Four Democratic Senators who are seeking their party’s presidential nomination in 2020, met this week with delegations of AIPAC activists from their home states. The meetings took place after eight presidential candidates announced they would not attend AIPAC’s conference, which took place this week in Washington.
enators Corey Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, and Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnessota, met with delegations of AIPAC activists from their respective states, according to an AIPAC official. Booker met with the group at the convention center where the AIPAC conference took place. The other Senators hosted the delegations at their Senate offices.
The meetings proved that despite what Vice President Mike Pence said during his speech at the conference, the Democratic Party is not “boycotting” AIPAC. Pence gave an unusually partisan speech at the conference, in which he directly attacked the Democrats and claimed that candidates who chose not to attend the conference were boycotting the event.
Pence again, being who he is and will always be.
New York Jewish Week editors published: AIPAC And The Two-State Dilemma, dated March 27:
The pro-Israel leadership is caught between an Israeli government that is moving to the right on a range of issues, including decades-old fundamentals of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, and an American Jewish community that still supports those fundamentals. The dilemma is all the sharper because President Trump, reviled by many American Jews for his domestic policies and his apparent tolerance for white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, is in a warm embrace with the Israeli prime minister — an embrace now even tighter in light of the president’s recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory.
Can AIPAC reasonably be expected to advance positions that are in direct opposition to those of the elected government in Jerusalem and a growing proportion of the Israeli public?
But as a group claiming to represent a broad spectrum of pro-Israel Americans, is it prudent for the group to signal endorsement of a shift in Israel that clearly is not supported by the Jewish community here?
That op-ed item links to the outlet's reporting, here. Read it. Read it with knowledge that the "trope" of always alleging "antisemitism" against criticism of any kind, (especially in terms of Minnesota's CD5 Rep. Omar), one has to be cognizant that there is a difference between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse, so whichever term is used, where's truth, in what Omar said and in the context of her feeling pressures exerted on her by colleagues of the "Don't rock
BETO: Following the money, here. Haaretz has a vexing paywall interposition when interesting items are cut short for the non-paying public; e.g., here and here. Beto should have shown up at AIPAC to flesh out that contention reported all too briefly in that second Haaretz item. There is this online. Ted Cruz being oily is no surprise. Other Beto related items, here, here and here.
Beto is not a progressive. But he seems pro-Israel, pro-Zionism in general.