Senator Van Hollen then went on to say:
Primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues, especially if, as a legislator, he or she voted to send Mr. Netanyahu bombs, even as his government imposed a total blockade on Gaza. Nor will they support a candidate who plans to re-enlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity.
“Complicity” is a strong word in an internecine Democratic fight here.
Then we’ve seen a number of Democratic primaries beginning to split over Gaza. It has become an essential issue in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, where Abdul El-Sayed leads in many of the new polls.
Archival clip of Abdul El-Sayed: You’re watching Democrats bend over backward in the most pretzel-like way to justify the war. They’re like: This is an illegal war, but if they ask me, I’d fund it.
Archival clip of El-Sayed: If you don’t have the courage to call out the moral abomination of a genocide, then what do you have the courage to call out in the first place? This is a moral Rorschach test for our party.
It was very present in the New Jersey House primary that Adam Hamawy, a doctor who had treated the injured in Gaza, just won.
Archival clip of Adam Hamawy: I was running on something very simple — is that we should be spending on health care, not bombs. We should be spending on our communities here in New Jersey, in America, and not funding bombs overseas for atrocities and genocide. We should not be funding the endless wars that we’re seeing.
It has been at the center of the House primary in my district in New York, where Brad Lander is running against the incumbent, Dan Goldman. Much of Lander’s attack has centered on Goldman’s support for Israel.
Archival clip of Brad Lander: Representative Goldman does not view what’s happening there as a genocide. I’ve been fighting against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1990. I’ve never heard him say the word “occupation” in that context.
Lander, too, is well ahead in recent polls.
Into all of this comes President Trump’s war in Iran — a war he has fought alongside Israel — as well as the general failure of his tariff and foreign policy. So it has made this moment one when something new really could emerge.
The Democratic Party is not going to go back to Bidenism. It is not going to try to replicate Trumpism. So what would something different actually look like? On Gaza and beyond, what would it do differently?
Matt Duss is the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. He has worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for American Progress. He served as Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser, and he has advised Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So Duss is really at the center of foreign-policy thinking among the elected left.
I wanted to have him on to explore a question that I think might come to define the 2028 primary: What would a left foreign policy look like? What would it actually try to do in the world?
