The Democrats' Pro-Iran, Anti-Israel 2020 Platform

Opinion Democratic Party 2020 Election 2020 Presidential Election Joe Biden

For the past week or so, Democrats purporting to be "pro-Israel" have been laying the groundwork for release of the party's official 2020 platform. Their spin has been that they held the line against their party's ascendant anti-Israel progressive base.

They needed that spin. Many lifelong Democrats who recognize Israel as a valued U.S. ally, who appreciate the existence of the world's only secure Jewish state and who oppose the unremitting terror campaigns of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas had grown concerned.

They know that much as they may have admired the Obama-Biden administration on other grounds, its "daylight" doctrine had been an unmitigated disaster for Israel. In a stark, stunning and explicit departure from decades of bipartisan U.S. policy promising "no daylight" and "no surprises" between the allies, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry revealed Israeli intelligence, sabotaged operations and engaged in stealthy diplomatic attacks on the Jewish state—culminating in the notorious UNSC 2334 declaration that the mere act of Jews living in Judea is criminal. The party's progressive base has made no secret of its desire to pocket 2334 and orient American policy in directions increasingly antagonistic towards Israel—and increasingly dangerous to Jewish life. The purported "pro-Israel" Democrats needed a pro-Israel platform for assurance.

But the Democratic National Committee released a platform 180 degrees off from the spin. It's so pro-Iran that the National Iranian-American Council, the de facto Iranian regime lobby in Washington, immediately "applauded" the DNC "for its forward-leaning platform commitments on issues of importance to the Iranian-American community." It demonstrates that President Obama's curious preference for the supremacists running the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than our traditional regional allies, has become mainstream Democratic ideology.

Trump administration policies have brought the bloody Islamic Republic to its knees. The Democrats seek to restore its vitality by ending sanctions and re-entering President Obama's odious Iran deal. Every faction across Israel's notoriously fractious political spectrum agreed that this deal was an existential threat. Biden and the 2020 Democrats take the opposing view: Regime change is wrong; diplomacy and economic engagement can restrain the mullahs.

Next up, the Gulf Arabs: A new generation of leaders have recently expanded women's rights, confronted Islamism, acted to curb terrorism, deepened ties to the U.S. and moved towards ending the Arab/Israeli conflict. Biden and the 2020 Democrats prefer to "reset" those warm relations in order to keep America's traditional Gulf allies at arms length.

Beyond merely calling to strengthen the genocidal Iranian regime while weakening reformers seeking to integrate Israel into the broader region, the platform also advocates a "small, finite and focused" U.S. troop presence nonetheless capable of training the Iraqi military and Syrian militias, stabilizing both countries, securing the Kurds and preventing a resurgence of the ISIS caliphate. Left unsaid is that such a presence does little more than dare belligerents to attack Americans while constraining Israeli freedom of action.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The platform then turns to Israel. It recommits to the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding tying U.S. military aid to severe constraints on Israel's dealings with Congress. It then sets the stage with a series of shockingly immoral and inhumane statements. It baldly equates America's loyal, liberal, democratic ally Israel with a corrupt, genocidal and profoundly anti-American terror organization that wreaks havoc on Jewish lives and perpetuates the squalid misery of Arabs under its yoke. It equates Jewish homeownership in disputed areas—to which Israel possesses by far the best historical and legal claims—not with Arab homeownership in those same disputed areas, but with Arab terror.

Having thus undermined Israel's right to exist, the platform calls for an unconditional commitment to restore Palestinian Authority (PA) funding that the U.S. has withheld until the PA ends its program of paying for murder, popularly known as "pay-for-slay." The PA's response to this American demand has been utter rejectionism; billionaire terror-chief Mahmoud Abbas insists on his right to use American money to fund terror.

With this Israel plank in its platform, Joe Biden and the 2020 Democrats have effectively adopted the terrorists' creed, excusing, justifying and encouraging the murder of Jews, denying history and law, and promoting the continued rise of global anti-Semitism. While the platform committee may have allowed the purportedly "pro-Israel" operatives to remove the word "occupation" from the text, its substance reaffirms the Democrats' commitment to the unspeakably anti-Semitic and anti-American notion of "judenrein" territory—the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their historic homeland. Selected details and linguistic niceties cannot spin away the platform's substantive anti-Jewish reality.

It is both telling and terrifying that purportedly "pro-Israel" Democrats have cast this disastrous platform as a victory. The platform's avoidance of the term "occupation" and its mild critique of BDS are smokescreens intended to let pro-Israel voters convince themselves that they're not voting for anti-Jewish genocide.

It would be tragic if the spinmeisters succeed.

Bruce Abramson is a senior fellow and director at ACEK Fund and the author of American Restoration: Winning America's Second Civil War. Jeff Ballabon is the principal of B2 Strategic and a veteran government relations and media consultant.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.