Democrats need to face a hard truth. While Republicans’ approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has failed, so has ours. The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.
For decades, we have called for a two-state solution, but we’ve failed to use our leverage to make it real. It’s past time that we use that leverage to end the occupation and achieve two states with full political and legal rights for all. That means withdrawing taxpayer support from Israel and conditioning arms sales.
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To be clear, I support Israel’s need for security. But for too long most Democrats have unquestioningly accepted Israel’s argument that American weapons are needed and used solely for its defense. We have not yet fully confronted the fact that Israel has used its strength not only as a shield, but also as a sword to bury the two-state solution and advance the far right’s vision of a “Greater Israel.”
The evidence on the ground is overwhelming: Violent settlers in the West Bank have attacked Palestinians with impunity, and Israeli security forces are increasingly complicit. Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank has pushed Palestinians into shrinking enclaves. Mr. Netanyahu’s government has sabotaged the Palestinian Authority, which, unlike Hamas, has accepted Israel’s right to statehood. Anyone who visits the West Bank under Israeli occupation can see an apartheid system at work. Meanwhile, Gaza remains in ruins, the humanitarian situation there remains catastrophic and Hamas remains armed.
I’ve seen these developments with my own eyes. I’ve visited Israel and the West Bank seven times and witnessed the rapid expansion of illegal settlements across land that was supposed to be part of a Palestinian state. I’ve spoken to Palestinian families pushed out of their homes and off their land. I’ve sat down with families, both Israelis and Palestinians, who have lost loved ones to violence. In Ramallah, I spoke with Palestinian American parents who can’t get justice for their children killed by violent settlers or Israeli security forces. I’ve seen aid trucks turned back from Israeli checkpoints while children in Gaza were starving on the other side. And I’ve seen how the once bustling city of Rafah was reduced to rubble by the Israel Defense Forces with American bombs and bulldozers.
It is these experiences — and watching this dangerous trajectory accelerate — that have shaped my growing alarm, which the American people increasingly share. They do not want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or what human rights organizations and scholars have determined to be genocide in Gaza.
Both Republican and Democratic administrations are responsible for where we are today. In his first term, President Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, implicitly condoned settlements and closed the Palestinian mission in Washington and our consulate in East Jerusalem.
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Democrats should pursue a last-gasp effort to salvage a two-state solution. If that effort fails, the United States will have to consider other options to secure equal political and legal rights for all. The alternatives — either a permanent apartheid state or the expulsion of Palestinians — should be abhorrent and unacceptable to everyone. They would result in the unending oppression or displacement of Palestinians, chronic unrest throughout the region and Israel becoming a pariah state.
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Democrats failed to meet the moment in 2024. Americans were rightly fed up with Democratic hypocrisy and complicity in the gross violation of the values we profess to hold dear. That in turn, hurt our credibility with voters. We cannot let that happen again.
