Declining Democratic Support

Submitted by Mark2 (United States), May 8, 2019 at 11:18

The support for Palestinians by the global Left should not be underestimated as being of secondary importance, because this cohort now includes a rapidly increasing percentage of registered Democrats in the US. On many US college campuses, Israel is the devil, the epicenter of the world's greatest human rights violations, the new South Africa, a soft (and only) target of the political left-wing worthy of boycott and sanctions. There appears to be no effective large-scale organized counter-protests to "Israeli Apartheid Week" on college campuses. Enough "reasonable doubt" has been raised about Israel in the minds of many of the future leaders of US society that already Israel is serious trouble, but its leaders don't seem to realize how serious this is for Israel's future. We now have the spectacle of one of the Democratic presidential primary frontrunners, Senator Sanders, publicly proclaiming that the IDF is Indiscriminately using lethal force against unarmed peaceful protestors in Gaza and that he doesn't believe a word of the IDF's claims to the contrary. Other Democratic candidates now have no fear of political cost in openly denouncing Netanyahu, with Tulsi Gabbard outright accusing Netanyahu of trying to drag the US into war with Iran. Obama feared no political cost to Democratic politicians in his crafting of an anti-Israel UNSC resolution in 2016 and entering into a nuclear deal that was largely favorable to Iran; this political fault-line will likely only become wider with the approaching 2020 national election.

Israel has failed to grasp the lessons of the Vietnam War, where a military superpower was defeated by asymmetrical warfare and the loss of the battle for hearts and minds that was being waged in the news media outlets and on college campuses. Israel apparently has no competent government-level facility in presenting its narrative in front of US nightly news viewers. For example, after the 2010 Gaza Flotilla incident, it took several days for Israel's government to release its video of the ship's passengers attacking the Israeli commandos with clubs, and this only after intense high level debate about whether the video should have been released at all. Currently, the decision has been made not to allow press representatives to embed with IDF forces at the Gaza border conflict areas. This mentality has contributed greatly to the situation we see today regarding the loss of support for Israel on the left.

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