Sanders broke the unwritten rule of presidential politics by criticizing Israel and speaking directly about plight of Palestinians before the New York primary

The Democratic debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on Thursday night was electrified by a series of feisty exchanges, but one especially pugnacious discussion stood out as a potentially historic moment in presidential politics: the candidates’ dispute over Israel and the fate of Palestinians.



Close observers of New York politics and the place within it of the city’s prominent Jewish population were astonished that Sanders spoke openly and directly about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza while criticizing Israel and its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for responding disproportionately to Hamas provocations. Never before had such an outspoken pro-Palestinian message been delivered from the presidential campaign stage.

During the debate, Sanders did not describe himself as a secular Jew but he did allude strongly to his heritage by saying that he spent “many months of my life when I was a kid in Israel”. He was also careful to describe himself as “100% pro-Israel”.

But what was unprecedented about his intervention was that he broke the unwritten rule that has held firm in US presidential races for decades: that candidates emphasize their commitment to supporting Israel while maintaining virtual silence over the Palestinian side of the Middle Eastern equation.

Sanders tore that convention apart by talking at length about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, where unemployment stands around 40% and where there is a landscape of “decimated houses, decimated healthcare, decimated schools. I believe the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people.”

It was an extraordinary moment in presidential politics, said Chemi Shalev, US editor and correspondent of the Haaretz newspaper. It is extremely rare for presidential candidates to express sympathy for Palestinians, and the two individuals who came closest in recent times – Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008 – still went nowhere near where Sanders did in talking directly about it on the campaign trail.

“Carter and Obama were much more careful, speaking about the need for peace as an imperative for Israeli security rather than as a matter of justice for the Palestinian people,” Shalev said.

Clinton, by contrast, remained true to the presidential rulebook, refusing to engage with the Palestinian issue. Her remarks, more conventionally, stuck to expressing sympathy for Israelis living under the burden of Hamas terrorism.

“I don’t know how you run a country when you are under constant threat, terrorist attacks, rockets coming at you. You have to defend yourself,” she said.

The Clinton campaign clearly sees Sanders’ overt support for the Palestinians as a potential electoral bonus coming just five days before the critical New York primary on 19 April, in which she is hoping to make her lead over her rival unassailable. Before the debate, held in a former navy yard in Brooklyn, had even ended on Thursday, her press team had circulated a memo to reporters headlined: Hillary Clinton and Israel: A 30-year record of friendship, leadership and strength.

On a national and international level, Sanders’ remarks are likely to reverberate for some time in that they arguably shifted the parameters of the public discussion. Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the pro-Israel and pro-peace lobby group J Street, said it was an “extraordinarily important moment in American politics. There is now an honest debate for about the first time on a national political stage, and that is important for American foreign policy and for the state of Israel.”

More immediately though is the question of how Sanders’ comments will play on next Tuesday’s vital election. It is hard to overestimate the role that Jews and the Israel-Palestine question play in New York politics: the city is after all the second largest urban collection of Jews in the world outside Tel Aviv, though its Jewish population has declined from more than 2 million people in the 1960s to about 1.2 million people today.

On the other hand, there have been seismic movements within the American Jewish community in terms of its relationship to the Middle East over the past decade, brought about by the drawn-out nature of the conflict, disillusionment with Netanyahu’s government and a dilution of the role played by Israel as a commanding issue. A J Street poll conducted in 2014 found that Jewish support for the Democratic party remained rock solid at 69%, but Israel ranked 10th on a list of 14 issues that had motivated voters of which the economy and healthcare were supreme.

There has also been a shift towards a younger generation of New York Jews who are more open to seeing the Middle East crisis as a double-sided conflict in which the Palestinian case should be given due prominence. It is possible that Sanders was making a play for that demographic, as well as appealing to the left wing of the Democratic party that has a strong pro-Palestinian tradition.

But seasoned analysts of New York Jewish politics underlined the political risk that such a stance involves for Sanders. Mitchell Moss, a professor of New York University who has written extensively on the role of the Jewish community in the city’s politics, said that he expected the senator for Vermont’s remarks to give Clinton a bounce.

“The New York primary is a closed contest that only registered Democrats can participate in. Many younger Jewish New Yorkers aren’t registered at all, and that makes Sanders’ comments self-destructive as they could drive the older Jews who will turn out to vote further into Hillary Clinton’s camp,” Moss said.

Against that, Sanders may be calculating that New York also has a growing Muslim population that today stands at well above half a million. For Linda Sarsour, co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York and a surrogate for Sanders, the candidate’s remarks on Thursday night demonstrated that America is changing.

At 36, Sarsour, a Palestinian American, said that it was “the furthest that any presidential candidate has gone in my lifetime. To hear the Brooklyn crowd cheering in the debate room showed me that the United States is moving towards the realization that the Palestinian people must be treated with respect.”