Would You Believe That Democrats Were Not Anti-Israel Enough in 2024?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 23, 2026

 

For some reason, Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chairman, concluded that he could simply bar the release of the party’s 2024 autopsy and it would stay buried forever. As it happens, a document drafted by committee and composed of research and interviews in which dozens participated cannot be kept so tightly under wraps.

 

On Monday, Americans were privy to some selective leaks from that closely guarded document, and those leaks just happen to support all the otherwise dubious claims of the Democratic Party’s activist class. According to the autopsy, the anti-Israel left is just as crucial to Democratic electoral prospects as the anti-Israel left always said of itself. Imagine that.

 

Activists with the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project told the DNC’s forensic electoral analysts that “the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel was a factor in the party’s losses because it drained support from some young people and progressives,” Axios reported. Furthermore, the Democratic Party secretly agreed with the activists, according to the IMEU. The “DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” IMEU Policy Project spokesman Hamid Bendaas said.

 

“Axios independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed the issue harmed the party’s standing with some voters,” the report continued. Indeed, the figures within the Democratic firmament with whom Axios reporters spoke noted that the activists’ outlook aligns with Kamala Harris’s own view. She supposedly “pleaded” privately  with Joe Biden to express more skepticism toward Israel, and she believed that her campaign was hindered by the “perceived blank check” he handed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

Axios’s report implicitly supports the notion that Democrats are withholding their own autopsy to shield Israel and pro-Israel Democrats from criticism, or perhaps to shore up the eroding bipartisan consensus about the legitimacy of Israel’s defensive military priorities. It’s quite a scandal, you see.

 

But if persuadable voters were truly turned off by the Democratic Party’s alleged licentiousness toward Israel, those voters were not especially well-informed.

 

They somehow missed the trepidation with which the Democratic Party approached the anti-Israel demonstrators, who erupted in hostility toward the Jewish state in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre. Biden did not address the widespread antisemitic incidences that accompanied those protests until six months into the movement’s campaign of harassment, intimidation, and violence.

 

Even as those protesters laid siege to the Democratic Party’s headquarters in an effort to get their hands on the party’s lawmakers (an event that “could have been much worse,” in Democratic Congressman Sean Casten’s estimation) and tore manically at the emergency fencing surrounding the party’s nominating convention, Biden went out of his way to concede that the demonstrators “have a point.” And the Biden administration acted on that point. It imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel, and it actively frustrated Israel’s plans to assault the Gazan city of Rafah — delaying the incursion that eventually resulted in the death of Hamas leader and 10/7 architect Yahya Sinwar.

 

For their parts, Harris and her vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, were even more obsequious toward the anti-Israel elements in their party. The anti-Israel demonstrators were “showing exactly what the human emotion should be,” Harris said of the protesters that hounded her campaign. At least they were “civically engaged,” Walz added, endorsing their demands for a permanent cessation of hostilities that would leave Hamas in power in Gaza. As late as October 31, 2024, the Associated Press revealed that the Harris campaign still thought the protest movement could be a political force multiplier for Democrats if only she could “validate their concerns.” The effort to “validate” the protesters continued even after the Biden administration itself accused the movement of benefiting from Iranian financial support.

 

Even before votes in the 2024 election were cast and counted, interested parties on the left have retailed a blame-shifting narrative for the party’s impending loss, foisting it onto the shoulders of Israel and its supporters. The activist class is, in one former Harris staffer’s phrasing, a bunch of “clowns” — a collection of “deeply unserious people who want to shirk their responsibility” for the condition in which voters left the party in 2024.

 

Indeed, even left-of-center elections analysts have thrown cold water on the far-left’s self-flattering narratives. “For every voter angry over the Israeli strikes on Gaza, there may have been another ready to back Trump if Harris seemed too critical of Israel or too forgiving of Hamas,” read one such clear-eyed outlook from the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn. “In addition, Democrats were already losing votes among socially conservative Arab Americans because of LGBTQ+ issues.”

 

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that Harris lost the presidency to a candidate who waged the most overtly pro-Israel political campaign Americans have ever seen because she wasn’t anti-Israel enough, but that’s the narrative that the activists are peddling. And if Ken Martin remains afraid of his own shadow, it’s the narrative that will further consume Democratic politics and be reflected in its candidate selections. That would serve the interests of many factions vying for control over the the Democratic Party’s hollowed-out husk, but it’s not clear that it would be in the interests of the party’s institutional stewards.