Last week, Politico ran an item about Sen. Bernie Sanders’s staff changes that contained a hint of a major progressive victory: Matt Duss, the Vermont senator’s principal foreign policy advisor “is expected to depart for a position in the Biden administration’s Department of State.” Though Politico cautioned that this decision was “not finalized” and it wasn’t clear what Duss’s role at State would be, just a whiff of his joining the administration was enough to set off a minor skirmish centered on what is likely to be the most contentious foreign policy issue of the Joe Biden era: Israel.
Why Matt Duss is so important
Duss has attracted an unusual amount of attention for a Senate staffer; in the last two years, he has been profiled by both Foreign Policy and The Nation, which described him as one of the most prominent of “a new generation of progressives who have grown up amid endless wars.” His background is unusual for a wonk. He was raised by evangelical Christian parents who taught him a deep sympathy for refugees—his father was born in a camp for displaced people in Germany and his great-grandfather was sent to a Soviet gulag. Duss came to politics relatively late in life after graduating college in his early 30s, writing his master’s thesis on one of the leaders of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq.
Duss’s focus on the Muslim world and the Middle East in particular meant he had expertise in the most prominent foreign policy debates of the 2000s and early 2010s, when he rose through the blogosphere and scored a gig editing national security stories at ThinkProgress, the blogging arm of the Center for American Progress. From there, he bounced to the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace, then to Sanders’s team after the 2016 election. In the Nation profile, David Klion describes Duss as having “deeply informed Sanders’s growing emphasis on international affairs,” in particular the Vermont senator’s efforts to end U.S. support for the Saudi military campaign in Yemen, a years-long humanitarian catastrophe that has produced an immense amount of human suffering. (In 2019, Congress passed a bill, co-sponsored by Sanders, to end logistical and targeting assistance the U.S. was providing to Saudi Arabia, but President Donald Trump vetoed it.)
During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised finally to wind down the U.S. involvement in Yemen, which began under President Barack Obama in 2015, and he made good on that promise quickly after taking office, calling for a ceasefire in Yemen and rebuking the authoritarian Saudi regime while also making it clear his administration will still provide aid to the longtime U.S. ally—just not support for its Yemen operations.
There have been other signs that Biden is open to progressive foreign policy positions, including his nomination of William Burns to head the CIA. Burns, a longtime diplomat who is skeptical of military intervention, earned praise from “Nonzero” author and “progressive realism” advocate Robert Wright. But Duss’s joining the State Department—which Biden has largely filled with Obama admin veterans—would be a notable foothold for progressives who have traditionally not had much access to foreign policy power.
Duss’s role at State brought up a very old “controversy”
A decade-old episode involving Duss illustrates one obstacle standing between progressive foreign policy wonks and government jobs, which is that criticizing Israel has been a third rail. The micro-scandal kicked off with a 2011 Politico article (written by future BuzzFeed editor and New York Times media columnist Ben Smith) highlighting differences between the Obama administration, which broadly supported the Israeli government despite personal differences between Obama and right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and lefty bloggers at ThinkProgress and other outlets. Duss had not been as outspoken as some of his fellow bloggers, but he had written that the blockade of Gaza, which was internationally condemned, was a “moral abomination” comparable to segregation in the American South.
At the time, such criticism of Israel was rare, and groups like the Anti-Defamation League condemned some of the bloggers as “borderline anti-Semitic”; the Obama administration felt compelled to reiterate its strong support for Israel in a statement to the Washington Post when the paper wrote about the controversy.
The Free Beacon, a right-wing newspaper funded by pro-Israel hedge funder Paul Singer, has spent years smearing Duss, and this week resurrected the ThinkProgress flap, calling him “central to the anti-Israel movement.” Right-wing figures like Nikki Haley gave quotes to the Beacon about his supposed anti-Semitism and how his appointment to the Biden administration would confirm the president’s extreme leftward tilt. These accusations were countered in a Substack post by Peter Beinart, a prominent Jewish journalist who has written extensively about Israel and Palestine, who noted that the same people crying anti-Semitism over Duss had no problem with Trump or other conservatives deploying anti-Semitic tropes.
“I look forward to the day when Christians like Matt Duss can say, without fear of imperiling their careers, that in defending people whose lands are stolen and whose villages are bulldozed and whose freedom is denied, they are living the teachings of Jesus Christ,” Beinart wrote.
Biden has a choice to make
It seems self-evidently absurd to call Duss, who rose to prominence as an advisor for the most famous Jewish politician in America, an anti-Semite. And there’s no reason for a Democratic administration to listen to anything the Free Beacon and Nikki Haley have to say. But Democrats have in the past been extremely sensitive to accusations, no matter how frivolous, of anti-Semitism, or even of opposing anything the Israeli government does. And during the Obama administration, Biden was seen as more supportive of the Netanyahu government than Obama himself.
Since 2016, however, progressives, including many Jewish progressives, have become more comfortable criticizing Israel and supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. (To many on the left, comparing modern-day Israel to the segregationist South, as Duss did, now sounds like an obvious truth.) Duss’s potential arrival at the State Department would indicate that that faction of the Democratic Party has acquired more influence than it ever has before.
If, however, the Biden administration backs off and declines to offer Duss a job, it will be a sign that the Democratic establishment still equates criticism of Israeli policies to criticism of Israel, and criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism. It’s still very early in the administration, but it’s hard not to see this as a fork in the road.
