At its meeting this week, the DNC opposed a ban on U.S. provision of offensive weapons to Israel.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****AUGUST 28, 2025****

**On the

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****Meyerson on TAP****

**The idiocy (both moral and strategic) of the Democratic National Committee**

**At its meeting this week, the DNC opposed a ban on U.S. provision of offensive weapons to Israel.**

We’ve been here before: widespread Democratic opposition to an outrageous war, particularly among the young, while a good chunk of the party’s establishment remains unwilling to halt U.S. involvement in that conflict. In the ’60s, that was Vietnam. Today, it’s Gaza.

Echoes of that rift were loud and clear at this week’s meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis. There, on Tuesday, the party’s Resolutions Committee voted against bringing to the floor a motion to put the Democrats on record as opposing the continuing provision of arms to Israel to wage its war of extirpation. It did vote for a resolution essentially restating the Biden administration’s position on the war: calling for a two-state solution, for the release of hostages, for an end to the conflict. That resolution said nothing, however, about America’s ongoing provision of the arms with which the Netanyahu government is waging its war.

The resolution that was adopted was authored by DNC Chair Ken Martin. The one that was squelched was authored by Allison Minnerly, a 26-year-old DNC member from Florida who’s a voter mobilization organizer. Her resolution was backed by most of the DNC’s young members, including the leaders of the College Democrats of America and the High School Democrats of America.

During the committee’s Tuesday meeting, proponents of Minnerly’s resolution offered amendments that would have made it more acceptable to a majority of DNC members, in particular one that specified the weapons ban would apply only to offensive weapons (and not, therefore, to defensive weapons like Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile deployments). That effectively would have conformed her resolution to the one that Bernie Sanders brought to the floor of the Senate last month, which failed in the face of unanimous Republican opposition, but which did win the support of a majority of Senate Democrats, who voted for it by a 27-to-17 margin.

Yet supporters of Martin’s resolution also **voted against** [link removed] that amendment, fearing that so amended, the Minnerly resolution then might prevail if it reached the floor in Wednesday’s general meeting. That the resolution’s supporters on the committee voted for the amendment showed their eagerness to amend their initial position, if by so doing they could bring the party establishment around to the position of the party base: A Gallup **poll** [link removed] from late July showed just 8 percent of Democrats backed Israel’s war on Gaza, while a Quinnipiac **poll** [link removed] released just yesterday showed that Democrats opposed, by a 75 percent to 18 percent margin, the U.S. sending more military aid to Israel for its war.

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Martin apparently understood he was hurling the party into an abyss if he then brought his own resolution to the floor. Instead, he withdrew it, and had a five-minute impromptu meeting with Minnerly, in which he agreed to form a commission to devise a party stance that presumably reflects more of a consensus. Minnerly welcomed his proposal, hoping, as she told me, that the commission would come up with something more reflective of the view of the “everyday people” who fill the party’s ranks.

If we go back 60 years, we can find the same generational dynamics playing out. It was in 1965 that Lyndon Johnson began deploying massive numbers of U.S. troops to Vietnam, a move that initially had the backing of the majority of Democrats. As nightly TV news reporting, however, began revealing the actual shape of our war there—the wanton destruction of villages, the cascading number of civilian casualties—young Americans turned against the conflict. Their ranks weren’t limited to the radicals of SDS (who, in 1965, weren’t really all that radical). That year also saw the first Democratic organization come out against the war: the California Young Democrats, headed at that time by two UCLA Law School students, Henry Waxman and Howard Berman, both later to become nationally important Democratic congressmen. Opposition to the war grew among the young to the point that it came to define their generation against their elders. Within the ranks of Democratic activists, it was the young who not only demonstrated against the war but also walked the precincts and worked the phone banks for anti-war Democratic presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972.

Not that Democratic opposition to that war was confined to the young, just as Democratic opposition to the Gaza war is also not limited to today’s Gen Zers. That said, opposition to U.S. support for Netanyahu’s war is becoming a defining issue for young Americans, with support for the war waning even among younger Republicans. With half a million Israelis now regularly taking to the streets to oppose Bibi’s drive to flatten Gaza completely, despite the insistence of Israel’s leading generals that Hamas has been defeated, and despite the threat his new offensive poses to the remaining Israeli hostages, the argument that continuing to supply offensive arms to Israel expresses our solidarity with that nation is increasingly belied by the Israeli people themselves, sick as they are by now of Bibi’s bloodfest. Today, our arms provisions have become an expression of solidarity only with the murderous ultra-nationalist right-wing Israeli cabinet members whose support Bibi dare not lose.

The most politically sentient Democratic leaders—like those 27 Democratic senators—appear to have grasped both the moral obloquy of sending arms to these fanatics and the strategic idiocy of alienating their own party’s base, and most particularly of forcing young Democrats to define themselves in opposition to the party’s already embattled establishment. Whether such political sentience can be brought to the numbnuts on the Democratic National Committee is anybody’s guess.

**~ HAROLD MEYERSON**

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