Only 8% of Democrats support Israel’s “war in Gaza,” and almost two-thirds of Democrats—65%—believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, with only 8% disagreeing that they are. In response to this, Democratic leaders, with a long history of backing both the current genocide and Israel more broadly, are scrambling to hedge their support and create an image of not only being Very Concerned Humanitarians, but of politicians willing to stand up to Israel—in some vague and ill-defined capacity.
Their fake Israel criticisms have emerged to fill a very in-demand and urgent market: trick half-paying-attention liberals into thinking you’re not in lockstep supporting Israel and its horrific live-streamed genocide. To achieve this goal, electeds and liberal zionist organizations are fashioning criticisms that are, in effect, a limited hangout—issuing partial, or relatively low-stakes, criticisms to salvage the core features of zionism and the US’s military support for Israel. One can pin down four distinct, sometimes overlapping, genres of pseudo-criticisms as Democrats gear up for the midterms—and as top Democrats, eyeing a White House run, seek to position themselves as progressive.
- Make Sure The Palestinian Kids Being Bombed Get 600 Calories A Day
This is by far the most popular talking point from pro-Israel Democrats who want to seem vaguely critical of Israel and Trump’s Gaza polices (after, to the person, saying nothing for almost six months) but who do not want run afoul of zionist pressure groups or the US military-industrial complex by challanging the basic premises of the so-called war on Hamas. Make Sure The Palestinian Kids Being Bombed Get 600 Calories A Day has emerged as a mainstay of cable news appearances and half-hearted social media posts by high-status liberals.
Continue bombing Palestinians, the argument goes, but while doing so, be sure to “flood Gaza with aid.” This was, and continues to be, the consensus liberal position and was, more or less, the position of the Biden White House for first 15 months of the genocide. It is also the only meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans, albeit not as significant as its promoters want people to believe. Bomb Kids on 600 Calories A Day (D) is obviously preferable to Bomb Kids on an Empty Stomach (R), but it is still an objectively pro-genocide position. Indeed, organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Doctors Without Borders determined Israel’s military campaign in Gaza was a genocide long before Trump decided to greenlight the added sadistic element of deliberate mass starvation in March 2025.
Continue bombing Palestinians, the argument goes, but while doing so, be sure to “flood Gaza with aid.”
Nevertheless, it remains the far-left flank of acceptable opinion on Gaza. and even to the extent that conditioning aid to Israel is turning into a more mainstream position (one vaguely endorsed by 2028 hopefuls Pritzker, Buttigieg, Shapiro, Gallego, and Klobuchar), it is expressly only as a means of “allowing in aid” to Gaza—not to stop the bombing and broader siege, as such. Once aid trucks are allowed back into Gaza, Israel’s campaign of killing, displacement, and maiming can continue as it was pre-Trump. This is fundamentally a critique premised on PR problems, “images of starving children makes us look bad,” not of the fundamental logic of Israel’s exterminationist aims and tactics.
- The Wayward Friend
A variation on Biden’s “Bear Hug Strategy,” the Wayward Friend is a popular framing meant to look critical without the messiness of demanding the US cut off Israel’s campaign of nihilistic mass killing. Israel, we are led to believe, has no existential issues nor is it engaged in a project of displacement and extermination, but has simply fallen in with the wrong crowd and needs a nudge in the right direction. A recent high-profile example of this came from 2028 frontrunner Pete Buttigieg on the Pod Save America podcast. The former Transportation Secretary, responding to questions about his support for Israel and its destruction of Gaza, played the role of disappointed—but ultimately loyal—friend:
Buttigieg insisted it was a “friendship” in which American politicians should “try to guide them to a better place.” Which is a very strange posture given the almost universal consensus—from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and an increasing number genocide scholars—that Israel is committing a genocide. As one former Buttigieg ally correctly told Politco the next day, after the interview went viral for all the wrong reasons, “When your friend kills 60,000 people and starves an entire population for months at a time, shouldn’t the question be: Why the fuck am I friends with this guy?”
Despite being a a popular go-to posture since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it is seeing revived prominance in the most recent wave of feigned outrage over the genocide. Indeed, it exists within its own elaborate false epistemology, where selling weapons to and supporting Israel unconditionally was actually some type of savvy 15-dimensional chess to Change Israel From the Inside. If the US pulls its support of Israel (and Israel presumably calls the US’s bluff and chooses self-destruction over ending its genocide), the talking point goes, this would somehow drive Israel into the arms of some other country—Russia or China, take your pick. Never mind the fact that this makes no sense and Israel, by its officials’ own admission, could not operate without US weapons, munitions, and parts for more than a couple of weeks, and completely switching over their military would take years to implement, thus leaving Israel open to attack from Iran and Yemen. It’s a talking point as old as injustice itself. The idea that a country must continue doing Bad Thing X because if they don’t someone else will—aside from being the moral logic of a drug dealer hanging outside of a middle school—was popular during debates over the abolition of slavery in the 1780s. As Adam Hochschild wrote in his 2005 book about the British abolitionist movement, Bury the Chains, “If Britain were to give up the trade,” pro-slavey MPs asked, “wouldn’t France simply take over the business?” To which anti-slavery advocate William Wilberforce responded, “For those who argue thus may argue equally, that we may rob, murder, and commit any crime, which any one else would have committed, if we did not.”
Israel, we are led to believe, has no existential issues nor is it engaged in a project of displacement and extermination, but has simply fallen in with the wrong crowd and needs a nudge in the right direction.
If our “friend” is committing a genocide, the idea that we have to keep arming and funding said genocide without conditions indefinitely, lest this “friend” go somewhere else to help arm and fund the genocide, is almost a parody of self-serving sophistry. It’s a justification, as Wilberforce noted 250 years ago, that could be used to justify literally any crime. It’s not a clever insider strategy—it’s obvious post-facto ass-covering, jangling keys in front of liberals impressed by appeals to faux-Savvy Insiderism.
- The One Bad Man Theory
As I laid out in my Substack two weeks ago, a popular deflection—even among more progressive, deeper critics of Israel such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna—is asserting that the primary driver of the mass death in Gaza isn’t US and Israeli elites, or the Israeli population, but One Bad Man: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While perhaps poll testing better than criticisms of “Israel,” the One Bad Man Theory smuggles in the false premise that if only Israel could reform itself, and get rid of Netanyahu, they could effectively self-reform their way into a kinder-gentler “war on Hamas.”
But as I note in my piece, this is a convenient fiction. Polls show that
- 68% of Israelis want zero aid entering Gaza.
- One April 2024 Pew Poll showed that only 4% of Jewish Israelis believe that Netanyahu has “gone too far” in Gaza, and 34% of Israelis (including Palestinian citizens of Israel, so the number is likely much higher) say he had “not gone far enough.” By that time, over 35,000 Palestinians had been killed.
- The primary line of criticism from Netanyahu’s political opposition over the past few months, in addition to corruption charges totally unrelated to Gaza, is that Netanyahu refuses to expand the military draft to Israel’s ultra-orthodox communities. In April of this year, former Premier Naftali Bennett lambasted Netanyahu not for his backing of genocide, but his policy of “preventing the military enlistment of the ultra-Orthodox,” saying it was keeping Israel in a stalemate with Hamas in Gaza. “The stagnation in Gaza stems directly from government policy that deprives the IDF of the main tool required for victory: fighters,” said Bennett, who the Times Of Israel said was “widely seen as gunning to replace Netanyahu.”
- A survey conducted by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University and published in Haaretz in May found that 56% of Jewish Israelis supported the “transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” Respondents were asked whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, “when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants.” Nearly half—47%—agreed.
- According to another poll from the Israel Democracy Institute, conducted at the end of July, a vast majority of Israeli Jews—79%—say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
The work being done by the One Bad Man Theory—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—is promoting the idea that the West, and the US in particular, need not put significant pressure on Israel because Israel is somehow always about to reform itself. It’s true there is a movement, and broad nominal support, for “a hostage deal” within Israel, but the awkward reality is that most Israeli liberals want such a deal, then they want to go back to the genocide. Obscuring this central fact does nothing but buy Israel time. It blunts calls to stop sending arms and cut off Israel’s economy by giving liberal-leaning Americans the false impression that the genocide is the work of One Bad Man “dragging it out for political gain,” rather than the broad political consensus in Israel supported by both Netanyahu and his primary political rivals.
- The Palestinian State Non Sequitur/Two-State Delusion
A timeless classic of the genre, appeals to support an alleged “Palestinian state,” remain the quintessence of meaningless liberal busywork, a superficially progressive way of backing an ongoing genocide while gesturing towards some liberatory or just future in a far-off time after Hamas has “been eliminated” (e.g. after the genocide). One may see the Israeli right melt down over recognition of Palestinian statehood, including recent threats to do so by the UK, Canada, and France, but this is mostly theater from ideological fanatics. Liberals know full well the utility of this posture, and understand that, as Felix Biederman put it, it’s little more than a “preemptive land acknowledgement.”
Then there’s the pesky reality that virtually no Western liberal supporting a “Palestinian state” ever defines what it means. In the rare case that they do, one gets some version of a state in name only—a “Palestine” divided into several noncontiguous territories, no armed defense, no bilateral treaties, total fidelity to Israeli-US security architecture and, of course, no real independence. When pressed for specifics, Western liberals can punt to an equally nebulous “peace process” where such matters, we are assured, would be sorted out. While this alleged process is supposedly sought, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza can continue unabated and with the full backing of the liberal establishment. One can support continued arms sales to Israel and its manifestly unjust policies so long as there’s a vaguely aspirational Palestinian state thingamajig and a high-minded “process” to sort it all out—a far-off goal that has zero bearing on the actual facts on the ground.
The market for these fake criticisms of Israel cannot be overstated. As Israel’s genocide explicitly reaches the stage of full blown depopulation and mass starvation, Pro-Israel Democrats are going to create increasingly elaborate, convoluted and exotic workarounds to avoid supporting a full, unconditional arms embagro on Israel not just to “send a message of aid,” but to end its bombing and siege once and for all. There will be a buyer’s market for pseudo-criticisms, limited hangouts, non sequiturs, and increasingly dubious attempts to sell liberal voters on the “bear hug”‘ explanation for why they backed genocide nonstop for two years. Being able to identify these faux critiques will be essential not just to suss out empty busywork, but to push for accountability for ambitious Democrats who think they can just double speak and vibe their way past their support for the destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.