Among the Democratic Party rank and file, U.S. policy toward Israel is more salient now than it has been in decades. The Middle East has been in a growing state of turmoil since Hamas’s shocking attack on October 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 mostly noncombatants and took another 250 civilians, soldiers, and non-Israelis as hostages. Much of the world, appalled by the mass shooting of hundreds of young people at a music festival, briefly sympathized with Israel and conceded it a right of response against the planners and perpetrators of the attack. But Israel did not merely respond. It leveled most of Gaza, eradicating cities, neighborhoods, families, and children. Journalists with their cameras and citizens with their phones memorialized for millions the horror of an advanced military obliterating a captive people.
A nominal ceasefire may now be in effect in Gaza, but as of last Friday, things have only escalated further: The United States and Israel have launched an enormous joint military campaign against Iran, composed largely of American air power. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been killed, and President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have jointly called for the Iranian people to topple their own government. Netanyahu has goaded Trump into war, and Trump—free of domestic constraints and backed to the hilt by his party—is thrilled to comply. But there is no reason to believe that the chaos and mass violence they have unleashed in the region will produce a humane and democratic outcome. The question of the wisdom and efficacy of America’s unreserved alliance with Israel has jumped to the center of the national conversation.
As these events have transpired, surveys have seen support for Israel collapse among Democrats—especially young Jewish voters and young Democrats generally. Only 17 percent of Democrats sympathize more with the Israelis than the Palestinians (who have the support of 65 percent of Dems). In a Quinnipiac poll, 77 percent of Democrats believe that a genocide has taken place in Gaza. When asked to describe their views on Israel and Palestine in a poll for this magazine, only 6 percent of Democrats responded, “The U.S. should strongly support Israel, including military aid when Israel is attacked.”
Yet, despite growing Democratic Party opposition to war in Iran, the habit of reflexively supporting Israel remains deeply entrenched at the highest echelons of the party. The Biden administration squandered its political capital defending the actions of the Israeli government. Last July, 27 Democratic senators voted to block arms sales to the Israeli government, but the measure failed to draw support from many liberal stalwarts, such as Cory Booker of New Jersey and minority leader (and longtime supporter of Israel) Chuck Schumer. Democratic politicians vying for the 2026 midterms have already begun accepting dollars from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. The contradictions in Democratic foreign policy in the Middle East are coming to a head.
Kamala Harris half-tried, and failed, to square the circle in her presidential run, but the party wouldn’t even let a Palestinian American Democratic state politician speak for two minutes at the 2024 convention. Harris’s seeming terror at breaking with her boss and saying anything the least bit interesting or courageous on the topic acutely damaged her campaign, especially in Michigan. A Democratic National Committee autopsy of her loss, which the party has chosen to suppress, concluded that the Biden administration’s handling of Gaza cost her significant support among younger and progressive voters. The situation is symptomatic of a full-blown split between pro-Israeli politicians and donors seemingly frozen in amber since the 1967 Six Days War, and the party’s younger, activist left and nonwhite voting blocs, including many young Jewish voters who want a vociferous rejection of a nominal ally that seems to be leading us into an unwanted war.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has tied himself to Trump, and Israel’s ultra-right-wing government cultivates white American evangelicals within the Republican Party like Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. Paradoxically, this same Republican Party has a growing infestation of Hitler-worshipping antisemites. The so-called “groypers” have used the unpopularity of Israel’s actions in Gaza to foment rank antisemitism and recruit new converts.
While the Israeli government moves rightward, the Democrats’ leadership has triangulated itself into no man’s land. It is neither sufficiently supportive of Israel to propitiate the country’s increasingly radical governing elite nor sufficiently critical of that elite to mollify the base of its own party. All this while many influential Jewish academics, writers, artists, and policy experts are reshaping the old, ideological boundaries that had circumscribed the issue. The Biden administration’s dishonest rejection of its own pious “rules-based liberal order” and Israel’s sharp plunge into authoritarianism have alienated even erstwhile defenders. Obama hands like former State Department official Ben Rhodes and ur-liberal Zionist and Times columnist Tom Friedman have harshly criticized both U.S. policy toward Israel and Israel’s barbarism (if one prefers an “uncontroversial” descriptor) in Gaza and apartheid on the West Bank. Centrist Democratic senators like Mark Warner of Virginia have begun to undercut the Trump-Netanyahu justifications for the aggression against Iran. The old order is breaking apart, but it needs a few bold politicians to give it a hard blow.
With the presidential
election of 2028 looming, Democrats will have a chance to decisively retake
power. To do this, they are going to need a presidential candidate who can
inspire the base and respect its policy preferences—and the base no longer
supports unconditional support for the Israeli state as it is now constituted.
If it does not align with the base, the party risks declining turnout in key
states and perversely losing swing voters to a right-wing antisemitism redolent
of the Lindbergh movement before the Second World War. But the war with Iran
and a shifting consensus among their base will give aggressive politicians more
room than ever before to change party policy.
The old, lazy mantra of a “two-state solution” seems almost delusional at this point (although, admittedly, so does a secular binational democratic state). But, at a minimum, an energetic, forward-looking policy of a Democratic administration must not reflexively co-sign on all Israeli aggression, depend on the very thin gruel of Israeli good faith, or require a Palestinian polity so enfeebled that it must accept all terms. Instead, it would insist on a pathway for Israel to become what Tony Judt once urged: a “normal state,” not a pariah, nor a new Sparta, as Netanyahu recently mused. It would apply the full weight of the U.S. government, in conjunction with the EU, G7, and regional Arab states, to compel just conditions on the parties conducive to Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. It would recognize that Israel’s disenfranchisement and brutalization of millions of people of the same ethnicity on the West Bank is apartheid and would advocate and work to dismantle it. It would also cite the work of scholars of modern human rights and affirm that Israel—in a horrific and grim irony of postwar history—committed genocide in Gaza. It would acknowledge, or insist Israel publicly acknowledge, that it is a nuclear armed power. And it would, without fear or favor, apply U.S. law to Israel, rather than give it a winking carve-out.
Among the party’s leading politicians, who can bridge the conflict between the base and the elites, and synthesize a new position on Israel? And how much might it matter whether this politician, who would almost necessarily be the party’s presidential nominee in 2028, is Jewish? Below, we undertake a survey of some representative possibilities, noting their general qualities, but focusing on the issue of U.S. policy toward Israel and how that will influence the nomination fight. (For the purposes of this exercise, we do not believe that Kamala Harris, if she runs again for president, has much chance to win the nomination. Her opportunity to break with Joe Biden and change U.S. policy toward Israel has come and gone.)
The Patriarch
Senator Bernie Sanders should be acknowledged here. A two-time presidential candidate and lion of the party’s “new new” left, Sanders has been a vocal critic of Israeli policy in the West Bank and has come to recognize the war on Gaza as a “genocide.” He introduced the aforementioned bill to block arms sales to the Israeli government. As a prominent Jewish senator from a family of Holocaust survivors, Sanders has been a supporter of Israel as a Jewish state, and an increasingly vociferous critic of it.
But Sanders is 84. The person to shift the party’s stance on Israel will need to be a credible 2028 contender. Sanders provides a useful ideological point of clarity. But younger people are required for this great task.
The Young Superstar
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders’s nominal protégé, is just 36. AOC is undoubtedly one of the country’s most prominent Democrats, with a massive social media following, a large PAC fund, and increasing influence as a fundraiser and supporter of centrist candidates. AOC has called the destruction of Gaza a genocide and sponsored the “Block the Bombs” Act in the House. She has recognized Netanyahu as a war criminal and frequently criticized her own party for its Israel stance, although some leftists have also criticized her for voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. As seen by her highly publicized remarks at the Munich Security Conference, she is trying to carve out a coherent foreign policy that moves beyond the bipartisan postwar consensus.
AOC is, like Sanders, a kind of outsider who has become adept at playing the inside game—but updated with the rizz of youth and social media savvy. Yet those proportions may not quite be harmonized such that she can take control of the national party in a bit over two years; for a thirtysomething House member to jump from influential backbencher to presidential nominee might be too much of a stretch. In order to defeat Trumpism, the party nominee must somehow unite the liberal center and social democratic–democratic socialist left. The Zohran Mamdani-Sanders-AOC party faction is ascendant. But it’s not yet clear if it can gain control and thus reorient the party’s Israel policy. With Sanders in winter and Mamdani ineligible to run for president, AOC is the undoubted leader of this faction. She might well galvanize a party desperate to overthrow its gerontocracy. Yet winning Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat remains the easier, though still significant, lift for her to make in 2028. We’ll see what she decides to do.
The Leading Man
This brings us to the politician that many consider to be the front-runner for the 2028 election, and the current leader of the Democratic Party: California Governor Gavin Newsom. As the governor of the largest, richest state in the nation, Newsom has fashioned himself into a Trump foil and grassroots-liberal darling. His successful push to gerrymander California congressional maps in response to the passage of new congressional maps in Texas has been viewed as a major political win. Fresh off that victory, Newsom has been barnstorming the country as a sort of preview of his campaign to come when his term as governor ends in 2027. Of all the Democrats we have surveyed, he is certainly the one with the fastest start in the race to 2028. And yes, to an almost hyperreal degree, he looks like Hollywood’s version of a president.
What of his position on Israel, though? Newsom has generally been a strong supporter of Israel in both his statements and his actions. Following the October 7 attacks, he met with Netanyahu. On subsequent anniversaries, he has memorialized the victims of the Hamas attacks, but he has not yet recognized Israel’s role in genocide. Following the 2024 campus protests, Newsom quickly signed a new state law to rein in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Last November, he signed a law creating a position to investigate claims of antisemitism in California public schools—a law that critics say conflates antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel.
Recently, Newsom, understanding the political liabilities of his position, has said that he will not accept money from AIPAC. He has pushed back against the incipient war in Iran and, in an interview on Tuesday, suggested Israel is an apartheid state. But it is unclear that he is prepared to fundamentally rethink the issue of U.S.-Israel policy. Over the past two years, he has maintained his support, even doubled down, as Israel has become increasingly unpopular, including denying that there was a genocide in Gaza, even when prompted. His recent comments signal that Newsom sees not so much the advantage of meeting the Democratic base where it is but the problem of not doing so. Newsom is worth watching here, and he’s obviously a possible nominee. His political instincts are telling. But unifying the party will require a dramatic affirmative reconsideration of his position, as opposed to merely limiting damage caused by current political positioning.
The Liberal Dark Horse
On the other hand, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen does seem to recognize the contradictions of the party’s current stance and has become one of the most progressive and outspoken critics of Israel. Prior to the October 7 attack, Van Hollen was well within the Democratic mainstream on Israel (affirming its “right to exist”). But, as the Gaza war dragged on, he has substantially changed his position. In addition to supporting multiple resolutions canceling arms sales to Israel, he has called for the Department of Justice to prosecute the Israeli military for the murders of Americans. In one interview, he claimed that then-President Biden had been “played by Netanyahu from Day 1.” Last September, Van Hollen visited the West Bank and reported that Israel was carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign. He has made a clear choice to break with his own party for being insufficiently forward-looking on the question of Israel.
Van Hollen is a principled liberal who, if social media is any indication, has some appeal to the social democratic faction of the party. While he doesn’t have the name recognition of a Bernie Sanders, he is a senator from a midsize state and a prominent foreign policy spokesman. He sees his political opportunity on this issue, as well as its moral justification. Perhaps, if AOC chooses not to run, he might be able to pick up the Sanders mantle and energize younger voters. While not an impossibility, Van Hollen is still a long shot, albeit one who has taken an honorable stand on the issue.
Three Diaspora Jewish Politicians at the Crossroads
Of course, anybody of any religious or racial background can lead the Democrats in 2028. There are many vital public policy questions that the party will have to confront. But, on this issue, where Jewishness per se is frequently conflated by Zionists and antisemites alike with support for the Jewish state, a Jewish nominee would have unique challenges and opportunities. And so, we have chosen to examine three leading Jewish contenders together.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is one such possibility. According to Binyamin Applebaum of The New York Times, he is the man for the moment, with a record of “clever political compromises” and a gift for “making centrism sound urgent.” His centrist credentials are bolstered by the fact that he is a strong supporter of Israel. Though he has been critical of Israel’s current government, he is a mostly conventional and uncritical advocate going back to his college years—when he was a volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces. More recently, he refused to call for a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza during the war. He also notoriously used his weight as governor to lean on Pennsylvania universities to be more forceful in their response to pro-Palestine student encampments, including private institutions like the University of Pennsylvania.
Shapiro’s identity and political brand are not only about Israel, of course—in 2023, he rapidly rebuilt a fallen bridge in Philadelphia to wide acclaim—but that is a resonant component of them. Shapiro is a genuine political talent—being a popular governor of the key swing state must be given its due—but he is committed to the state of Israel’s sentimental myth of national creation. We are dubious he will be able to reconcile his deeply held views about Israel with the rank-and-file desire to change party policy.
At 39, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is younger than any candidate we have mentioned aside from AOC. He is a sharp, compelling politician and powerful public speaker in the Obama mold who beat an incumbent senator in a tough state in 2020. Ossoff is also Georgia’s first Jewish senator, from a family that fled the pogroms in Europe and harbored Holocaust survivors. He is far to Shapiro’s left on the question of Israel. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ossoff was warning of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza just weeks after the October 7 attacks. He voted in favor of Sanders’s bill for arms sanctions against Israel. These votes align with those of other liberals like Van Hollen and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, but what sets Ossoff apart is that, unlike his blue-state colleagues, Ossoff is facing a tough reelection in 2026.
Like nearly every other politician we have discussed, his reliance on typical fundraising mechanisms can put him at odds with the donor class. His criticism of Israel has already cost him support in his home state, where bipartisan members of the Atlanta Jewish community unsuccessfully tried to draft Brian Kemp to run against him. As with Shapiro, attention must be paid to his demonstrated ability to carry one of the only states that, for now, actually matters in our meshuga presidential election system. If he does win again, he will look all the more formidable. But Ossoff’s embracing of a more aggressive stance toward Israel won’t necessarily sway the hidebound members of the Democratic political establishment to join with him. Indeed, so far it seems they are more likely to oppose him than follow his leadership. Which will require him to fight. Will he?
The person for this mission likely needs to have a foot in both worlds. There is one candidate whose particular identity, politics, and prominence put him above all the others on this issue: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. (Note: Co-author Trip Venturella was the creator in 2022 of a tongue-in-cheek Twitter account called “Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker.”)
Pritzker is an affable pol, a plutocrat with some of the class-traitor instincts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His Chicago accent and heavyset frame give Pritzker a kind of everyman quality. He is an outspoken progressive, having supported legislation eliminating cash bail, banning assault weapons, and prohibiting anti-union “captive audience” meetings in Illinois. He is also a scion of one of America’s most prominent Jewish families. The Pritzkers own Hyatt Hotels and sponsor the Pritzker Prize in architecture. The governor’s sister, Penny, is a former Obama Cabinet secretary who is now the head of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. Pritzker can run against the class hierarchy and privilege of the American political-economic-cultural elite—and, like FDR, he should. But it will never be said of him that he is not to that elite born and bred.
Pritzker has also demonstrated a profound commitment to the causes of Zionism and, especially, Jewish remembrance. He served on the board of AIPAC, and some of his closest advisers are AIPAC-affiliated. In multiple profiles, he has spoken of his work helping build the Illinois Holocaust Museum, an effort that he seems to regard as one of his life’s defining endeavors. Pritzker has credibility among the pro-Israel lobby. All of this would seem to make him an extremely unlikely prospect to forcefully shift party policy away from the status quo on Israel.
But in Pritzker’s case, his long-standing affiliation with the pro-Israel lobby—never a secret—doesn’t necessarily doom him. In response to the Gaza war, Pritzker seems to be revising his views about Israel, and his recent statements demonstrate, perhaps, a changing position. He has cautiously staked out a place on the party’s left flank, endorsing Sanders’s bill for arms sanctions, for instance. Unlike Newsom or Shapiro, he did not implement new state laws in Illinois cracking down on campus speech in response to the Gaza encampments of 2024. Tellingly, throughout his career, Pritzker has movingly emphasized the horror of the Holocaust—the extermination of European Jewry—rather than cheerleading for Israeli Jewish nationalism. In an extended interview with the Christian Science Monitor, during which he gave the reporter a tour of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, he noted that too little had been done to protect innocent Palestinians, a view he has now expressed in multiple statements. He was even more explicit on a recent episode of the popular I’ve Had It podcast, saying that as a Jew committed to upholding the values of social justice and people’s freedom, “I have to apply that equally to the state of Israel as I do to other countries that have committed atrocities.” From being an “unequivocal” supporter of Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7, he has taken a much more skeptical view.
Squint, and you can see the outline of a political strategy begin to take shape. Pritzker, citing his own previous affiliation with AIPAC, could say that the party must find the courage to change course. One could imagine Pritzker giving a major speech along the lines of Obama’s famous Philadelphia speech on American racism, one that outlines his familial background, study of the Holocaust, and universalist ethos, and concludes by saying that continued, unconditional support of Israel by the Democrats would violate those very principles. He has flown to these rhetorical heights in the past. To quote one memorable line from his 2025 State of the State address, “If we don’t want to repeat history—then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.” Of the politicians we have surveyed, his shift would be the most forceful, and it would have an organic power that no non-Jewish candidate could match.
Furthermore, as a billionaire, Pritzker doesn’t need the support of an organization like AIPAC (which spent more than $53 million in the 2024 election cycle in campaigns across the country) or wealthy Democratic donors for whom maintaining the Biden-Harris status-quo policies was a threshold issue. He has spent the past several decades leveraging his own wealth to support Democrats across the country, and if he does change his stance on Israel, his dual identity as a donor and a major candidate can shift the giving patterns of other donor organizations. A real-life blackjack shark, Pritzker’s side of the table is full of chits owed to him on account of this largesse. His wealth gives him flexibility and national reach, and his past positions give him credibility. Moreover, it might be easier for Pritzker to blow off the anxious calls of Chuck Schumer or Reid Hoffman than a politician who hasn’t spent a lifetime in the orbit of the powerful and influential.
A change in his views will ignite rageful opposition from centrist and conservative Zionists. But this bar mitzvahed student of the Holocaust and former AIPAC board member, a Pritzker, will be hard to smear—Pritzker’s position will be vehemently opposed, but nobody can sanely imply he is antisemitic or a “self-hating Jew.” Only the famously anti-Communist Nixon could go to China. Only LBJ, the white, drawling, native son of Texas, could promote and sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Pritzker may well be similarly singular regarding Israel.
But beyond his unique positioning, another question hovers: Would it be politically wise for Pritzker to change his stance? The answer is yes. Such a position is obviously advantageous for Pritzker’s presidential ambitions for the reason noted at the outset of this piece: The Democratic Party’s base has dramatically shifted and no longer requires (or even wants) unqualified support for the policies of Israel. The party electorate of the 2028 primary is going to be extremely engaged, and likely even less favorable toward Israel than the electorate of today—as Israel continues to violate international law, displace Palestinians in the West Bank, and co-prosecute an unpopular war helmed by Donald Trump. The situation reminds us of the 2008 Democratic primary, when Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq War might well have been the key issue that resulted in his close victory over Hillary Clinton. The old shibboleths are dying, and the party is ready to be led in a new direction.
Right now, Pritzker is one of maybe a dozen plausible Democratic nominees, including ones we haven’t mentioned here, such as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, California Congressman Ro Khanna, and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock. All of these candidates, with the possible exception of Newsom, need something—a governing move, a viral media moment, a galvanizing issue—to break loose from the pack. If Pritzker aggressively seizes on the issue of Israel and Palestine from the left, he will retain first-mover advantage as an establishment Democrat willing to buck conventional wisdom.
Pritzker’s former links to Israel, typical for mainstream American politicians, have fairly opened him to attacks by skeptical journalists and some left-wing activists. But even the skeptics might credit him for changing his views and thus alienating influential family associates and friends. Other politicians, Jewish and non-Jewish, have already made similar shifts. Van Hollen, for instance, has shown courage and persistence on the issue. But JB Pritzker affirming “Never again—for anybody,” as the variation on the old credo has it, will land with a power that no non-Jewish politician, no matter how sincere and eloquent, will be able to match. The identity linkage between the U.S. Jewish diaspora and the Jewish state that frames U.S. policy toward Israel can best be loosened by a diaspora U.S. Jewish politician. While Shapiro will likely remain uncritically Zionist for a mixture of personal and political reasons, and while Ossoff might well display the guts and smarts to make this move, we think Pritzker would be the most effective of the three. He is a major donor and a representative of a family exemplifying American Jewish assimilation and success. He would differentiate himself from the field as a Jewish politician unafraid to transform U.S.policy who would challenge the Jewish state in the name of Jewish universalism.
Pritzker would make this move from a position of incredible rhetorical and substantive political strength. As a Jewish American whose ancestors escaped the pogroms, as a man who was instrumental to building a Holocaust museum, as a top liberal Trump antagonist, and as governor of a major state, Pritzker is in the strongest position of anybody we’ve surveyed to reshape the Democratic Party’s position on Israel and unite its centrist and leftist factions. Perhaps most importantly, Pritzker will signal to other Democrats that this ethical change is a viable political position and well within the party mainstream. By doing so, he will open a pathway to resolving the intraparty contradiction between the elites and the activist base, unifying the party at the time when that is most needed. He would likely gain an enormous amount of credibility among younger leftist voters and the activist base, while maintaining his stature as the successful, heartland chief executive of one of America’s largest states. After all, a blackjack player collects chits in order to cash them in.
The crown, as we sometimes say, is in the gutter, and there is a chance for Pritzker to make an assertive political move regarding Israel. But in this case, the savvy political play is also the right play for American interests in the world, for Palestinian justice and equality, and, whether most Israeli Jews and hard-core U.S. Zionists realize it or not, for Israel too if it wishes to escape the burdens of being a pariah and garrison state. As Pritzker—and the other contenders—plot a path toward a possible run for the presidency, they might consider: Politicians who do the right thing that is also the shrewd thing improve the country—and win elections.
