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Hiring Pro-Hamas Aide Completes Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Israel Pivot

Warren’s targeting of GOP fundraiser Elliot Broidy is just the latest episode in the senator’s move to embrace the anti-Israel left.

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Last week, Democrat 2020 hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted triumphantly about her role in pressing the Department of Justice to investigate a prominent Donald Trump donor and longtime supporter of pro-Israel causes in America.

Warren’s targeting of GOP fundraiser Elliot Broidy is just the latest episode in the senator’s move to embrace the anti-Israel left, to help establish and cement her bona fides with far-left progressives who’ve come to see the destruction of the Jewish state as a non-negotiable cause. Warren’s move tolls warning bells of what we might come to expect from other 2020 candidates eager to appeal to their far-left base. Warren has been itching to prove her anti-Israel chops among the progressives, and it would appear Broidy offers a convenient vehicle for just that.

But harassing prominent Republican donors isn’t the only ingredient needed for completing Warren’s anti-Israel pivot. As Jordan Schactel of The Daily Wire pointed out, Warren’s recent moves follow a linear trend that the 2020 hopeful has been following since she first boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in 2015. She was a vocal critic of the embassy move and recognition of Israel’s capital in 2017 and joined Bernie Sanders in chastising Israel during the March 2018 Gaza protests without one critique of Hamas, despite Hamas’ role in orchestrating the protests.

Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon reported that Warren recently hired anti-Israel radical Max Berger, who helped to found the IfNotNow organization, a group that has devoted itself to damaging Israel’s reputation in America under the guise of seeking an end to Israel’s “occupation” of Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem.

In doing so, IfNotNow routinely ignores Palestinian terrorism against Jews, promotes the “scholarship” of noted terrorist spokespersons, and even harasses young Jews attending Birthright trips. Berger’s co-founder, Simone Zimmerman, previously served as the Jewish outreach coordinator for Bernie Sanders, until she was fired for writing a profanity-filled Facebook post directed at Benjamin Netanyahu.

Like Zimmerman, Berger has a unsavory social media past. In 2013, he posted on Twitter that he “would totally be friends with Hamas,” the Sunni Islamist fundamentalist group that engages in terror attacks against Jews in Israel and openly advocates for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Given the objectives of the IfNotNow organization, Berger’s professedly warm stance towards Hamas is unsurprising. Berger has also been accused of fabricating sensational stories about his own Birthright trip in order to demonize the organization, which funds trips to Israel for thousands of Jews each year. His dishonest hackery would cause a typical candidate pause. But not Warren.

Warren’s failure to comment on Berger’s support for anti-Semitic terrorists reveals a watershed moment in Warren’s campaign. To speak is an act, but in the world of campaigns, to remain silent may require equal deliberation. It seems here is no exception.

It is likely Warren sees an opportunity to remain silent about Berger as a way of offering tacit support to the far-left, anti-Israel progressives of her base. Unlike her attack on Broidy, which required Warren to go on the offensive, here she is able to shore up support from radical anti-Israel groups by simply saying nothing.

Those curious about the direction of the Democratic Party on Israel need not look any further than Warren’s campaign for a blueprint of the anti-Israel pivot. In 2014, Warren defended the right of the Israeli military to shoot at rocket launchers in self-defense against Hamas, even if Hamas placed those rocket launchers in Palestinian hospitals and schools. Now she is hiring those who admire Hamas.

It isn’t a particular secret that the Democratic Party has struggled to quell the rising anti-Israel sentiment percolating within it. Warren’s gradual shift offers a roadmap for those wondering how quickly (and dramatically) a traditionally pro-Israel Democrat can make the progressive anti-Zionist swivel. The answer, it seems, is a mere five years.