What to do or say about Israel’s war on Gaza has establishment Democratic consultants and the elected officials for whom they work in a tizzy. 

Nothing good will come of the chaos that has already been created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking-ball to institutions, agencies, and programs. 

While some supporters of Palestinian rights saw the developments at last week’s meeting of the Democratic National Committee as a defeat, it was, in fact, a victory. Here is what happened at the meeting and why I feel that progress was made.

Even though the bottom has fallen out of Democrats’ support for Israel, some in the party still can’t bring themselves to recognize this reality. 

We’ve reached a sort of tipping point in the way political leaders in the West are reacting to Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza. It’s maddening for two reasons: that it took this long to get an official response from Western capitals; and that, once the magnitude of the tragedy became clear, the responses have been so decidedly ineffectual. 

Our understanding of an historical event’s meaning is a function of two factors. The first is what we choose to identify as the starting point leading up to the event. The second is the lens through which we view it.

American political parties are in disarray. Instead of being the engines that organize and drive our politics, their roles have been supplanted by partisan social media influencers, non-profit political groups, super PACs, and the billionaires who fund them and consultant groups they hire. 

Any way you look at it, the northern rim of the Arab World is a mess. US politicians, echoing Israel’s position, speak glibly (and dishonestly) of a transformed or new regional order. In reality, the situation has worsened. Israel has accelerated its genocidal war on Gaza, land-grabbing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and occupations and deadly bombings of Lebanon and Syria.  

Meetings between US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are more akin to a master class in posturing and duplicity than in diplomacy. Last week’s meetings were no exception.