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Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, wasted no time answering whether an antisemitism problem exists in the Democratic Party.
“There is,” McMorrow answered bluntly at a debate Senate debate on Thursday.
“At the Democratic convention, an attendee yelled an antisemitic slur at my husband, who is Jewish and was walking with my 5-year-old daughter. That is terrifying,” McMorrow said.
Amid a tight, three-way Senate primary, McMorrow’s answer definitively reveals her stance on a question that’s steadily grown in recent years: whether the Democratic Party has positioned itself as more than just a critic of Israel’s government and, instead, provides a forum for disdain of the Jewish people themselves.
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A number of progressive Democratic figures have grown increasingly skeptical — and vocal — on the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Most notably, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-declared socialist, has questioned whether the U.S. should align itself with Israel in the wake of its war with Hamas in Gaza, citing humanitarian concerns.
The criticisms aren’t contained to New York.
Democrats in Congress, such as Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sens. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., are among a growing portion of the party that have called for a re-evaluation of U.S. support for the Jewish state amid conflicts in the Middle East.
Notably, Abdul El-Sayed, one of McMorrow’s Senate primary challengers, has called Jewish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal” and said he believes the Israeli government is “evil.”
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McMorrow, who has positioned herself as a middle-of-the-road candidate between critic El-Sayed and the more establishment-friendly Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., clarified that her criticisms of the party doesn’t mean she’s entirely aligned with the current U.S. posture toward Israel, either.
“We need to be able to state very clearly that what the Netanyahu government is doing — that the violence needs to end,” McMorrow said.
When asked if she would support U.S. aid to Israel, McMorrow said she would have voted for a recent resolution proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that would have blocked the sale of U.S. arms.
McMorrow added that she believes Democrats need to be careful to ensure their rhetoric is narrowly tailored to Israel as a state and not the Jewish people in the U.S.
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“We need to bring about long-term peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis. And turning that into not an anti-Netanyahu, but an anti-American Jewish message is dangerous,” McMorrow said.
Her comments were met with applause.
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