Politics

The DNC is meeting — and Israel is at the forefront once again

Published

2 months ago

April 9, 2026

Democrats’ internal feud over Israel is rearing its head on the party’s biggest stage — again.

Critics of Israel’s military actions and the pro-Israel lobby’s interference in recent Democratic primaries are setting up thorny test votes at the Democratic National Committee’s spring meeting in New Orleans on Thursday, where members will debate resolutions recognizing a Palestinian state, conditioning military aid to Israel and condemning the “growing influence” of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other dark-money groups.

The measures before the DNC’s resolutions committee are unlikely to pass and are nonbinding even if they do. But they are the latest public clash that will pit more pro-Israel party brass against a base whose views on Israel have turned sharply negative and progressive activists who are increasingly incensed by the glut of special-interest spending in Democratic primaries that is often directed against their candidates.

In a sign of the heightened sensitivity around the politics of Israel, one DNC member who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations said they had received direct calls about the resolutions from two presidential aspirants who would have to answer for the DNC’s positions on Israel and AIPAC if they run. The resolutions are also highlighting sharp divisions within the task force DNC Chair Ken Martin established last year to set the party’s strategy on the Middle East — a committee that remains in early stages and is far from formalizing an agenda.

James Zogby — a longtime DNC member and critic of Israel who is president of the Arab American Institute and who sits on Martin’s Middle East Working Group — said the party needs to wake up to voters’ shifting views on Israel.

“Public opinion has shifted. Democrats have clearly shifted. Candidates have shifted. And we’re not where we were five years ago even,” Zogby said. “We have to avoid the mistakes that we’ve been making, which simply show us to be unwilling to accept or unable to accept the political realities.”

A Pew Research survey released this week showed 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold unfavorable views of Israel, up from 69 percent last year and 53 percent in 2022. A NBC News poll conducted in late February and early March, meanwhile, found that 57 percent of Democrats view Israel negatively, a dramatic change from when just 35 percent held a negative view of the country after Hamas attacked it on Oct. 7, 2023.

“The Democratic Party, time and time again, is presented with absolutely winning issues,” said Allison Minnerly, a DNC member from Florida who submitted the resolution criticizing AIPAC and corporate-aligned spending, and who unsuccessfully pushed another last year calling for an arms embargo on Israel. “People 1) hate corporate money and 2) do not want to be involved in further conflict in the Middle East.”

But Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which is against the current measures, said the increasing critiques of the Israeli government by prominent elected officials “doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a wholesale shift in support for Israel’s security or its right to exist as a Jewish state.” Soifer, a former Kamala Harris adviser whose group has opposed similar efforts before the DNC in the past, cast the latest batch of foreign-policy resolutions as a “distraction” for a party that’s showing early success in the midterms by honing in on domestic issues.

The DNC and a spokesperson for AIPAC declined to comment.

Democrats have been here before. The party conducted a 2024 autopsy that found its approach to Gaza hurt the top of the ticket — then decided not to release it publicly.

At the party’s meeting in Minneapolis last summer, Minnerly’s weapons ban failed, while Martin yanked his measure calling for “unrestricted” aid to Gaza and a two-state solution after it passed in favor of creating the task force to advance “solutions” to the party’s divide.

The Middle East Working Group is slated for its fourth meeting this week in New Orleans. Some members lamented to Blue Light News that the group lacked structure and any real institutional power. And they disagree on how best to approach their mission.

Joe Salas, a member of the working group from California, believes that Gaza was “one of the things that lost us the White House” in 2024 and is urging the party to adjust its response. He put forward the resolution recognizing the “State of Palestine” and pausing or conditioning weapons transfers to “any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance,” telling Blue Light News he hoped it would serve as a guidepost for the task force.

But Andrew Lachman, another task force member and the past president of the California Jewish Democrats, said he doesn’t want to see members of the group trying to “undermine the work of the commission” by pushing catchall resolutions that could bigfoot its efforts.

“It would be much better for us to try to find ways for us to work together as a party, to stand together against these wars, than engaging in this kind of approach,” he said.

The resolutions have also set off a fresh round of lobbying among interest groups. IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian group, sent members a memo on Wednesday urging them to pass the measures.

“The signs are growing that the gap between Democratic leadership and their voters on this issue will be a liability in 2026 unless serious action is taken,” the group warned in its memo, a copy of which was shared with Blue Light News.

Politics

Kennedy and Wright cheer on US

Published

29 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The U.S. delegation in Seattle includes HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to a FIFA official, along with White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were among those who attended the U.S.’ first match, against Paraguay.

Politics

The politician who kicked his way to power

Published

59 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.

Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.

The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.

The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.

The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.

Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)

Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.

Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”

Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.

Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.

Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.

Politics

The US-Australia face-off that isn’t happening

Published

1 hour ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Who’s not here at Seattle’s Lumen Field for the Pacific Rim face-off between the United States and Australia?

If they’re following the match, the two countries’ elected heads — President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — are doing so from afar.