By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
“Translation: a giant f*** you from Democratic leadership
to Democratic voters.” So wrote Ben “Hamas” Rhodes in response
to Representative Jared Moskowitz’s cheerful announcement of his latest
congressional committee assignment.
Rhodes is in a tizzy because Moskowitz (D., Fla.) will
serve as the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s
subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In that relatively
obscure role, Moskowitz promised to “strengthen America’s relationships with
Israel and our Gulf allies,” which, as his party’s point man on MENA-related
issues, is more or less his job description.
To the Israel obsessives on the far left, however,
Moskowitz’s language and Democratic leadership’s failure to punish him for it
are betrayals.
“Critics argued that placing one of Congress’ most
outspoken supporters of Israel in a key Middle East policy position shows that
Democratic leadership remains badly out of step with its own voters,” the
progressive venue Common Dreams observed. Moskowitz is accused of failing to
mouth the “genocide” shibboleth, conflating “criticisms of Israeli crimes with
hatred of Jews,” and of voting to support an Israeli aid package within a month
of the October 7 massacre.
The cad.
Their paranoia notwithstanding, the far left’s
anti-Israel monomaniacs can’t be accused of imagining that the Democratic Party
is trying to sideline them. Handing Moskowitz this assignment means he will
chair the subcommittee if Democrats retake the House, limiting the left’s
ability to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States. The maneuver is
of a piece with the party’s rejiggering of the presidential primary calendar
that Joe Biden all but explicitly confessed was designed to reduce the
influence of the unrepresentative affluent, white progressives in states like
Iowa and New Hampshire.
Then as now, Democratic institutionalists are fighting
back against the socialist invasion via committee, but a weak fight is better
than no fight at all.
But will Rhodes have the last laugh? Is he right that the
Democratic rank and file share his pathologies and will lash out at the party
over their failure to heed the demands of their infallible base voters? It’s no
secret that Democratic voters, younger ones especially, have taken a hard turn against Israel. But is the issue salient
enough that those voters will bother to learn what the MENA subcommittee is,
much less who serves as its ranking member? Probably not.
Last October, the Institute for Middle East Understanding — a group that
maintains that Kamala Harris’s campaign was doomed by virtue of the
Biden-Harris administration’s “support for Israel” — took the Democratic Party’s
temperature when it came to Israel. The polling it sponsored found that, while
just over one-third of self-described Democrats said Israel would factor into
their 2026 vote, just 16 percent said Israel was one of their top three issues.
And for a handful of those Israel-focused Democrats, the Jewish state is top of
mind because they want to increase U.S. support for it.
And that poll was in the field while Israel was
concluding the last of its high-tempo operations on the ground in Gaza. Ten
months after a cease-fire was announced, it’s unlikely that Israel occupies as
much real estate in the minds of Democratic voters as it once did.
Rhodes’s assertion should not be dismissed out of hand.
Any conservative Republican with a long enough memory should be able to recall
moments when the machinations of congressional leadership that seemed banal at
the time came to be regarded as grave sins against the collective will. Maybe
someday, Moskowitz’s accession will come to be regarded in that light.
For now, though, this is a very inside-baseball story.
The Democrats rending garments over it aren’t championing an ongoing revolt.
Rather, they’re hoping to catalyze one.
No comments:
Post a Comment