Peter Beinart writes:

The mantra of Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign is “Brave Wins.” Yet in her video message to the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum this week, the New York Senator didn’t even mention the word “Palestinian.”

That was typical. The 2020 Democratic hopefuls talk a lot about having the courage not just to challenge Donald Trump but to transform America’s political and economic system. But with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the leading contenders couldn’t muster the nerve to offer any substantive criticism of Israeli policy in front of an establishment Jewish audience, even by video.

In the pantheon of American Jewish groups, the American Jewish Committee is considered centrist. That means it opposes bigotry in the United States and endorses a Palestinian state while simultaneously refusing to challenge even Israeli policies—like the government subsidies that encourage settlement growth—that brazenly undermine the very two state solution the AJC claims to support.

Read the AJC’s 36-page “Guide for the Perplexed” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and you wouldn’t know that in the West Bank Israel maintains two legal systems, one for Jews—which guarantees due process, free movement, citizenship in the country in which they live and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives—and a second, which denies all these rights to Palestinians.

The AJC constructs a cocoon that allows its supporters to believe that Israel is a thriving democracy even as it denies millions of Palestinians basic rights, and to believe that Israel yearns for a two state solution even as Benjamin Netanyahu boasts about opposing one.

And with the exception of Sanders, the major Democratic candidates didn’t challenge that intellectual and moral bubble. They inhabited it. [Continue reading…]