SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
jake sullivan
Van Hollen Says Democratic Party Must End Whitewashing, Admit ‘Complicity’ in Gaza Genocide
"Primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues."
May 26, 2026
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Utter Moral Failure': Critics Aghast at New Reporting That Shows US Elites ‘Scared of Crossing Trump’
"I am disappointed in those who think keeping quiet will save them," said said one Trump critic. "It will not."
Oct 24, 2025
Even as they acknowledged that only the public opposition of people in power would rein in President Donald Trump's attacks on democracy and the rule of law, a number of political, military, business, and academic elites made clear Friday that they "are scared of crossing" the president.
In a column published on Friday in the Financial Times, Edmundv Luce revealed that he has been talking with "dozens of figures, including lawmakers, private sector executives, retired senior military figures and intelligence chiefs, current and former Trump officials, Washington lawyers, and foreign government officials," and he found that the vast majority asked to remain anonymous for fear of attacks from the president and his administration.
"Such is the fear of jail, bankruptcy, or professional reprisal, that most of these people insisted on anonymity," Luce explained. "This was in spite of the fact that many of the same people also wanted to emphasize that Trump would only be restrained by powerful voices opposing him publicly."
Trump's revenge campaign against his foes has taken many forms, Luce found. The most high-profile examples have been instances in which the president has personally pushed for officials at the US Department of Justice to criminally indict many longtime adversaries, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey, and John Bolton, Trump's own former national security adviser.
Luce also learned that the administration has been waging pressure campaigns on private employers to blacklist former Biden administration officials and other opponents from being offered jobs.
"Every employer says something along the lines of 'We’d love to hire you but it’s not worth the risk,'" one former Biden White House staffer told Luce. "All they offer me is apologies."
Former Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who is now a professor at Harvard University, told Luce that he spends much of his time "trying to help former colleagues find jobs" because so few employers are willing to chance angering the president.
Military officials who spoke with Luce expressed fears that the US armed forces will not resist Trump, as they did in his first term, were he to give them illegal orders. One retired four-star general said he worried that Dan Caine, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would not refuse to carry out requests to have the military interfere with elections, as many officials did in 2020 when Trump tried to get the US Army to seize voting machines in swing states that he had lost to former President Joe Biden.
"Caine has the thinnest background to run the military at its most difficult stress test in modern history," the general said.
Many Trump critics who read Luce's reporting found it appalling that so many wealthy and powerful Americans were afraid to publicly criticize the president.
"When all this is over, we need to have a pretty serious conversation about the utter moral failure of the elite of this country," remarked Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, on Bluesky.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, said that Luce's reporting shows "how much opposition we never see or hear because people fear reprisal" from the president.
Bradley Moss, a national security attorney who was one of Luce's few sources willing to speak on the record, wrote on Bluesky that more elites needed to start speaking out against the president and his authoritarian ambitions.
"I am disappointed in those who think keeping quiet will save them," he said. "It will not."
Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard University, acknowledged the dangers outlined in Luce's column but also pointed out reasons for hope.
"This wannabe dictator is also extremely unpopular and those of us with the courage to stand up have the American people on our side," he argued. "It'll take courage and focus, but democracy can win."
The elites interviewed by Luce expressed their reticence to publicly speak out against Trump days after more than 7 million people gathered at thousands of "No Kings" protests condemning the president's authoritarian agenda—despite the administration's threats against protest movements. Residents in cities including Portland, Oregon and Chicago have also resisted federal agents carrying out Trump's mass detention and deportation campaign.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden National Security Adviser Among Those Crafting 'Project 2029' Policy Agenda for Democrats
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
Jun 30, 2025
Amid the latest battle over the direction the Democratic Party should move in, a number of strategists and political advisers from across the center-left's ideological spectrum are assembling a committee to determine the policy agenda they hope will be taken up by a Democratic successor to President Donald Trump.
Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
The project is being assembled by former Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, now co-founder of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and includes Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser under the Biden administration; Jim Kessler, founder of the centrist think tank Third Way; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
As The New York Times noted in its reporting on Project 2029, the panel is being convened amid extensive infighting regarding how the Democratic Party can win back control of the White House and Congress.
After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
Progressives have called on party leaders to back Mamdani, pointing to his popularity with young voters, and accept that his clear message about making life more affordable for working families resonated with Democratic constituents.
But speaking to the Times, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake exemplified how many of the party's strategists have insisted that candidates only need to package their messages to voters differently—not change the messages to match the political priorities of Mamdani and other popular progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"We didn't lack policies," Lake told the Times of recent national elections. "But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies."
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have drawn crowds of thousands in red districts this year at Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies—another sign, progressives say, that voters are responding to politicians who focus on billionaires' outsized control over the U.S. political system and on economic justice.
Project 2029's inclusion of strategists like Kessler, who declared economic populism "a dead end for Democrats" in 2013, demonstrates "the whole problem [with Democratic leadership] in a nutshell," said Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass—as does Sullivan's seat on the advisory board.
As national security adviser to President Joe Biden, Sullivan played a key role in the administration's defense and funding of Israel's assault on Gaza, which international experts and human rights groups have said is a genocide.
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade: Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Israel/Gaza War, and the 2024 Joe Biden campaign," said Nick Field of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
"Jake Sullivan is shaping domestic policy for the next Democratic administration," he added. "Who is happy with the Biden foreign policy legacy?"
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular