Democrats are engulfed in behind-the-scenes battles over Israel’s war against Hamas, as leftist staffers in both the Democratic National Committee and the State Department voice increasingly strident demands for a cease-fire — threatening to tear the party asunder amid President Biden’s re-election effort.
“The president centered his 2020 campaign on a ‘Battle for the Soul of the Nation,’ but it seems as though the administration is currently in a battle for its own soul,” an unnamed DNC official told Axios Saturday.
“I don’t know how you can see supporting the large-scale killing of Palestinian civilians as anything but immoral,” the official said.
“This promises to be a long, grueling campaign, and the president is making it even harder” by supporting Israel, another party leader grumbled.
On Friday, 51 DNC staffers signed on to an open letter demanding that party leaders push Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the Huffington Post reported.
“As strategic partners to the administration… we feel it is the DNC’s moral obligation to urge President Biden to publicly call for a ceasefire,” the employees, who make up more than 15% of the party’s fundraisers and campaign organizers, wrote.
“I think a lot of us feel it’s increasingly hard to focus on our work,” said one of the signers.
The divide is mainly between young pro-Palestine progressives and older Dems who sympathize with Israel, the staffers said — echoing the internal clashes over the Vietnam War that derailed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election in 1968.
The DNC staffers’ letter came one day after Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin became the first senator to demand a halt in Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terror group.
Biden has not called for an Israeli cease-fire, only for a “pause” in the fighting to “give time to get the prisoners out.”
Meanwhile, a career State Department officer has publicly bashed Biden repeatedly on X, accusing him of being “complicit in genocide.”
“Your rhetoric and approach from day one has resulted in the deaths of thousands,” foreign affairs officer Sylvia Yacoub posted to Biden on Oct. 30, the Washington Free Beacon reported — one of more than a half-dozen social media screeds she has lobbed at her ultimate boss since the Israel-Hamas war began last month.
“There is so much blood on your hands.”
Yacoub, a former Obama Foundation associate and an organizer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, has since locked down her account.