Senator Bernie Sanders. Photo: Nick Solari via Wikimedia Commons.

“In the warmest of human hearts,” the socialist Irving Howe once wrote, “there is always a cold spot for the Jews.” The plans which socialist Bernie Sanders and more-than-socialist Elizabeth Warren have just set forth for resolving the Israel-Palestine “conflict” demonstrate that, in their view, Jews have not done enough dying in the past century.

The plans certainly give no evidence of compassion for the three generations of Israelis who have had to bury their own children. No, their compassion is reserved, in Sanders’ case, for the Arab residents of Gaza, ruled by the Hamas organization, whose written constitution pledges its votaries to “kill Jews wherever you find them,” and who use the billions of dollars sent them by charitable organizations to achieve that aim.

Sanders wants America to send funds intended for Israel to Gaza so its rulers will have money to pay for electricity and groceries, lest they be forced to divert the fabulous sums of money they now receive for more sanguine purposes, especially underground tunnels into Israel to perpetrate raw murder.

Warren, less patient than Sanders, would like to give the Palestinian Arabs joint control of the city of Jerusalem so that they can plant their “capital” city in Israel’s capital. The Arabs never, in their long history in the region, thought of making Jerusalem even the capital of a province. But when their war of 1948 against the nascent Jewish state gave the Jordanians half of the city, they showed, apparently unbeknownst to Warren, what happens in such an arrangement: they proceeded to destroy the synagogues, the cemeteries, the holy places, and the Jewish inhabitants of their half with a savagery that would have shamed animals.

Since in this enterprise of Middle East peacemaking, nothing succeeds like failure, the Palestinians were again, in later years, offered control of eastern Jerusalem by Ehud Barak and other Israeli doves, but to no avail.

It is no accident that Senators Sanders and Warren should offer their pro-Arab peace schemes, brimming with repudiation of their party’s long-standing political and spiritual bond with the Jewish people, at just this time.

They too, like the majority of their colleagues, have trembled at the way in which the squalid antisemitic outbursts of the Democratic party’s numerically tiny “squad” of four have gone both uncondemned and unrepudiated by the party’s leadership, including its pathetic Jewish contingent. How better to placate this ferocious quartet than by offering up a presidential candidate who will put the Jews in their place?

Edward Alexander is author of Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew.