Boston Herald

Mideast issue shows Dems out of touch

- Jeff ROBBINS

It isn’t easy being a Democrat these days. The Republican­s occupy the White House and both houses of Congress. Two thirds of the nation’s state houses are controlled by the GOP, which also controls 32 of 50 state legislatur­es.

Despite President Trump’s low approval ratings, Americans are demonstrab­ly down on Democrats. A new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that while Americans believe by a 62 percent to 32 percent margin that Republican­s are out of touch with the concerns of most people, they believe by a greater margin, 67 percent to 28 percent, that the Democrats are out of touch, too.

Democrats’ lives are further complicate­d now by Massachuse­tts party members who seem to have a death wish, and want to foist it on the rest of us.

The death wishers here are represente­d by adherents of the perfectly named group Massachuse­tts Peace Action, a fringe operation known for its untethered blather on the subject of Israel. At a meeting of the state committee tomorrow, the group is seeking to have Democrats lay the blame for the absence of Mideast peace on Israeli settlement­s.

These death wishers resemble no one more than Ralph Nader and his supporters, who were perfectly happy to make sure that George W. Bush, rather than Al Gore, was elected president in 2000. Or Jill Stein, who professed to see no material difference between having Donald Trump as president and Hillary Clinton.

The would-be party line for these local death wishers — that Israeli settlement­s are the reason for the Palestinia­n-Israel conflict — isn’t merely unbalanced. It is hooey, and it takes only the most cursory knowledge of the facts to know it.

The decadeslon­g campaign by Arabs, including Palestinia­ns, to annihilate the Jewish state predated any Israeli settlement­s. Indeed, it was the planned Arab invasion of Israel in 1967 that brought about Israeli occupation of the West Bank in the first place.

The repeated, inexplicab­le Palestinia­n refusal to accept an independen­t state — an outcome that would have ended the settlement­s that are supposedly to blame for the conflict — is the central fact which the Massachuse­tts Peace Action folks steadfastl­y disregard, and want others to as well.

When Democrats join the ranks of those who seem to believe that facts don’t matter, they do damage to their party of a kind they can ill afford. Democrats ought to be focused on enhancing their credibilit­y, not eroding it, and not forcing those who have long identified with them to contemplat­e walking away in disgust.

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