraded to a “working group.”
The working group’s convener (selected by Martin) is James Zogby, a longtime advocate for Palestinian rights. Zogby had greeted Martin’s task-force announcement with praise, calling it “politically thoughtful” and a recognition of “the reality that the status quo has become unacceptable and untenable.”
But more than six months later, the status quo remains undisturbed as the DNC’s Middle East Working Group proceeds at a snail’s pace. And the composition of the eight-member panel makes it foreseeably incapable of reaching its purported goal to “help us sort out how our party deals with America’s policies in the Middle East.”
The working group is an oil-and-water mix of fully incompatible views on Palestinian rights and Israeli power. Some on the DNC panel want an embargo on US arms to Israel, while others firmly oppose any such step. One member of the working group, Andrew Lachman, has led fights inside the California Democratic Party to thwart actions or statements critical of Israel. He is currently the president of Democrats for Israel-California.
How the DNC’s appointed group is supposed to “sort out” a Democratic Party position on US policy in the Middle East is inexplicable. But the project does have an evident function. The Middle East Working Group has proven itself to be a stalling mechanism. And the pretenses behind it have become even more fanciful as the US-Israel military alliance persists with a war of aggression on Iran that has been setting the region on fire.
No matter how much the DNC leadership tries to shunt it aside, the burning issue of US policy toward Israel will not go away. This year, it has become key in one Democratic primary race after another, putting incumbent members of Congress on the defensive for their timeworn efforts to justify support for Israel or acceptance of funding from the AIPAC lobby. Yet the DNC stance is that the party establishment is wise to seal itself off from such unpleasantness.
The DNC’s refusal to make public its autopsy of the 2024 election is tangled up in dodging the autopsy’s reported conclusion that Kamala Harris’ rigid support for arming Israel was a significant factor in her defeat. Keeping the official autopsy under wraps, supposedly in order to improve the prospects of future election victories, actually makes such victories less likely by mystifying instead of clarifying electoral history.
Martin told Fox News viewers in late February that concentrating on the future would be better than trying to “relitigate” the 2024 election. But hiding the autopsy amounts to condescension, assuming that only a small elite party circle should be privy to the results of the party’s extensive (and expensive) research. Many Democratic activists and candidates would benefit from candor instead of stonewalling.
Weeks ago, the annual convention of the California Democratic Party responded to growing pressure from grassroots activists by adopting a platform that advocates for “an immediate end to the mass civilian casualties, destruction, displacement and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.” The platform says that “Palestinians in Gaza should be able to rebuild without displacement, with international humanitarian, economic and security assistance,” and it calls for “the immediate rebuilding of Gaza with the provision of humanitarian aid, restoration of funding for an UNRWA that serves the Palestinian people.”
But the Democratic National Committee, like the bulk of Democrats in Congress, lags far behind such grassroots outlooks. The top-down culture that prevails in the national party has stultified internal debate, rendering it scarce and pro forma. Despite Martin’s reform talk, whatever the DNC chair says goes. “I’ve been more and more disappointed with him,” a progressive DNC member told me days ago. “He says he loves internal debate and small-d democracy. I think it’s a talking point. I don’t know that he really wants that.”
After a little more than a year in the job, Martin has cleared the low bar set by his immediate predecessor, Jaime Harrison, who dutifully served President Biden for four years. But the DNC is still largely paralyzed with pressure from its old guard and insistence on being unaccountable to the party’s rank-and-file. The Democratic Party is in dire need of democracy.
On no issue is that more apparent than the DNC’s insistence on treating Israel as above serious reproach. The ruse of forming and then slow-walking the Middle East Working Group may have bought some time for the Democratic Party’s status quo of complicity with genocide in Gaza and US-Israeli war crimes elsewhere in the region. But party activists genuinely committed to human rights will not be fooled and will not be silent.
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'Let the Public See Where Democrats Really Stand': Full DNC Floor Vote Demanded on Gaza
"We are demanding a roll-call vote so that every DNC member is accountable for where they stand in this historic moment."
Aug 27, 2025
Those hoping that Democratic Party leaders have finally learned some lessons in the political thrashing they received in last year's elections are not yet done fighting for a resolution they argue would put the party back on the right side of moral history and also improve its prospects going forward against an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party led by President Donald Trump.
A day following a failed vote in the resolutions committee, members of the Democratic National Committee and grassroots groups demanding the DNC to take a stronger stand against US complicity with Israel's genocide in Gaza are not giving up—pushing now for a full floor vote to take place Wednesday on a resolution which calls for an immediate ceasefire, an arms embargo, and suspension of military aid to Israel.
"The DNC membership has the power to stand up and let the public see where Democrats really stand," said Allison Minnerly, the 26-year-old DNC member from Florida who introduced Resolution 18 before the resolutions committee, in a statement Tuesday night after the measure was rejected earlier in the day with a voice vote at the party's summer gathering in Minneapolis.
"A roll-call vote is the minimum standard of transparency in a democracy," said Minnerly in her statement, backed by allies within the DNC ranks as well as outside groups.
"A roll-call vote is the minimum standard of transparency in a democracy." —Allison Minnerly
Following the committee vote rejecting Resolution 18, chair of the College Democrats, Sunjay Muralitharan, bemoaned the defeat, including that no chance was offered for friendly amendments. "This move isn't just unjust, it's politically ineffective," he said. "Support for Israel's actions is in the single digits within our party's base. Deeply disappointed in this decision."
DNC chairman Ken Martin, who had introduced a competing resolution, Resolution 3, later took the unusual step of withdrawing his milqetoast proposal on Gaza after it passed the committee. In its place, he called for the creation of a task force to further discuss the issue.
"There's divide in our party on this issue," Martin said as he withdrew his resolution in favor of further discussion. "We have to find a path forward as a party, and we have to stay unified."
Minnerly and her coalition, however, say the issue is too important—and the conditions in Gaza, where a famine has been designated by the world's leading authority on such matters, too horrific—for the full membership of the Democratic Party leadership not to weigh in publicly and on the record.
As the daily massacres and starvation continue in Gaza, the coalition says there is no better moment for all DNC voting members to put themselves on the record.
"Resolution 18 represents the voices of not only young Democrats but all Democrats who believe that Palestinian lives matter too," said Zayed Kadir, chair of the High School Democrats. "It's time for the DNC to stand on principle and stop shying away from the conversation—the moment is now."
As such, in a statement released overnight, the coalition—which includes the American Muslim Democratic Caucus National, Roots Action, Florida Young Democrats, leaders of the High School and College Democrats, and many individual members—is calling for every member of the DNC to:
- Publicly pledge to support a roll-call vote on Resolution 18 from the floor;
- Reject voice votes that hide accountability;
- Stand with Democratic voters, the majority of whom oppose blank-check military aid toward an ongoing genocide.
The coalition began circulating a petition Tuesday night calling on members to tell "the DNC that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza needs urgent attention by sending a letter asking them to bring Resolution 18 back into the conversation and support it tomorrow (Wednesday)."
Aftab Siddiqui, representing the American Muslim Democratic Caucus National, suggested that taking up the resolution by the full DNC at the meeting would begin to show the party is learning from its past mistakes and start forging a new direction.
"Resolution 18 represents exactly the kind of principled politics that wins elections," Siddiqui said. "While Democrats lost ground in 2024 by wavering on core values, New York City's mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, proved that moral courage on Gaza builds winning coalitions. The DNC must learn this lesson."
Ahead of and during Wednesday's plenary session, the coalition said it will publish "a transparency scorecard" to track which DNC members commit to demanding the roll-call vote. Those who do not, the group said, will be noted as opposing transparency.
Polling has shown that Democratic voters strongly favor the demands outlined in Resolution 18, a fact the coalition says the DNC must acknowledge if it wants to represent the people it claims to represent truly.
Nadia Ahmad, a delegate from Florida, said Democrats "cannot claim to stand for justice and human rights while blocking a resolution that calls for an arms embargo and humanitarian aid to Gaza."
The fight before the DNC, she added, "is about whether our party has the moral courage to listen to its members and the American people. We are demanding a roll-call vote so that every DNC member is accountable for where they stand in this historic moment.”
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