Here’s a summary of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s stand on Israel-related issues, following her Saturday’s formal launch of her 2020 presidential campaign:
Warren supports a secure and democratic state of Israel.
She supports guaranteeing Israel’s security from its enemies, such as Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
She supports a two state solution.
She objected to the PLO application for membership in the UN.
Warren’s first foreign trip since being elected to the Senate, in November 2014, was to Israel, where she met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She then visited the PA and Jordan. Her aides said those latter two visits had been organized by the State Department and Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.
In November 2017, Warren was one of ten Democratic senators who signed a letter urging Netanyahu not to demolish the illegal Bedouin shantytowns of Khan al-Ahmar and Sussiya, suggesting this would diminish the chances of a two-state solution and “endanger Israel’s future as a Jewish democracy.”
In April 2018, after the start of the Gaza border riots, Warren said she was “deeply concerned about the deaths and injuries in Gaza” and called on Israel to “exercise restraint and respect the rights of Palestinians to peacefully protest.”
All of which suggests there’s little daylight between Warren and all the other key Democrats on the Hill regarding issues involving Israel and the US. That’s a surprise, because of the senator’s reputation for radical views on many domestic issues. As leader of the party’s progressive wing, Warren, 69, has made worker rights, fair wages and cheap health care the core of her campaign. Warren proposes an annual wealth tax, to levy a 2% annual tax on household net worth above $50 million, and a 3% annual tax on net worth above $1 billion. With this much socialism in her agenda, you’d expect anything but the traditional Democratic stand on Israel.
The Democratic party of 2019 is radically different from the same party only ten years ago, and eons away from the party in the 1970s and ’80s. According to a Pew poll this year, while 79% of Republicans say they “sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians,” only 27% of Democrats held the same view. Since 2001, according to Pew, the percentage of Republicans preferring Israel over the PA Arabs increased from 50% to 79%, while Democrats liking Israel better are down to 27%, from 38%.
This suggests that, as an American voter, support for Israel is your major consideration in choosing whom to support for the presidency in 2020 – vote Republican. Having said, that, on the morning after Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s launch of her presidential campaign, it is surprising to discover how much this unabashed radical has held on to traditional Democratic party values regarding the Jewish State.
At which point the educated reader would voice their immediate objection, seeing as only last week, the senator from Massachusetts voted against a Republican bill to allow states to punish companies they do business with, should these companies obey pressure from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
The straight-forward answer is that the 28 Democrats who voted against the bill, a few of whom are seeking their party’s presidential nomination, had been set up by Florida Republican Marco Rubio, the bill’s author. The bill came in three parts: security aid to Israel; a call on the president not to pull out of Syria; and the BDS thing. Over in the House, the Democratic majority passed its own version of parts one and two, which will soon be merged as a new law. Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not even consider the third part, because the vast majority of liberals viewed it not so much as an attack on BDS, but on free speech. After all is said and done, consumer and other economic boycotts – despicable as they are in the BDS context – are still a form of political speech.
And so the Democrats in the Senate were forced to eat the stinky fish handed them by Rubio, knowing it would cost them political support, but also knowing voting the other way would actually injure them with their voters at home.
Should Elizabeth Warren receive the DNC nomination and then go on to defeat Donald Trump in November, 2020, Israel should expect a repeat of the Obama Administration’s unfriendliness, possibly without the added costs of Obama’s disastrous policy in the Middle East, including his instigation of the lethal “Arab Spring” and the nuclear deal with Iran. Hopefully, Warren would know better than to repeat those.
With that in mind, though, a combination of a Gantz government and a Warren presidency would spell rough times for Zionists everywhere, most notably in Judea and Samaria.