Unfortunately, the Democratic elite—which has played a crucial role in enabling and perpetuating the slaughter in Gaza—is still clinging to the status quo. And nowhere is that more evident than in how Ken Martin, the recently installed chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is handling the issue.
As chair of the organization that oversees the Democratic Party’s national fundraising and election efforts, Martin is an important and visible party leader. His statements and committee decisions shape national perceptions of the party and influence which candidates and voters are valued come election time. But it seems that he is siding with the old guard when it comes to Israel.
In early August, The Intercept reported Martin’s aides pressured 26-year-old pro-Palestine DNC delegate Alice Minnerly to water down a symbolic resolution calling for the party to support an immediate ceasefire and an arms embargo, to suspend military aid and recognize Palestine as a state.
When Minnerly refused, Martin publicly backed a competing resolution that maintains a Biden-era commitment to advancing Israel’s “qualitative military edge.” This resolution was crafted with the input of Democratic Majority for Israel, a group whose super PAC worked to oust former representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. The countermeasure reportedly has the support of the entire DNC leadership in advance of a vote at the upcoming meeting.
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As one Harris campaign staffer explained to The Nation, a senior official in the Harris campaign informed voter engagement organizers at the beginning of October 2024 that they were to no longer to record voter feedback about Gaza in their internal systems.
This meant that the campaign simply stopped engaging with voters concerned about Gaza in the crucial final weeks leading up to the election, around the same time that Kamala Harris embraced Liz and Dick Cheney and sent Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he alienated the swing state’s Arab and Muslim voters by declaring that Israel had been “forced” to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “The thought process in the campaign with Muslim voters, young voters, with anybody who was concerned about Gaza was, OK, we’ll lose you, but we’ll pick up two somewhere else,” the staffer said. We all know what happened after that.
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In May, Martin declared that support for Israel is a foundational Democratic Party value, telling the Jewish Democratic Council of America conference, “It is so important right now for our party to stand up with the Jewish community, to continue to stand up for Israel, to continue to stand up for humanity and to not forget who we are as Americans.”
This is consistent with his record on Israel while chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, particularly in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.
On October 9, 2023, for example, Martin condemned the Twin Cities DSA’s statement of solidarity with Palestine as “disgusting” for its inclusion of the phrase “from the river to the sea” (calling it “a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel”) and for failing to reference the murders of Israeli and American civilians. An hour later, he returned to X to describe it as a “garbage antisemitic statement.”
A few months later, Martin encouraged pro-Israel activists to get involved in local precinct politics to offset “the extreme voices in our party” who were then organizing for a ceasefire resolution to be passed by the Minneapolis City Council. Martin and his state GOP counterpart joined a January 2024 Zoom call held by the Minnesota and the Dakotas Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)—which calls itself the “public affairs voice of the Jewish community” and had vigorously opposed the resolution. The JCRC has opposed the description of Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide, claiming that it inverts both history and reality and leads to the demonization of Jews around the world. The JCRC has also declared that Israel cannot be an apartheid state because minorities live within its borders.
