Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
The protesters demonstrating outside a pro-Israel party on Wednesday didn’t number more than a half-dozen and their shouts — about how Democrats gathering here in Chicago for their convention were culpable for Palestinian deaths in Gaza — could not be heard inside. Instead, Democrats proclaimed in speech after speech their support for Israel, and at least one panned those very same protesters.
“We’ve got to make sure that the Democratic Party is a pro-Israel party. How do we do that? First, we win elections. The other side can’t win elections. That’s why they’re blocking traffic,” said Representative Brad Sherman of California at a packed event for Democratic Majority for Israel. Joining him were more than two dozen other Democratic members of Congress, Mayor Eric Adams, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and Maryland senator Ben Cardin. Meanwhile, the movement representing Palestinians was struggling to get even one of its members a spot onstage.
For months, grave predictions swirled that protesters would turn Chicago into a redux of 1968 with battles in the streets and inside the convention hall over a divisive war. That has not happened. Though there are plenty of delegates wearing pro-Palestinian T-shirts and keffiyehs, the most disruption the convention has seen was a sit-in staged by Uncommitted delegates demanding speaking time.
Mark Mellman, the founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, was ready to declare victory before the convention was over.
“I think the protests get outsize media attention,” he said from the lobby of his Lakeshore hotel, just about to board a shuttle to take guests to the United Center. “The protesters said they were expecting 40,000 people, and it’s only 4,000, so fewer than 10 percent of what they were predicting. One outlet did a piece talking about how Kamala Harris was under siege from protesters on this issue. What siege?”
A pollster and longtime Democratic insider, Mellman started his pro-Israel group in 2019, a year after the rise of “the Squad,” whose members were to the left of the party on Israel. This year, DMFI spent heavily to knock off two members of the Squad, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. The group also helped Yassamin Ansari, an Iranian American city councilwoman from Phoenix, eke out a 39-vote victory in a Democratic primary for Ruben Gallego’s open seat. (Ansari was viewed as more supportive of Israel than her opponent.) DMFI boasts it’s won every race it got involved in, which explains why its event in Chicago was so crowded with Democratic politicians.
“There are two prime imperatives for politicians,” Mellman said. “They want to do what they think is right, and they want to get elected and reelected. We indicate to people why being pro-Israel is the morally, ethically right thing to be doing, and why it is the electorally successful thing to be doing. Being anti-Israel is dumb politics. But more broadly, people don’t want candidates that are divisive and extreme. They want candidates who will bring people together to produce progressive results.”
He could have been speaking about Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. In one of the buzziest moments of the convention, she used her prime-time speaking slot to praise Kamala Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home,” a line that The Nation said represented “a betrayal of the Gaza movement.”
Uncommitted delegates who represent that movement say the Biden administration’s support for Israel will hurt the party in November unless there is a drastic course correction. Mellman dismissed such warnings. In Michigan, he said only one percent of the electorate is Muslim, while 2 percent is Jewish. “It’s unfortunate that this has to be reduced to religious categories, and they are both small numbers, but one is twice as big as the other,” Mellman said, before citing similar ratios in Pennsylvania and Nevada. (Of course, people’s opinions about Israel and the war cannot be so certainly divided along demographic lines.) He also doesn’t believe the voters who say they are going to vote for Donald Trump or sit the election out.
“They’re going to vote for somebody who instituted a Muslim ban when he was president and has promised to remove Palestinians from the country if he becomes president? They say they may not vote for him, but they’ll stay home. Okay, well, the closer we get to this election, the clearer it’s going to be to people that if you would otherwise vote for Harris and are staying home, then you’re voting for Trump. So that gets less and less attractive the closer we get to the election.”
Though Mellman may try to portray the other side as puny, they in turn say the hype around him is inflated, that a majority of Democrats and Americans are horrified by the war in Gaza, and that Democratic Majority for Israel only exists because there isn’t really one — see the Uncommitted delegates. They also point out that when Mellman designs messaging to go after progressives, he doesn’t mention Israel at all but instead focuses on bread-and-butter issues, which may be politically successful but doesn’t bode well for his project.
“We should be careful to think of people with hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from right-wing billionaires as some kind of genius political strategist,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats. “He can take his victory lap, but our country and our party is worse off because he made these the most expensive primaries in history.” Andrabi said DMFI’s win-loss record is less impressive than it sounds, since pro-Israel groups unsuccessfully tried to find candidates to run against other Squad members.
On Thursday, the tension between both sides spilled into a more public forum over whether an Uncommitted delegate would be allowed to address the convention from the stage. Ocasio-Cortez was one of a small number of Democrats, not all of them left wing, who called on the DNC to relent. It didn’t happen.
When Mellman boarded the shuttle bus to the convention, police had cleared the roads of both traffic and protesters who had slowed the buses on the first day. Within his view was a car that had painted on its side “Stop the genocide! Dems Lie, People Die!”
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