(Daily Caller) A who’s-who of Obama administration alumni are seemingly behind a concerted push to drive a wedge between President Joe Biden and Israel.
For weeks, stories of chaos across the nation’s college campuses dominated the media. Anti-Israel protestors set up encampments, ignored charges of trespassing and ripped down the American flag to replace it with the Palestinian flag, all to protest the United States’ pro-Israel stance in the country’s war against Hamas. Recent reporting by Tablet Magazine, as well as public statements from former White House officials, reveal that members of the Obama administration are stoking the flames of anti-Israel sentiment in the Democratic Party, exacerbating a headache for Biden.
During the chaos, Biden avoided the press for nine days before publicly stating that the protests were not influencing his policy. But the damage was done, and some began to question the president’s commitment to Israel.
“I think by forcing Biden to this dilemma, the outside folks are in practice hurting him,” a former Trump administration official, granted anonymity in order to speak freely about the matter, told the Daily Caller. “They probably don’t view it that way. They probably view themselves as being trying to be advocates for certain anti-Israel policies. But the net effect of it is, yes, they are undermining Biden by sort of railing against him on this wedge issue.”
Tablet identified several organizations, like Students for Justice in Palestine, that have had their hand in backing the students and individuals protesting. The magazine named financial backers like the WESPAC Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund among the groups that are funding the activist organizations on the ground. The WESPAC Foundation and Within Our Lifetime (WOL), an anti-Israel group, have received significant donations from the Tides Foundation, a major progressive dark money group.
“Indeed, scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides’ involvement somewhere. The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), which organized an illegal blockade of the Port of Tacoma in November and an anti-Israel walkout of high school students in San Francisco—where AROC contracts with the unified public school district—is a fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center,” the Tablet piece read.
One less-talked-about phenomenon Tablet identified is the prominence of Obama administration alumni at these organizations.
Dylan Orr, a board member of Tides, was a part of the Obama administration, working in the Department of Labor. Cheryl Alston, another board member of Tides, was previously appointed to the advisory committee of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation by Obama, where she sat for two years. Former secretary of the Tides board, Suzanne Nossel, was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations in the Obama State Department.
“I think there was a time in the party’s history – early in the Obama years – when there was a Clinton Democrat and an Obama Democrat, with the former considered to be more hawkish and centrist. But by the time the Clinton Democrats graduated from Obama U, that distinction had become harder to discern,” Richard Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Caller. “And the merger was completed during the Trump years as they coalesced in defense of the Obama foreign policy legacy of cozying up to Iran and undermining Israel.”
The Obama-protest ties run deeper.
Tim Wang, another board member of Tides, is a managing partner at Westley Group, which was founded by Steve Westley, Tablet noted. Westley was the former California co-chair of Obama for America.
