Are top Democrats actually “shifting” on Israel, or is the PR simply getting more sophisticated? 

After the midterms wrap up and the race for the Democratic 2028 nominition for president kicks off in earnest, this will be a central question those concerned with the US role in the genocide in Gaza must grapple with clearly, honestly, and with—it turns out—a high degree of skepticism and media literacy. That’s because the forces committed to keeping the weapons flowing to Israel quickly adjusted their tactics to meet the mood of the public, and the mood of Democrats in particular. 

Last year for TRNN, I detailed the three main ways AIPAC Democrats will seek to look critical of Israel while assuring that the pro-Israel status quo remains fundamentally unchanged. Since I wrote that breakdown, a fourth talking point—and one that seems inevitable in retrospect—has emerged as a favorite of liberals who want to seem “tough on Israel,” but don’t want to upset the Israel Lobby. This line, which I documented last April, commits to “ending US aid to Israel” which, despite seeming like a meaningful break or a move left, is a policy that first emerged from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the late US Sen. Lindsey Graham. And, as I noted, it was planned out by far-right think tanks Foundation for Defence of Democracies and Heritage Foundation—specifically designed to blunt the primary argument against support for Israel. Last January, Netanyahu told the Economist that he wants to “taper off” formal US military funding. Pro-Israel lobbying organization J-Street then took this right-wing idea and  proceeded to sell the “cut off aid to Israel” line to liberals as something they could take to their constituents as evidence that they are in line with Democratic voters’ overwhelming dislike of Israel, while not changing the status quo. Indeed, as IMEU documented in their critique of the plan, the effort would actually further entrench US-Israeli military alignment. 

The US can “cut off aid to Israel” and still very much continue to arm them. The only thing that has changed in this scenario is that Israel pays for it rather than the US government, but from the perspective of those being starved and maimed in Gaza this distinction matters about as much as the color of the bombs.

Much like the Biden White House’s slippery and misleading rebranding of “ceasefire,” the “ending aid to Israel” line relies on popular misunderstanding of what the load-bearing word means, in this instance, “aid.” In colloquial or common usage, it’s a word for general support—military, diplomatic, and financial. In reality, it simply means subsidizing—e.g. paying for—Israel’s weapons. The US can “cut off aid to Israel” and still very much continue to arm them. The only thing that has changed in this scenario is that Israel pays for it rather than the US government, but from the perspective of those being starved and maimed in Gaza this distinction matters about as much as the color of the bombs. 

As predicted, this “cut off aid” statement is fast becoming the go-to line for Democrats seeking to assure their increasingly anti-Israel base without upsetting the Israel lobby or the Democratic Senate and House leadership they are aligned with. Recently, after receiving criticism for inviting in AIPAC-linked consultants to steer his campaign, Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson released a statement calling Gaza a “genocide” and pledging to “stop funding of Israel’s military”:

Troy Jackson’s public statement yesterday expressing his commitment to end the genocide in Gaza and stop funding Israel’s military was driven by a host of supporter letters sent directly to the campaign on those issues. pic.twitter.com/FMrMBPcU2W

— Nathan Bernard (@nathanTbernard) September 26, 2026

This is a perfect example of a J-Street-curated statement that, to the untrained eye, seems critical of Israel and committed to justice for Palestine, but actually says little of substance. There’s a lot of window dressing and gesturing, but ultimately Jackson’s policy is consistent with that of Benjamin Netanyahu’s. 

Rep. Ro Khanna, who very much appears to be running for president in 2028 and making Gaza central to his pitch for progressives, is similarly muddled in his stance. Despite supporting partial and temporary embargos here and there, Khanna told Hasan Piker in July that a full arms embargo on Israel would be “probably too far.” He has instead focused on the “cutting off aid” line that emerged out of the Israeli security apparatus and found its way into “progressive” circles via J Street.  

Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, James Talarico, likewise gave a similarly underwhelming answer when asked about his position a few weeks later. Asked about Gaza last August on The Breakfast Club Show, he refused to label it a genocide, instead deferring to the “international criminal court” (and ignoring the overwhelming consensus of human rights groups and genocide scholars). Then he promised to “condition military aid” followed by two minutes of Obama-esque vapid empathy-speak. 

That isn’t to say all Democrats are simply rebranding the status quo. It seems, despite his campaigning with central defender of the genocide Kamala Harris, Abdul El-Sayed is expressing a firm commitment to an arms embargo on Israel. Obviously, this is also the case for DSA-endorsed candidates who are not splitting hairs or letting J-Street manage their Israel policy. But these firm commitments are the exceptions. Increasingly, what we’re seeing is a squishy mix of empathy-speak, vague gesturing, highly conditional pledges to “condition aid” and other such abstractions with little in the way of firm commitments. 

The only actions Democrats have, at scale, taken to “break from Israel” is recent spattering of Congressional votes over the past year designed to signal disapproval but change nothing of substance. These bills vary between genuine, if partial, arms embargo and the aforementioned “end aid” framework endorsed by Netyanhau and Graham. It’s complicated, but worth dissecting, because it can help illustrate how much energy and effort is going into these pseudo “breaks,” namely those being pushed by Israel lobbying group J-Street. One House bill from last July sought to “end aid” to Israel. The bill had some merit as it isolated Israel as such. But, like all of these bills, it was effectively a “messaging vote” because it had zero chance of passing, and because it aligned with the Netyanhau-approved “ending aid” framework. Almost half of Democrats in Congress supported it, including long-time reliable Israel ally Nancy Pelosi. 

A few months later, we saw the slightly more substantive, but ultimately performative, partial arms embargo bills in both the House and Senate. Though different, they both involved preventing further sales of certain weapons to Israel given certain conditions. In the House, 104 Democrats backed the measure, and in the Senate, all but seven Democrats, including major Israel supporters, backed the measure. 

These votes, in effect if not intent, end up serving as little more than anti-Israel thingamajigs that liberal zionists in Congress can point to when confronted on the issue as evidence that they are not a rubber stamp for Israeli violence.

But these bills, as everyone involved in their drafting, lobbying, and counter-lobbying know, were totally DOA. They have zero chance of actually passing, much less getting a President Trump veto-proof majority. Thus—despite many activists’ best intentions—they functionally serve as little more than a mechanism for reputation laundering for liberals who’ve backed Israel’s genocide and its broader regional violence, but who can read a poll as well as anyone else. These votes, in effect if not intent, end up serving as little more than anti-Israel thingamajigs that liberal zionists in Congress can point to when confronted on the issue as evidence that they are not a rubber stamp for Israeli violence. Indeed, suspiciously enough, the Senate version last April garnered the support of staunch Israel advocate and AIPAC-money sponge Cory Booker, who grinningly met with Israeli defensive minister Yoav Gallant after Gallant was indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity. Does anyone think for a second Booker would have backed a bill to prevent weapons sales to Israel if it had a remote chance of passing? Does anyone think his vote in support is evidence he’s “breaking from Israel”? Or is it evidence of something a bit more subtle, and sinister, which is Democrats realize they need to appear as if they’re breaking from Israel without the messiness of actually doing so? 

But if the above bills are largely superficial and performative, why would Hakeem Jeffries write a letter in opposition, one may ask? For the same reason Jeffries agreed to let the vote happen and not discipline those supporting it: it’s all part of an intramural scrimmage between zionist allies who disagree on how best to “rein in” Israel. On substance, nothing fundemental is permitted to change, and the idea of ending military support was never on the table. Jeffires and AIPAC both understand that this is a 80/20 issue against them and are allowing their members more latitude in rhetorical and ideological distance, so long as the weapons flow remains unabated which it, of course, securely remains. 

One of the more difficult tasks for an activist of good faith is being able to tell the difference between genuine, if incremental, progress, and counterinsurgency—that which appears like incremental progress but is, in fact, a move to the right with better PR.

In his urging of support for the bill earlier this year, Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said that “American people are crying out for an end to US tax dollars subsidizing Israel’s military.” But American people are not so much crying out for this, and certainty Palestinians aren’t, as they are an end to the genocide and occupation. It doesn’t matter if this genocide is “subsidized” by “US tax dollars” or not—the source of military funding is mostly arbitrary and inconsequential. What activists are demanding, what Democratic voters are demanding, is not a “message” bill or limited to “defensive weapons” with 18 qualifiers and carveouts, but support for a total arms embargo in principle and as a long term strategy of ending US support for the dispossession and killing of Palestinians. 

One of the more difficult tasks for an activist of good faith is being able to tell the difference between genuine, if incremental, progress, and counterinsurgency—that which appears like incremental progress but is, in fact, a move to the right with better PR. Sorting out the difference in the coming months is going to be essential to make sure we don’t just elect a whole new crop of liberals who, despite more convincing crocodile tears and more sophisticated handwringing, just go back to shipping weapons systems and scrambling the sixth fleet to defend Israel’s next “defensive war.” 

As voters concerned with the full-scale destruction of Gaza analyze the statements of politicians seeking to appear “good on Gaza” in the coming months, there are two central commitments they must attempt to pin down: (1) support for a full arms embargo without any conditional statements or tortured caveats and (2) support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanction movement, which seeks to economically isolate Israel. These are the positions that would logically follow from a belief that the country in question is committing genocide—as top progressives likely seeking the White House, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna—said they believe. These measures—not nickel and diming “offensive” versus “defensive,” not singling out “Netanyahu,” not making vague promises to “condition aid” if Israel meets some unknown, arbitrary benchmark of humane mass killing—are the only thing that will move the needle and compel Israel to temper its exterminationist policies and plans. Only one member of Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, unequivocally supports BDS, but certainly far more are capable of committing to a full arms embargo. If they cannot do even this bare minimum, and do so clearly, then the only logical conclusion one can reach is they are simply saying nice-sounding words, and checking the rhetorical box of “genocide,” so they can get elected then go back to enforcing and maintaining the genocidal status quo. 

"Mother and father" is unacceptable language, the Green Party has said, with members threatened with sanction under the party's code of conduct if they fail to use gender-neutral terminology and 'inclusive language'.

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By Leonid RAGOZIN

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

It falls to alternative parties like Germany’s AfD to push for peace.

Britain’s Labour Party is not traditionally thought of as a bastion of militarism or authoritarianism. Yet listening to some of what its top figures have been saying recently might cause one to doubt the conventional wisdom on that.

Consider what Labour Party strategist Paul Richards said in a GB News interview earlier this month. Asked how the UK might respond to an increased Russian threat, Richards—who has worked for two Labour governments—gave a disturbing answer. “We’d have to lock some people up,” he said, “some of the pro-Russian voices, people who say there isn’t a threat, [and say] ‘Don’t fight for your country, don’t go to war for Burnham.’”

His comments are not a one-off. They reflect a worrying trend among Britain’s political mainstream—the old parties, media, and think tanks—which has increasingly adopted a siege mentality informed by the far-fetched expectation of imminent war with Russia.

Nor is the trend restricted to Britain. It spans the entire Western world. And it helps explain why the centrist political forces previously seen as “reasonable” are losing ground to the supposed “fringe.” Apocalyptic millenarianism is no longer the domain of radical obscurantists, but of people like NATO’s secretary-general Mark Rutte, who in 2025 seemed to foretell with relish a conflict between Europe and Russia on the scale of  the SecondWorld War. “Imagine it,” he said, “a conflict reaching every home, every workplace, destruction, mass mobilisation, millions displaced, widespread suffering and extreme losses.”

It is politicians branded as far right or far left radicals who, surprisingly, have emerged as the main opposition to this unhinged bellicosity.

What’s largely prompting this trend is the very logic of the liberals competing with the populists. Western societies display a demand for performative “toughness,” which caters both to the infantilism of their political classes and the gamification of war in faroff countries.

Things seem to have begun in earnest in 2016, when the prospect of liberals losing to rivals like Donald Trump led the former to embrace conspiracy theories like Russiagate and double down on foreign policy hawkishness as a way of evading responsibility for their own failures. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine served a similar function, providing a theater for “toughness” even as the West has gotten bogged down in what has increasingly turned into a proxy conflict.

Trying to outdo the populists along a different axis, rather than doing the hard work of opposing them with value-based positions, has led the centrists into a trap. It left a vacuum in the center, into which the populists—ever alert to political opportunities—have deftly stepped.

Here is how it plays out in Germany. When the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered an embarrassing defeat in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month, the party’s leader and premier in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst, said the government should consider banning the AfD (which won the election by a landslide). Wüst is eyed as a potential replacement for the unpopular chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The CDU went on to suffer additional defeats in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in Berlin. The former is particularly symbolic, because this is where the Nord Stream gas pipelines make landfall—a fact that makes this state a direct beneficiary of the German-Russian joint venture to supply cheap Russian gas to the German economy.

When Nord Stream 2 was blown up in September 2022, the immediate consensus in the West was that Moscow was responsible. Yet the culprits turned out not to be Russian, but Ukrainian. German police investigators eventually charged individuals associated with Ukraine’s military intelligence service for the attack. (It’s worth noting that this Ukrainian spy agency was rebuilt in 2015 with considerable assistance from America’s CIA.)

Germany’s rejection of Russian gas supplies after Putin’s all-out invasion in Ukraine can be seen as a noble gesture, perhaps, but it had dire consequences for the country’s economy, which contracted in 2023 and 2024 before showing anemic growth in 2025. Even more importantly, it hit every household in Germany with skyrocketing heating and power bills. Interestingly, Germany wasn’t receiving Russian gas at the time of the explosion, which means the attack was aimed at preventing the resumption of supplies after the end of war rather than interrupting ongoing exports.

The German government has never properly addressed the issue at the federal level. On the eve of September elections, Merz’s sharp reaction to the Leipzig drone incident, which he instantly blamed on Russia, contrasted sharply with the virtual absence of a response to the perpetrators of the Nord Stream attack.

Voters in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania slaughtered Merz’s party, excluding it entirely from the state’s legislature for the first time in nearly 80 years. The big winner was the AfD—a party unafraid to ask questions about Nord Stream and which muses about restoring gas supplies after the Ukraine War ends. Voters also largely spared the Social Democrats, under whose leadership Nord Stream was built in the first place (although they had to disown it after Russia’s invasion).

The early days of tension between post-Soviet Russia and the West, which culminated in the war in Ukraine, were marked by squabbles over pipeline projects delivering gas to Europe (remember South Stream or Nabucco?). The unyielding opposition of centrist politicians to such projects has led voters to wonder whether their political establishment is more interested in catering to armsmakers and shale gas producers than in providing for its citizens. It’s hard to think of a better illustration of NATO’s unofficial mission to “keep the Germans down and the Russians out” than the fate of Nord Stream.

The perception of abandonment is what fuels the popularity of the AfD’s sovereigntist stance. And despite accusations of extremism, it is the AfD who sounds the most moderate and reasonable on the vital issues of war and peace.

Indeed, their foreign policy stance provides AfD leaders with one bulletproof rebuttal to accusations of fascism. A defining component of the fascist ideology is aggressive militarism—a trait exhibited by the German political establishment, not its hard-right challengers. The AfD fills the shoes of the old-school left-wing peaceniks when it comes to Ukraine, while the Merz government staunchly supports further escalation while discreetly undermining Trump’s efforts to bring the conflict to a close. The AfD also condemns the war on Iran (which Merz initially supported, before making a U-turn under public pressure).

(Ex-)centrists also advocate an enormous defense spending hike Germany can ill afford, as well as compulsory military service (this latter move has sparked youth protests across the country). The way mainstream German politicians are courting the far right in Ukraine—members of Azov movement prominently featured at the prestigious Munich Security Conference this year, for example—make the charges of nazism levelled against the AfD look especially lame.

Opposing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which the AfD does, is one thing. Supporting an endless proxy war with a nuclear-armed great power—and committing to fight this “to the last Ukrainian”—is quite another.

And the polls suggest German voters have little appetite for risking their country’s future in such a gambit.

The AfD and other insurgent parties thrive when their opponents lean into hawkishness and authoritarianism, but so far there is little evidence the establishment understands this. Indeed, European political elites are doubling down. They recently invited Zelensky’s former press secretary, Iulia Mendel, to speak in front of the European Parliament. But Mendel is a vocal critic of her former boss, and so the parliament’s centrist leadership banned her from entering after Zelensky’s government imposed sanctions on her (an extrajudicial punishment he is routinely applying to political rivals). By banning Mendel from speaking and turning a blind eye on Zelensky’s abuse of power, the center once again chooses delusion and bellicosity over a genuine commitment to democracy.

Meanwhile, alternatives like the AfD will continue to fill the vacant space left in the middle of the political spectrum.

Original article:  www.theamericanconservative.com