Opinion | Democrats Disagree Over Israel — and That’s OK.

The Democratic Party is better if the tent is wide. What do you think about the way that foreign policy is becoming more of a litmus test in some of these primaries. So the way you frame the party there was that there’s a tremendous amount of agreement on affordability, right. You have everyone from Zohran Mamdani running on making New York cheaper to Roy Cooper, North Carolina. I think his slogan is make stuff cost less. Yeah. I agree that there’s actually a lot of unity directionally on that, even if the different factions in the party have different ways of approaching how you make things cheaper. Israel and Gaza are not that way, and I think it’s one reason those fights have been proving much more combative, at times much uglier. They’ve become more a question of a moral litmus test. That’s the kind of thing that is more dangerous for a party when the issues reflect not a disagreement on how to achieve a shared goal, but a fundamental disagreement on not just what the goal is, but who is moral and who is immoral in it. So as you’re watching it play out, as you’re counseling people how to navigate it, how do you see it? The Democratic Party has had huge changes in foreign policy approach. We’ve had much bigger, deeper divisions, over the Vietnam War, for example a generation or two ago. And having a party that actually has a conversation about this — there are times when the conversation can be so vicious and extreme or even violent, those things I do not like. And I think we should all fully oppose any kind of violence in political disagreements. The point of democracy is to be able to settle conflicts nonviolently. But there are both issues of identity and issues of morality and basic, deep, fundamental divides that are being hashed out. And that’s part of why I think it’s actually good to have a Democratic process where those things can happen, where people can have those debates and they can decide how central that’s going to be to their vote, and they can figure out how to draw a circle that includes enough people to be able to both win and feel comfortable living inside that circle, and there will be another side of it, a new circle that’s drawn that has the vast majority of Democrats and finds a path forward. And my hope, my deep hope, is that that’s a future that allows thriving and life and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike. This is a moment where people have watched unimaginable horrors be inflicted on people who manifestly do not deserve it, and different people have seen different horrors on their screens based on which algorithmic bubble they’re in. But the question of how the United States should conduct its foreign policy in the wake of that is absolutely a legitimate thing for a democracy to think through. For better or worse right now, there are two major viable parties in the country, and it is healthy for contests of different ideas to happen within the party, within primaries, and then to have a chance to elect very different types of Democrats in different places. This is a giant, incredibly diverse country. People are going to disagree about a whole bunch of different things. And for me, I think the Democratic Party is better if the tent is wide.