San Francisco 

The primary season has so far offered liberal Zionists a measure of reassurance. In several key contests — most notably Daniel Biss in Illinois — candidates have succeeded by hewing to a familiar line: criticizing AIPAC’s heavy-handed spending without adopting the activist Left’s language on Palestine. For many Democrats, this points to an emerging equilibrium — a party still willing to rally behind recognizably liberal Zionist candidates, even as its internal debate sharpens.

But that wasn’t the impression inside San Francisco’s cavernous Sydney Goldstein Theater on Tuesday night, where an eclectic cross-section of the city’s Democrats gathered for the largest debate yet in the race to replace the retiring Nancy Pelosi.

Outside, a loud contingent of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were gathered to denounce State Senator Scott Wiener, a frontrunner in the race. In many ways, he’s an ideal test case for the liberal Zionist position: like Biss, he’s Jewish, has disavowed AIPAC, and is — on all salient domestic issues — a dependable progressive, yet he remains within that tradition’s orthodoxies in resisting BDS and the Block the Bombs Act. That has left him hemorrhaging support over Israel and Palestine, an issue where his main rival, former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti, has advanced a more uncompromising position.

The issue has dogged Wiener for months. At an earlier debate, Wiener, to loud jeers, declined to call Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide, and was barely permitted to finish his final remarks over the din of pro-Palestine hecklers. As the clip of his non-response ricocheted online, he reversed himself in a lengthy video statement, saying Israel’s conduct indeed qualified as a genocide. He later resigned as co-chair of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether. By Tuesday’s debate, it transpired, Wiener had decided to stop taking audience questions — though that didn’t stop the night’s hecklers from shouting at him for refusing to call Israel an apartheid state.

Asked whether the United States should reconsider its relationship with Israel, Wiener said that what Benjamin Netanyahu’s government inflicted on Gaza had “quickly gone beyond self-defense” and produced a “catastrophic death toll”. He added that he would not support funding offensive weapons nor, in an awkward formulation, “the destruction of Palestinian communities”. Yet when the moderator pressed him on what counts as an offensive weapon, Wiener conceded that he still supported the Iron Dome, drawing hisses from the crowd. Chakrabarti, meanwhile, seized on the opening, saying he opposed funding both offensive and defensive arms to Israel, and the room broke into applause.

The exchange revealed the narrowing space Wiener is trying to occupy. After all, liberal Zionism permits moral criticism of Israel while stopping short of the political conclusions such criticism would ordinarily entail. That leaves its adherents unable to embrace the full political consequences the activist Left demands, or to persuade progressive critics that they ever will.

As Democrats look toward 2028, they are still searching for an equilibrium on Israel — and gauging how far a pro-Palestinian, Omnicause politics has penetrated the party’s mainstream. The idea of AIPAC as a malign lobbying force is now largely settled within the coalition, with leading candidates promising to reject funding from the group. What this year’s primaries have yet to resolve is whether Israel itself has become a moral liability. But if there was any doubt as to whether liberal Zionism, in its J Street-inflected form, can remain viable on the Left, these races suggest that may no longer be possible inside an increasingly militant Democratic Party.