There was a time when Ro Khanna boasted of “working with the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC to build ties between the Indo American and pro-Israel communities.” Gavin Newsom, as recently as last year, proclaimed his “deep reverence” for Israel. JB Pritzker even served on the board of AIPAC.

Now Khanna, a progressive California congressman, proudly calls the war in Gaza a genocide and refuses AIPAC dollars. Newsom, the California governor, recently called Israel an apartheid state and said he won’t take AIPAC donations either. Pritzker, who is Jewish, voiced support for a Senate resolution that would have blocked American arms sales to Israel.

What is becoming clear is that the 2028 Democratic primary for the presidency — still, in many respects, embryonic — will not look like any other in the modern era when it comes to how the candidates talk about Israel and the rest of the Middle East. Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran and the carnage from the war in Gaza have dramatically reshaped how the American left approaches Israel. A new NBC poll showed a stunning 57 percent of Democrats now take a negative view of Israel. Just 17 percent of Democrats sympathize with Israel in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Before then, various other surveys have found younger voters souring on the Jewish state while the smashing mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim democratic socialist, demonstrated it was possible for a pro-Palestine politician to win over an electorate with a large Jewish bloc.

The potential Democratic contenders are in the process of recalibrating — growing more emboldened in their Israel criticism and considering positions that were once taboo. For some, this is less of a surprise. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for president, she’ll be the furthest left of the leading contenders. Though activists initially challenged her for not labeling the war in Gaza a genocide quickly enough, she has since been one the most vocal pro-Palestine voices in Congress, calling Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal” and co-sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act in the House. She did take heat from the left for voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, but if she ran in 2028, she’d have every incentive to pivot further left. Trump’s unconditional support for Israel, especially in the war with Iran, has polarized left-leaning voters even more against the Jewish state, and AOC would need every last one of them to win the nomination.

Among the Democrats most likely to run for president, Israel could end up a genuine fault line. Though Newsom has grown increasingly critical of Netanyahu’s government, he has been, as Richard Yeselson recently pointed out, more than willing to crack down on the pro-Palestine movement within his own state. He signed a law to effectively strangle the demonstrations at universities and backed another law last year to investigate claims of antisemitism in California public schools — a law that is likely to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

In this way, he is much more aligned with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, another Democrat who will be running for president. Shapiro, who is Jewish, would represent the more hawkish elements of his party in the primary. A volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces in college, Shapiro refused to call for a unilateral cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war following the October 7 attacks and cracked down, when he could, on pro-Palestine protests at universities in Pennsylvania. Shapiro, come 2027 and 2028, will be fascinating to watch, because he is both a strong supporter of Israel and a canny political operator. He knows how to read polls. He will probably not pivot as hard away from Israel as Newsom — he rejects the use of “apartheid” and strongly implied, in a recent podcast interview, such a word was not “rooted in reality” — but he is not going to sound like Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz, either. Even as the hawk of the primary, he may be willing, at minimum, to offer mild criticism of Netanyahu.

If there is one candidate who could be the version of Nixon going to China for pro-Israel Democrats, it’s Pritzker. He’s a progressive billionaire who cannot be credibly accused of not supporting Israel. He doesn’t have to swear off AIPAC dollars because he doesn’t need them in the first place. He’s plenty capable of self-funding or turning to other liberal donors who appreciate his willingness to confront President Trump. Pritzker, unlike Newsom and Shapiro, did not implement any new laws to suppress the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel campus protests. In a recent podcast appearance, the Illinois governor was more explicit about the cause of Palestinian rights than he had been in the past, declaring that, as a Jew committed to upholding the values of social justice, “I have to apply that equally to the state of Israel as I do to other countries that have committed atrocities.”

It will probably be up to prominent Jewish Democrats like Pritzker to move the needle, the way Bernie Sanders, a Zionist who lived on a kibbutz in the 1960s, shattered a political taboo by speaking up about Palestinian suffering during the 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton. Clinton, at the time, delivered speeches at AIPAC conferences like most mainstream Democrats and defended Israel almost unconditionally. Sanders notably did not. While the Vermont senator did not win the primary, his stance on Israel then —“In the long run, if we are ever going to bring peace to that region, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity” — was a harbinger of what was to come for the American left.

There are no longer any political incentives for an ambitious Democrat with presidential aspirations to be overly pro-Israel. The John Fetterman approach is not only a moral dead end but a political one — even Shapiro knows this, looking on as his fellow Pennsylvanian confronts the likelihood of lasting in Washington just a single term. Fetterman doesn’t have any acolytes in the Democratic Party. The 2028 Democrats won’t be anti-Zionist or even overly pro-Palestine — the activist class may still be dissatisfied — but they will be far more skeptical of Israel than any we’ve seen in many, many decades. The hawks, in that sense, have already lost.

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2028 presidential election

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