Dershowitz: Lieberman Warned Anti-Israel Democrats

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Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, hours before his fatal fall on Tuesday, was completing a statement that he and Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School professor emeritus, were writing about Israel, the Democratic Party, and the 2024 election.

Dershowitz, in a Thursday column for The Wall Street Journal, said the statement warned the campaign of President Joe Biden that it can no longer count on the support of pro-Israel Jewish voters if it turned against Israel.

“Here is the statement, as edited by Joe at 2:35 p.m. the day before he died,” Dershowitz wrote. “We all want to see support for Israel in the U.S. remain bipartisan which is why we appreciated President Biden’s statements in the wake of the October 7 Hamas barbarisms. We believe that Israel must be allowed to achieve its legitimate goal of disabling Hamas from keeping its promise of repeating the massacres of October 7th.

“More recently however we have become concerned about what appears to be a weakening of support for Israel by President Biden, Vice President (Kamala) Harris and some other leading Democrats. We are especially concerned about the possibility that some of this weakening may be influenced by domestic political fears of losing electoral support from anti-Israel voters who have threatened to stay home unless the Biden administration pulls away from Israel. There appears to be too little concern about losing the support of pro-Israel voters.

“We are here to say that you can no longer simply count on our vote just because Jews traditionally have voted Democratic. We are here to say you must earn our vote. We want to continue to support Democratic candidates, but you need to know that if you abandon Israel in order to garner the support of anti-Israel extremists within the Democratic Party, it will be difficult for us to support Democrats who are on the ballot this November. Pro-Israel voters have alternatives to simply staying home. None of us can or will vote for any candidate who supports cutting military support for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. So please, do the right thing. Do not abandon Israel and its time of great need. And we will not abandon you.”

Dershowitz noted that the statement was planned to be spread among prominent pro-Israel Democrats and sent to the White House in a public release.

“Its goal was to make it clear that if domestic political considerations — the so-called two state solution, meaning Michigan and Minnesota — were influencing the administration’s change of attitude toward Israel, there would be a domestic political price to pay for such a change,” Dershowitz said.

He noted that Lieberman’s death won’t put an end to the campaign to keep support for Israel a bipartisan issue.

“Joe believed in this to the depths of his being,” Dershowitz said. “And those of us who were working with him to send this message will continue this campaign in his memory.”