A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most of the party’s voters, writes Norman Solomon.
DNC HQ in Washington, DC. (ajay_suresh/Wikimedia Commons)
In the aftermath of this month’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the U.S.-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.
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 the rejected 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.”
Damaging Its Electoral Chances
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.”
DNC Chair Ken Martin. (MNEditor21, Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
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 U.S. 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.”
Protest at the White House on April 7, 2025, to end the Israeli genocide in Palestine. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.
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Mr, Solomon deserves credit for documenting the dark underbelly of the Democratic Party.
When does he admit that that dark side is the real party, and he made a mistake when he abandoned 3rd-party politics to join the establishment?
As I told Senator Schumer in October 2023, I’m expanding my boycott of Israel to include any politician who takes money from the Israel lobby.
Candidates can have either money or votes. They can’t have both. Check the websites of the usual suspect lobbies, to see whom they endorse.
My litmus test is anti-Zionist. If there are competing candidates who pass that, then my next one is anti-Nato
Fuck the Dems. We need to define our demands. Reduce the military to stop being the hit squad for multinatinal corporations and the ruling elite; impose a Wall St. transaction tax to provide billions in public revenue; universal helathcare (like the rest of the civilized world); universal free education to post gradualte levels; revocable licensing for all corporatios with power to penalize for detrimental practices; supoort independent media to democratize the narrative control; publically owned utilities and all essential services; support localized farming co-ops, health insurance co-ops to compete with corporate monopolies; etc. These are not wistful ideals, these are practical and applicalbe policies used all over the world. If we name our demands – we can “imagine” and then intend them into being.
Once again the Democratic Party will turn a potential victory unto a defeat
Meshes quite well with decades of “failure to take even minimal action” to recognize, let alone ameliorate, the suffering of the majority U.S. working class. Places like the Rust Belt and associated deaths of despair. Then they cast desperate voters as “stupid”–a way of distancing themselves from their own responsibility and callousness. The No Kings demonstrations seem to be about getting us to believe if Trump were gone, we’d have Dem paradise. Oh sure. Notice the theme isn’t No Oligarchs and No Plutocrats! The adage when someone tells you who they are, believe them applies. Their “vote for the lesser of two evils” was a confession they are indeed a form of evil. Pleasing the donor class is clearly more important to the DNC than the lives of us nobodies both domestically and abroad.
The Ds are committed to Unpopulism. They back Unpopular issues and candidates.
Not voting for zionists.
Maybe they need to rename the Party. There’s nothing democratic about the Democrats.