At a debate this week with his Republican opponent, State Treasurer Stacy Garrity, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro attempted to articulate a position that might appease his party’s anti-Israel left-wing base while at the same time upholding a stand that he has held throughout his life: support for Israel.
His attempt to thread that needle consisted of, on the one hand, reaffirming his strong, even emotional backing for the Jewish state and noting that while Jews were grieving the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, they were also under siege from an unprecedented surge of antisemitism. But he balanced that with a denunciation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, he claimed, was making it impossible to maintain the U.S.-Israel alliance. He said he hoped that Netanyahu would not be re-elected later this month, thus removing a major obstacle to the presidency for him.
The popular governor is currently cruising toward an easy re-election victory. But most political observers are looking past November and pondering whether his plans to run for president in 2028 will be derailed by what he describes as his “love” for the State of Israel.
A changed party
We won’t know the answer to that for another 12 to 18 months. But given everything happening in American politics in 2026, it’s hard to make a case for optimism for Shapiro or, more importantly, winning back the Democrats for the pro-Israel cause.
In primary after primary conducted by Democrats, a stance such as Shapiro’s or even far more lukewarm affirmations of support was a kiss of death for candidates. It even applied to those like Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.): an incumbent, reliably liberal and fervently opposed to President Donald Trump.
Even more important is how the party is rallying around the most notorious and prominent opponent of the Jewish state running in 2026—Democratic U.S. Senate nominee in Michigan Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. In the last month, he has received endorsements and even financial support from a host of Democrats, including Jews like Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
Schumer has also taken the same line about the dispute between Democrats and Israel being about Netanyahu. But for El-Sayed and an entire rising generation of “progressives,” you hear more about the usual litany of blood libels about the Jewish state being guilty of “genocide” than the prime minister.
With El-Sayed still locked in a close race against Republican Mike Rogers, Democrats just rolled out their version of political royalty to help him: former President Barack Obama.
El-Sayed’s obsessive attacks on Israel and its Jewish supporters, as well as demonizing the AIPAC lobby as part of a plot to capture America for a foreign power, haven’t played as well among African-Americans as they do among college-educated liberal whites. And so, Obama campaigned with El-Sayed this week to help shore up that key Democratic constituency for him.
Obama’s intervention on behalf of an openly antisemitic candidate caused little surprise. But it does bring to mind when the breach between Israel and the Democratic Party became a serious problem.
Netanyahu’s domestic political foes, as well as American liberals like Shapiro, have argued for years that it was the prime minister who blew up bipartisan support for Israel. They say it can be primarily traced to the eight years when Obama and Netanyahu were locked in a long-running duel of clashing personalities and policies when the two were leading their respective countries.
That culminated in the unprecedented address Netanyahu gave to a joint meeting of Congress to oppose Obama’s disastrous 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
Most members of his party were opposed to appeasement of Iran before Obama decided to betray his 2012 re-election promise not to allow Tehran to have a nuclear program. But even though his signature foreign-policy accomplishment would have guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuclear weapon rather than preventing it, he was able to make support for the measure a litmus test of loyalty to his party and himself.
Netanyahu was widely bashed for his chutzpah in going to Capitol Hill to make the case against the pact. But he alerted Americans and those in moderate Arab nations to the danger—and to the fact that Israel wouldn’t allow itself to be put in the crosshairs of an Iranian nuclear program that had been preserved by Obama. In doing so, he prepared the way for its reversal by Trump and for the joint military campaign in 2025 and 2026 by Israel and the United States that destroyed much of Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
Obama broke the pro-Israel consensus
The problem with the thesis blaming all of this on Netanyahu’s Republican partisanship, which was laid out in a recent article in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer, is that it is largely false. Throughout the eight years of the Obama-Netanyahu duel, it was Obama and a party that he was increasingly pushing toward the left on a host of issues that was pressuring Israel to make policy moves its voters had elected the prime minister to oppose in terms of the conflict with the Palestinians.
Obama’s obsession with pressuring Israel to accept a two-state solution was always the main source of tension between Israel and the Democrats. He was determined to force acquiescence to the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem, while Hamas’s separate terror state already existed in the Gaza Strip. He had repudiated the promises made by his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 to help persuade him to withdraw from Gaza. That included America recognizing Israel’s right to retain the areas where Jewish communities existed in Judea and Samaria.
The blowup between Obama and Netanyahu in May 2011, when the latter supposedly insulted the former, is seen as a seminal moment in the breakup between Israel and the Democrats. But few remember that the prime minister’s insistence on defending Jewish rights and Israeli security in Obama’s presence came a day after the president ambushed Netanyahu on the eve of his visit with a speech declaring his intention to pursue negotiations intended to force Israel back to the 1967 armistice lines. That reset American policy to one in which Washington was implicitly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the territories to gratify Palestinian ambitions and the division of Jerusalem.
As it turned out, Obama’s efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians produced nothing but a pointless quarrel with Israel, as well as more support at home for Netanyahu from a public that recognized Obama as an unreliable ally. As was true in previous decades and in the years since he left the White House, the Palestinians—both the “moderates” of the Palestinian Authority and the “extremists” of Hamas—had no interest in a two-state solution. Their sole goal was and remains the destruction of Israel, as the support for the Oct. 7 massacre and the genocidal intent of the terrorist organization has demonstrated.
The purpose of dredging up this history is not so much to vindicate Netanyahu as to point out that the criticisms of the prime minister by Democrats like Shapiro—who, as a Pennsylvania state assemblyman in 2008, was an early supporter of Obama and personally reassured me that, if elected, he would be a great ally to Israel—are largely rooted in myths about the events of the last two decades.
After Oct. 7
At every step, it was Democrats like Obama, former President Joe Biden and others who took positions at odds with the overwhelming majority of Israeli voters, both before and after Oct. 7. Whatever critiques can be made about Netanyahu and his case for remaining in charge, few Israelis are opposing him because he fought back robustly against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran in a war that many Democrats like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others now claim was “genocide.” Nor do they want to topple him because a decade ago and more, he held the line against foreign pressure to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, let alone Jerusalem, to create a Palestinian state from which terrorists could have inflicted the same horrors on communities in central Israel as happened to those near Gaza.
Indeed, in the weeks after Oct. 7, Obama’s qualified statement of support for Israel in the wake of the slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children focused as much on its guilt—and that of its American supporters—as on being “complicit to some degree” for the war Hamas started because those parties had refused to empower the Palestinians.
Other Democrats preparing to run in 2028 are listening to the chorus of Israel-bashers on the left, who claim their party lost in 2024 because it was insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state. Speaking in South Korea this week, former Vice President Kamala Harris said that Biden was wrong to tolerate Israel’s “horrific conduct” in Gaza during the war, which is to say that he didn’t save Hamas from defeat. This also ignores the fact that the Biden administration actually worked hard to hamstring the Israeli war effort, slow-walking arms deliveries as well as making false claims that efforts to root the terrorists out of crucial strongholds like Rafah would create massive civilian casualties. This pressure on Israel only strengthened Hamas's resolve to hang on and keep fighting and undermined their own efforts to end the war and release Israeli hostages.
Harris’s statements weren’t just another instance of her second-guessing her old boss and blaming him and others in the administration for her being defeated by Trump. It was an effort to ingratiate herself with the bulk of Democratic voters who are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.
That trend is what made the rise of someone like El-Sayed possible. In the eyes of Israel’s Democratic critics, it isn’t just Netanyahu who is guilty of “genocide.” They view the broad consensus among Israelis, which stretches from right to left in opposing a Palestinian state and insisting on disarming Hamas in Gaza, as responsible for “genocide” and view it as an “apartheid” state.
El-Sayed made it clear this week that he regarded Israel as being as great a threat to the United States as an Iranian state that had been at war with America for 47 years.
Moderates are also turning on Israel
The idea that an Israeli prime minister not named Netanyahu could fix relations with a Democratic Party that treats antisemites like El-Sayed as worthy of support is just wishful thinking on the part of people like Shapiro.
That’s because this issue is not just a matter of the positions taken by radicals like El-Sayed and Mamdani or far-left “Squad” members in the U.S. House of Representatives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is also considering a 2028 presidential run.
Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who are perceived as moderates, are also signaling that the alliance with Israel will undergo a “thorough re-examination” in the coming years. Coons, who is in line to become chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November, is already planning on proposing discriminatory sanctions on Israelis similar to those already put forward by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.
None of this is because, as Foer claims, Netanyahu cultivated ties with Republicans while neglecting to do the same with Democrats. To the contrary, it was the Democrats who have aligned themselves against Israel’s interests and—under the influence of a base that has swallowed the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism—view the Jewish state and Jews in general as “white” oppressors who must be suppressed. The claim that Netanyahu should have rejected the support of conservative Republicans (who were not under the spell of these ideologies) to placate Democrats is not a serious argument.
Shapiro may hope this will all fade away if Netanyahu is defeated on Oct. 27. But his problem is not just the possibility that Israeli voters will reject his advice. It’s that the same Democratic primary voters who elevated people like El-Sayed, Mamdani and a host of other “progressive” candidates in the last year view those who express “love” for Israel, even if it is qualified with Netanyahu-bashing, as simply beyond the pale.
In the recent past, Shapiro’s combination of political liberalism, largely successful governance and record of electoral success would have put him among the frontrunners in a presidential race. But over the course of the last year, even the most enthusiastic supporter cannot have missed the shift in the opinions of Democrats.
To them, a figure like Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who is Netanyahu’s principal opponent, is just as much of a “war criminal” deserving of sanctions as the prime minister. No conceivable concessions that Eisenkot could make to the Palestinians will be enough to win back Democratic voters indoctrinated in left-wing ideologies or the officeholders they want to send to Washington to blow up the alliance with the Jewish state.
A liberal failure
The remnants of a once-dominant pro-Israel faction of Democrats prefer to blame Netanyahu. But the responsibility is theirs. It was Democrats like Schumer and Shapiro who abetted the rise of Obama and who looked the other way as he set in motion the train of events that created so much “daylight” between their party and Israel. They were the ones who refused to anathematize members of the “Squad,” like Reps. Ilan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and AOC when they helped legitimize antisemitism and Israel-bashing. And they are now the ones who, in the hope of appeasing their left-wing critics, are bolstering the candidacies of Jew-haters like El-Sayed.
Democrats who are blasting criticism of El-Sayed’s radicalism and Islamist opposition to Israel’s existence as “Islamophobia” while ignoring or downplaying his bigotry aren’t open to rethinking their opposition to Israel. Nor are they likely to embrace a Democratic presidential candidate who is emotionally committed to the U.S.-Israel alliance but just wants a different prime minister in Jerusalem.
Simply put, Shapiro’s pro-Israel/anti-Netanyahu stand is not likely to satisfy a party base that now regards hostility to the Jewish state, along with opposition to enforcement of immigration laws, as the organizing principle of politics in the second quarter of the 21st century. And it’s likely that neither he nor any other Democrat is going to be able to get past that problem with the sort of nuanced position articulated at his debate. The collapse of the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party is a liberal failure of nerve and principle that won’t be undone, regardless of who wins the next election in Israel.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.