Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
The protesters who demonstrated outside a pro-Israel party on Wednesday numbered no more than a half dozen, and their cries — that the Democrats, gathered here in Chicago for their convention, were responsible for the Palestinian deaths in Gaza — were not heard inside. Instead, the Democrats proclaimed their support for Israel in speech after speech, and at least one of them was a sharp criticism of those same protesters.
“We have to make sure that the Democratic Party is a pro-Israel party. How do we do that? First, we win elections. The other side can’t win elections. That’s why they block traffic,” said Rep. Brad Sherman of California at a well-attended Democratic Majority for Israel event. He was joined by more than two dozen other Democratic congressmen, Mayor Eric Adams, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Maryland Senator Ben Cardin. Meanwhile, the movement representing Palestinians struggled to get any of its members a spot on the stage.
For months, dire predictions circulated that protesters would turn Chicago into a repeat of 1968, with street battles and fighting in the convention hall over a divisive war. That didn’t happen. Although many delegates wore pro-Palestinian T-shirts and keffiyehs, the biggest disruption to the convention came from a sit-in by unaffiliated delegates demanding speaking time.
Mark Mellman, founder of the Democratic Majority for Israel, was ready to declare his victory before the convention was even over.
“I think the protests are getting an excessive amount of media attention,” he said from the lobby of his Lakeshore hotel, about to board a shuttle to take guests to the United Center. “The protesters said they expected 40,000 people, but there are only 4,000, less than 10 percent of the expected number. One media outlet published an article about Kamala Harris being harassed by protesters over this issue. What harassment?”
Mellman, a pollster and longtime Democratic insider, founded his pro-Israel group in 2019, a year after the rise of The Squad, whose members were to the left of the party on the Israel issue. That year, DMFI spent heavily to oust two members of The Squad, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. The group also helped Yassamin Ansari, an Iranian-American city councilwoman from Phoenix, to a narrow 39-vote victory in a Democratic primary for Ruben Gallegos’ vacated seat. (Ansari was considered more supportive of Israel than her opponent.) DMFI boasts of winning every race it has been involved in, which explains why its Chicago event was so packed with Democratic politicians.
“There are two main goals for politicians,” Mellman said. “They want to do what they think is right, and they want to get elected and re-elected. We show people why being pro-Israel is morally and ethically right, and why it gets you elected. Being anti-Israel is stupid politics. But more broadly, people don’t want candidates who are divisive and extreme. They want candidates who bring people together to achieve progressive results.”
He could have been talking about Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. In one of the most exciting moments of the convention, she used her prime-time speaking time to praise Kamala Harris for “working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home,” a statement that The Nation said it represented “a betrayal of the Gaza movement.”
Undecided delegates representing that movement say the Biden administration’s support for Israel will hurt the party in November unless there is a drastic course correction. Mellman dismissed such warnings. In Michigan, he said, only 1 percent of voters are Muslim, while 2 percent are Jewish. “It’s unfortunate that this has to be reduced to religious categories, and those are both small numbers, but one is twice as big as the other,” Mellman said, before citing similar ratios in Pennsylvania and Nevada. (Of course, people’s opinions about Israel and the war don’t split so neatly along demographic lines.) He also doesn’t believe voters who say they’ll vote for Donald Trump or sit out the election.
“You’re going to vote for someone who, during his presidency, imposed a travel ban on Muslims and promised to drive Palestinians out of the country if he becomes president? You say they may not vote for him, but they’re going to stay home. OK, the closer we get to this election, the more people realize that if they’re otherwise voting for Harris and staying home, they’re voting for Trump. So that becomes less and less attractive the closer we get to the election.”
Although Mellman tries to portray the other side as weak, they counter by claiming that the hype surrounding him is overblown, that a majority of Democrats and Americans are appalled by the war in Gaza, and that the Democratic Majority for Israel only exists because it doesn’t actually exist – see the Undecided Delegates. They also point out that Mellman doesn’t mention Israel at all in his messages to progressives, instead focusing on basic issues, which may be politically successful but does not bode well for his project.
“We should be cautious about viewing people who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from right-wing billionaires as genius political strategists,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for the Justice Democrats. “He can take his victory lap, but our country and our party are worse off because he made this primary the most expensive in history.” Andrabi said the DMFI’s record is less impressive than it sounds, since pro-Israel groups have tried unsuccessfully to find candidates to run against other members of the Squad.
On Thursday, tension between the two sides erupted in a more public forum over whether an unaffiliated delegate could speak on the convention stage. Ocasio-Cortez was one of a handful of Democrats who called on the DNC to back down – not all of them left-leaning. It didn’t happen.
When Mellman boarded the shuttle bus to Congress, police had already cleared the streets of traffic and protesters who had slowed the buses on the first day. In his line of sight was a car with the words “Stop the Genocide! Democrats Lie, People Die!” written on the side.
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