Connect with us

RSS

‘You Must Earn Our Vote’: Joe Lieberman’s Last Statement Warned of Political Consequences for Dems’ Anti-Israel Shift

Former US Senator Joe Lieberman speaks at an event in Ashraf-3 camp, which is a base for the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) in Manza, Albania, July 13, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Florion Goga

Former US Senator and Democratic Party vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman‘s last statement was a warning to Democrats about the political danger of turning against Israel.

Lieberman died on Wednesday after sustaining a fall.

Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, detailed the late senator’s concern in a new op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

“Hours before his fatal fall on Tuesday, former Sen. Joseph Lieberman put his final touches on a statement we were writing together about Israel, the 2024 election, and the future of the Democratic Party,” wrote Dershowitz, who, like Lieberman, was a strong supporter of the Jewish state.

Dershowitz explained the message was a “warning” to the re-election campaign of US President Joe Biden that it can “no longer count on pro-Israel Jewish voters” to vote for the Democratic Party if it turns against Israel.

“We are here to say that you can no longer simply count on our vote just because Jews traditionally have voted Democratic. We are here to say you must earn our vote,” the joint statement read

It continued: “We want to continue to support Democratic candidates, but you need to know that if you abandon Israel in order to garner the support of anti-Israel extremists within the Democratic Party, it will be difficult for us to support Democrats who are on the ballot this November.”

In the 2020 US presidential election, only 30 percent of Jews voted for former US President Donald Trump, a Republican, while 68 percent voted for Biden, a Democrat. Since 1968, an average of 71 percent of Jews have voted for the Democratic candidate in the presidential race.

“None of us can or will vote for any candidate who supports cutting military support for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. So please, do the right thing. Do not abandon Israel and its time of great need. And we will not abandon you,” the statement concluded.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 89 percent of American Jews believe Israel’s reasons for fighting the Hamas terror group in Gaza are valid. A December poll found that 81 percent of American Jews support Israel’s mission to “recover all Israeli hostages and remove Hamas from power.”

Lieberman and Dershowitz wrote that they “appreciated President Biden’s statements in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas barbarisms” but that “more recently … we have become concerned about what appears to be a weakening of support for Israel by President Biden, Vice President Harris, and some other leading Democrats.”

“We are especially concerned about the possibility that some of this weakening may be influenced by domestic political fears of losing electoral support from anti-Israel voters who have threatened to stay home unless the Biden administration pulls away from Israel,” the statement noted.

In Michigan, a key battleground state and home to America’s largest Arab population, a campaign to vote “uncommitted” during the state’s primary rather than for Biden gained significant support — including from US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). More than 100,000 people, making up more than 13 percent of the total voters, cast an “uncommitted” ballot. It was a small spike of uncommitted votes in terms of proportion relative to when former US President Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012, but a significant spike in terms of raw numbers.

There have been questions raised about whether an anti-Israel stance would actually help Biden’s re-election stance, though. A recent Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll of Michigan voters found that, while only 1 percent of respondents said the Israel-Hamas war was the most important issue to them, a striking 67 percent said the issue was either “very important” or “extremely important.”

Lieberman’s last statement “was intended to be circulated among prominent pro-Israel Democrats and sent to the White House in a public release,” according to Dershowitz. “Its goal was to make it clear that if domestic political considerations — the so-called two state solution, meaning Michigan and Minnesota — were influencing the administration’s change of attitude toward Israel, there would be a domestic political price to pay for such a change.”

Lieberman has long been a staunch supporter of Israel. When he ran for vice president on Al Gore’s ticket in 2000, he was the first Jew to be on a major party ticket in American history.

He also observed Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. Although some questioned how he was able to cease all work on Friday nights and Saturday while also being a US senator, he responded, “I don’t think I could be a senator and not observe Shabbat.”

Lieberman was considered a moderate Democrat who aimed to work across the aisle.

“Joe’s tragic death won’t end his campaign to keep support for Israel a bipartisan issue,” Dershowitz wrote. “Joe believed in this to the depths of his being. And those of us who were working with him to send this message will continue this campaign in his memory.”

The post ‘You Must Earn Our Vote’: Joe Lieberman’s Last Statement Warned of Political Consequences for Dems’ Anti-Israel Shift first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

RSS

Waiting for the Middle Eastern Storm to Settle

A Houthi fighter mans a machine gun mounted on a truck during a parade for people who attended Houthi military training as part of a mobilization campaign, in Sanaa, Yemen, Dec. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

JNS.orgJust days into 2025, Israel is still fighting a war on seven fronts, including Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, various Iranian proxies in Iraq, volatility in Judea and Samaria, and an extremely unstable and unpredictable Syria.

Israelis living in central Israel have been awoken by Houthi missiles several times this week. This is not simply Israel’s problem, but the world’s. The war from Yemen began in March 2020, when radical Houthis began attacking the shipping lanes in the Red Sea. U.S. and other vessels have to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, affecting the entire global economy and putting at particular risk the economy of Egypt.

The Houthis, who practice a strict form of Shi’ism called Zaydi Islam, seized control of the capital of Sanaa in 2014, demanding their own government and lower fuel prices. Their governmental infrastructure is confined to an extremely conservative Shura Council. More than 80% of the Yemeni population lives below the poverty line; their sophisticated weaponry is provided by Iran.

With Sanaa 2,096 kilometers away from Tel Aviv (1,290 miles), the Israelis might not yet have precise intelligence of where the Houthis have been launching their missiles from, but they are very rapidly gaining it. A ray of hope is that U.S.-backed CENTCOM has begun attacking Houthi bases within the last several nights.

Turning to Gaza, since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that the current warring situation continues to exacerbate. Without time to recover from that “Black Sabbath,” 15 months later, more than 800 soldiers in the Israeli Defense Force have lost their lives with thousands wounded. Many reservists’ lives have been put on hold for months at a time while they are called away from their jobs and their families to defend their country.

Israel has made significant gains on the battlefield within Gaza, killing Hamas senior leaders, and most recently, eliminating Hassam Shahwan, head of the terror group’s internal security. Ideologies, however, do not suddenly disappear. The tenacity of the relentless propaganda war against the State of Israel is a regnant aspect within the minds of many members of Hamas, and no one knows for sure what they might have in store for Israelis.

The IDF has uncovered more than 240 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who had been cynically using the Kamal Adwan Hospital as a command-and-control center, which was replete with weapons found in babies’ incubators, tactical communications equipment and classified Hamas documents.

Predictably, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the U.N. World Health Organization condemned Israel, saying “hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds, and the health system is under severe threat.”

A similar problem awaits Israel in Southern Lebanon, where the halfway point of the 60-day ceasefire has passed. The IDF has collected a massive arsenal of 85,170 weapons from Hezbollah captured from about 300 Southern Lebanese villages.

However, rudderless ships can behave erratically. Hezbollah has just issued an aggressive statement saying that if Israel is not out of Southern Lebanon by the end of the ceasefire, the terrorist group will respond with renewed acts of violence.

Lebanon, a failed state without a real, centralized government is under the tight grip of Hezbollah, and a failing economy with approximately 89,500 Lebanese pounds equal to $1.

It remains to be seen how Middle East envoy Amos Hochstein’s plan is any different from U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and UNIFIL supposed to once again fill the void. Both have demonstrably colluded with Hezbollah, going so far as giving Hezbollah LAF uniforms. Hezbollah is supposed to again move north of the Litani River. However, they are already returning to homes that have been used to build tunnels to supply weapons and fighters against Israel.

The late Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, eliminated by U.S. forces in 2020, vowed to make “a ring of fire around Israel.” This has now proven to be a failed policy. The Shi’ite crescent running from Tehran through Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and to the Mediterranean Sea has a gaping hole at its core in Syria.

Israel shares a long border with Jordan, which has proven to be a vehicle for smuggling weapons into Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank). Despite a slim minority of Palestinian support for the Palestinian Authority, according to the Palestinian Center for Survey and Research, of all the candidates to follow 89-year-old leader Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian choice points to Marwin Barghouti, a convicted terrorist serving multiple life sentences for murder during the first and second intifadas (“uprisings”) against Israel.

Resurrecting the failed P.A. to take control of Gaza indicates nothing less than a supreme failure of imagination among the U.S. State Department and other foreign government officials.

Finally, there is some optimism that Syria no longer provides a direct route from Iran to Hezbollah, yet skepticism remains over the intentions of Abu Mohammed al-Julani, Syrian revolutionary militant and political leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Al-Julani, who had been a member of Jabhat al Nusra, an affiliate of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, has reinvented himself into Ahmed al-Sharaa and disavowed his ties to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He has promised to unify Syria, yet has also vowed revenge against the Alawites, who have ruled the Sunni majority with a brutal fist. He maintains particular animus against the Kurdish minority, who had always been loyal to the United States and who fought valiantly against ISIS. He has recently said about the Kurds that “the separatist will either bid farewell to their weapons, or you will be buried with your weapons.”

Much of al-Julani’s backing and training of his rebels has come from Turkey. A great deal of northern Syria is now being controlled by Ankara, which aims to resurrect the Ottoman Caliphate of the 15th and 16th centuries, creating a radical Sunni outpost that admires Hamas. It does not auger well that al-Julani has just changed the textbooks to revere Sharia law.

Israel is already fighting a war on seven fronts. An eighth front within Syria might well open up. What happens next well may predict the outcome for the rest of the Middle East.

The post Waiting for the Middle Eastern Storm to Settle first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

RSS

Syrian Leader Asks US to Pressure Israel to Retreat

A person waves a flag adopted by the new Syrian rulers, as people gather during a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) near the Umayyad Mosque, after the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, Photo: December 20, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo

JNS.orgAhmed al-Sharaa, head of Syria’s Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group and the country’s de facto leader, has asked the United States to pressure Israel to withdraw from the Golan buffer zone and the peak of Mount Hermon.

Moreover, al-Sharaa, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, asked the Biden administration for humanitarian aid, Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported on Friday.

Sources in Israel said that they did not receive any demand from Washington with regard to Syria, adding that the Jewish state will not compromise on its security, according to the report.

Maher Marwan, the new governor of Damascus, spoke to NPR last week on behalf of al-Sharaa, saying that Syria “wants peace, and we cannot be an opponent to Israel or an opponent to anyone.”

Marwan acknowledged that Israel’s concerns following the collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime were understandable, “So it advanced a little [into the buffer zone], bombed [former Assad military assets] a little, etc.”

He added, “We have no fear toward Israel, and our problem is not with Israel. … There are people here who want coexistence and who want peace. They don’t want disputes. And we don’t want to meddle in anything that will threaten Israel’s security or any other country’s security.”

In 2017, the U.S. placed a $10 million bounty on al-Sharaa, as the commander of Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria.

However, the bounty has been removed after a high-level U.S. delegation met with al-Sharaa in Damascus on Dec. 20.

The meeting was touted as “good” and “very productive” by US officials. “We will judge by the deeds, not just by words,” said Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.

Furthermore, reports in the media suggested that President Joe Biden is weighing the recognition of the new Syrian regime before leaving office on Jan. 20.

The Syrian leader spoke to a group of journalists a few days before the arrival of the U.S. delegation, saying that his regime will continue to uphold the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement that ended the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Israel’s “excuses have run out, and they have crossed the lines of engagement” for striking the Assad regime’s military infrastructure, as well as for deploying troops to several demilitarized zones in the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, The New York Times quoted al-Sharaa as saying.

“The collapse of the Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone established by the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office stated on Dec. 12. “Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities on the Golan Heights with Oct. 7-style attacks. That is why Israeli forces entered the buffer zone and took control of strategic sites near Israel’s border.”

The post Syrian Leader Asks US to Pressure Israel to Retreat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

RSS

Israel Preparing to Remain in Lebanon Past 60-Day Ceasefire

Illustrative. Smoke billows after an Israeli Air Force air strike in southern Lebanon village, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, as seen from northern Israel, Oct. 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Urquhar

i24 NewsIsrael is preparing to stay in Lebanon well past the 60-day period set by the ceasefire agreement that came into effect on November 27, Israel’s national broadcaster Kan reported Sunday.

According to Israeli sources, the Israeli military will remain for more than a month after, as the IDF believes it is essential to hold its position in a number of outposts in Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah from taking over key strategic points. Hezbollah is not respecting parts of the agreement that prohibit it from deploying in southern Lebanon. Not all of the Iran-backed Shiite terrorist group have withdrawn north of the Litani River, as stipulated by the ceasefire agreement.

Israel will wait to see who will lead the new Lebanese government to ascertain if it is possible to cooperate on security issues. “We cannot trust Hezbollah, which will strive to restore its capabilities as soon as the IDF leave Lebanon,” one of the officials said.

On Saturday evening, Kan said the Lebanese army suffered from ongoing issues in implementing terms of the agreement. While the military did deploy troops in southern Lebanon as agreed, the number of soldiers south of the Litani River is less than the 6,000 initially planned.

The army high command led by General Joseph Aoun is motivated to successfully carry out tasks entrusted to them by the US and French ceasefire oversight committee. However, Shiite commanders are reportedly significantly more lax in areas under their control. Some even go as far as to provide intelligence to Hezbollah according to Kan.

The post Israel Preparing to Remain in Lebanon Past 60-Day Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News