Former Obama administration officials Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor took to social media over the weekend to attack Israel and slam the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, asking how it’s possible to “trust Democrats to fight for anything” if they take money from the pro-Israel lobby group. 

The anti-Israel activism from the Democratic influencers is a public example of the intense lobbying taking place in party circles and how progressive foreign policy officials such as Rhodes who have long been deeply critical of Israel are pushing to turn humanitarian concerns in Gaza into a more permanent split between the Democratic Party and Israel.

They’ve especially directed their ire at AIPAC, which played a key role in Democrats electing some moderate candidates supportive of a close U.S.-Israel alliance to office last year. 

The left-wing commentators who host a weekly foreign policy podcast, “Pod Save the World,” decried AIPAC for a post on X where the organization said that “food, medicine and aid are IN Gaza. The @UN won’t distribute it.” 

Rhodes said AIPAC is “spreading lies. The Israeli government is starving Palestinians and everyone knows it. How can we trust Democrats to fight for anything if they take money from people who lie like this about starving kids,” the former Obama deputy national security advisor posted on Friday.

Vietor, a former spokesman for Obama and the National Security Council, posted a recent clip from “Pod Save the World” where Rhodes said, “If you think you can continue to take money from AIPAC, whether you’re Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or whomever, AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that have delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.” 

“And you cannot give them a carveout,” Rhodes continued. “And we need to have this fight as a party because these are the wrong people to have under your tent. I’m usually a big-tent person, but the kind of people who are supporting Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I don’t want them — my leaders of my political party — like, cozying up to those people.”

During his time at the White House, Rhodes was one of Obama’s closest advisors and masterminded the public relations push behind the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He told The New York Times in 2016 that he “created an echo chamber” of experts who would feed reporters positive analyses of the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes stated.

Rhodes was a strident critic of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly earning himself the nickname of “Hamas” in the White House. In his 2019 book The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, Rhodes wrote that Israel was “driven by the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox emigres” and that Netanyahu used “political pressure within the United States to demoralize any meaningful push for peace, just as he used settlements as a means of demoralizing Palestinians.” 

As Obama’s spokesman, Vietor’s personal views on Israel were less public. Since leaving government though, he has frequently lambasted Israel on the podcast and on social media, posting earlier this month that Israel is “trying to globalize the ethnic cleansing.”

The podcast hosts were highly critical of the Biden administration for, in their view, not doing enough to pressure Israel, with Vietor calling the Democratic president’s “handling of Netanyahu” and the war in Gaza “disastrous.” 

Vietor also dismissed the recent U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as “failed,” saying that Trump and Netanyahu both lied about the success of the operation. Rhodes again took the opportunity to critique his party, saying that “Democrats afraid to stand against Trump on Iran — for fear of AIPAC or being called weak — are showing Americans that they won’t stand up for them when it’s hard.”

Rhodes told The New York Times in 2019 that “the Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class. … We’re one moment away from this changing, once someone breaks through the fear factor.”