Liberal Zionism's Democratic Problem
Van Hollen's op-ed is the clearest articulation of a new Democratic position on Israel. Its contradictions show liberal Zionism becoming politically homeless inside the party itself.
There is now a senior-Democratic position on Israel that did not exist two years ago. Chris Van Hollen’s New York Times op-ed is its clearest articulation. Maryland’s senior senator, a Foreign Relations Committee member, calls for conditioning arms sales to Israel, withdrawing taxpayer support, recognizing a State of Palestine, and naming AIPAC as the obstacle in Congress. Forty Democrats voted to block a military transfer this spring — more than doubling the support of two years ago. The progressive flank’s argument has become the Senate’s argument.
Van Hollen gets a lot right. Settler violence in the West Bank is what he describes, with Israeli security forces increasingly complicit. The Smotrich-Ben Gvir wing is explicit about its goal of burying the two-state solution and is advancing de facto West Bank annexation short of formal declaration. Netanyahu has sabotaged the Palestinian Authority for almost two decades. Biden de-prioritized the file from his first month in office and failed to use the leverage he had. The AIPAC-led conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism damages the fight against antisemitism by collapsing the distinction the fight depends on.
Van Hollen’s article is trying to do two incompatible things at once. The vocabulary it reaches for — genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — belongs to a wing of the Democratic Party that has moved past two states and embraced antizionism. The prescription it ends on — recognize Palestine, broker Saudi normalization, salvage the two-state solution — belongs to a different wing that the first wing now treats as an adversary.
The piece fails most clearly at three points along the seam between these two wings of the party. The question under the seam is whether liberal Zionism remains compatible with the Democratic coalition that has historically held it.
The first is the move he makes about Gaza. Americans, he writes, do not want to be complicit in “what human rights organizations and scholars have determined to be genocide in Gaza.” Full disclosure: I do not think Israel has carried out a genocide in Gaza. The term has lost meaning. It is used now as a political weapon and a narrative tool, and the legal threshold has stopped being the point. That is exactly the move Van Hollen makes. A senator is using third-party determination as the predicate for American policy. He cites authorities who made the case instead of making it himself.
You can hold the view that Israel has conducted the war in ways that violate international law and still see what is happening. Van Hollen is borrowing a contested legal claim from the institutions that reached it. The next sentence of his paragraph cites no scholars and moves directly to policy.
His prescription does not require the genocide threshold. The war crimes case can be made from documented conduct. He reaches for the heavier word because it travels further in the wing of the party whose vocabulary he is borrowing.
The second failure is the theory of leverage. Van Hollen assumes the binding constraint on a two-state outcome is American will: apply pressure, condition arms, recognize Palestine, and the outcome unlocks. This treats Israel as a unitary actor with a predictable response to pressure, and the Palestinian side as a passive partner waiting to be acted upon. The prescription functions as a posture aimed at the same wing of the party — toughness on Israel without a theory of how toughness advances a two-state reality.
Start with Israeli politics, which Van Hollen doesn't engage. He writes about the Netanyahu government as a permanent feature of the landscape. The opposition in Israel continues to poll ahead of Netanyahu and a majority of Israelis want him to resign. The coalition is underwater on every major issue. The most plausible mechanism for the policy shift Van Hollen wants is Israeli voters replacing the government that produced the conduct he objects to. A piece on how to move Israel toward a two-state outcome that does not mention Israeli politics is incomplete.
The incentive — Saudi normalization, Abraham Accords-style integration — has done more to move Israeli politics over the past decade than coercion has. The Iranian proxy network attacked on October 7 in part because the Saudi track threatened to reshape the region in ways that would isolate it. That parallel architecture pulled Israeli politics in a direction two decades of American pressure on settlements had not. Coercion has the additional problem of hardening the coalition it is aimed at: defiance of American pressure is something the Smotrich-Ben Gvir bloc campaigns on and fundraises off. The same instrument that hardens a Netanyahu government can give a Bennett-Lapid-Eisenkot government a path it can run on. Van Hollen mentions the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative once, late. The structure of the piece is built around conditioning, withdrawing, sanctioning, even though the empirical record runs the other way.
Van Hollen conditions a Palestinian state on “free and fair elections” without naming what those elections would produce. Elections for the Palestinian National Council — the PLO parliament — are notionally scheduled for November, though Palestinian elections have been scheduled and cancelled repeatedly since 2006. The polling that would inform any prediction is itself contested — IDF documents recovered in Gaza in 2024 showed Hamas systematically inflating its own support in PCPSR surveys, with the polling firm pushing back without resolving the question. What's documented is this: Hamas controls Gaza, has not relinquished arms, and rejects the two-state framework Van Hollen wants to recognize. The PA is in year twenty-one of Abbas’s four-year term, with no clear succession plan and no elections since 2006. The most prominent figure with cross-faction appeal is Marwan Barghouti, from Fatah but imprisoned in Israel since 2002.
Van Hollen’s framework would be recognizing a configuration in which the condition he names — “free and fair elections” — cannot currently be met, because one of the two main parties controls the security environment in half the territory. And elections held under current conditions would likely strengthen Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority — the only Palestinian body that has formally accepted the two-state framework. The condition Van Hollen names would undercut the partner his prescription requires. Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005. Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s senior advisor, said at the time that the disengagement was meant to put the political process in formaldehyde, removing the Palestinian state from the agenda indefinitely. Hamas won the next election, and the infrastructure that produced October 7 followed. The case the disengagement actually makes is structural: unilateral moves executed without political infrastructure produce the worst outcomes for both sides — which is exactly what Van Hollen’s recognition framework would do without the prerequisites it requires.
Recognition without state-building is symbolic. Symbolic recognition in a security vacuum creates the next war. And Van Hollen offers no plan for the two prerequisites of any real political progress: Hamas disarmament and a strengthened, reformed PA.
The third failure is the apartheid framing — and it shows the seam most clearly. “Anyone who visits the West Bank under Israeli occupation,” Van Hollen writes, “can see an apartheid system at work.” He is reaching for a word the left of the party has made central to its case, without engaging what the word would actually require. The remedy for apartheid is one state with equal citizenship. Partition is what you do when you concede the differential structure is permanent and sort populations into separate sovereignties. Van Hollen even gestures at the contradiction when he writes that the United States may have to “consider other options to secure equal political and legal rights for all” if two states fail. But two states is what he ends on. The label and the prescription point in opposite directions, and the contradiction goes unmarked.
The two wings are now openly hostile. The vocabulary Van Hollen reaches for belongs to a wing whose framework is settler-colonialism, decolonization, one state with equal rights, right of return. For that wing, apartheid describes the whole project from 1948 forward, and genocide is the operating premise everything else builds on. The liberal Zionist position Van Hollen ends on is what they think they are fighting. Hasan Piker spent an hour last month tearing into Ilan Goldenberg — a former Middle East advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, J Street’s Senior Vice President and Chief Policy Officer, the kind of analyst whose framework sits closest to Van Hollen’s. The attack was unfair on the merits, but the choice of target was the point.
The policy Van Hollen ends on — two states, recognize Palestine on benchmarks like free and fair elections, Saudi normalization on the model of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative — belongs to a different coalition entirely. The Piker wing rejects preconditions on Palestinian sovereignty as colonial, opposes Saudi normalization as Arab governments bypassing the Palestinian cause for weapons deals, and treats Bennett-Lapid and Eisenkot as one set of colonizers replacing another.
Van Hollen is trying to use the first vocabulary to arrive at the second prescription, and the contradictions are the result. The piece works as a campaign document for a primary candidate trying to thread a needle that has been moved — and the calculation behind it is visible. Liberal Zionists in the Democratic Party are accommodating the post-two-state vocabulary because they believe accommodation is the only way to hold the party together for upcoming elections — and a party that comes apart takes their policy with it.
When I worked at Israel Policy Forum, Van Hollen was among the most responsive and engaged members of Congress on this file. I write now from Tel Aviv, watching what happens when a politics I helped advocate for becomes politically homeless inside the party that historically housed it. His party has shifted around him, and the piece carries the strain of a serious legislator trying to write through that shift.
The coherent version reverses the move: keep the prescription, match the vocabulary to it. The war crimes case can be made from documented conduct without reaching for genocide. Precise tools — targeted sanctions on settler-violence networks, unit-specific weapons conditioning tied to West Bank operations — beat broad arms restrictions that produce the rally effect the policy depends on not producing. Regional normalization, including the Saudi track, has been the leverage that actually moved Israeli politics over the past decade, and it commands wide public support in Israel. The target should be Israeli political turnover, not American policy reversal. Recognition of Palestine has to be conditioned on state-building — Hamas disarmament, PA reform, succession architecture — not on benchmarks current conditions cannot meet.
Democrats writing the post-October 7 framework have a choice this piece does not address. They can argue for a liberal Zionist remedy, defend two states on its merits, accept that the conditions for it are political and not just rhetorical, and lose the wing that has moved past that option. That is the position from which I am writing. It is the harder argument to make right now. Much of the American conversation has moved past two states. No Israeli government currently exists with an interest in a political horizon with the Palestinians. The two populations themselves are further from settlement than they have been in a generation, with political and popular confidence both collapsed. They can follow the vocabulary where it actually goes, abandon two states, and own that argument. The cost of trying to have both is the kind of piece Van Hollen just published.
Adding my voice to the chorus: excellent analysis.
Thank you Eli for doing what I cannot: read these things from start to finish.
The underlying premise of the Van Hollen Op Ed is this:
Israel was a mistake, should never have been founded, and I am going to do my best to see that the Democrats disengage from this and move towards a Middle East without this disfiguring flaw.
I do not think I'm exaggerating.
Excellent analysis from Eli Kowaz. Thank you for the clarity.