According to this latest NBC News poll, 67% of Democrats say that their sympathies lie with Palestinians over Israelis. This is an astonishing sea change in the opinion of a major part of the electorate. Just thirteen years ago, in 2013, only 18% of Democrats said that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians.

This shift, moreover, is not confined to Democrats. Thirty-seven percent of independents claim that their sympathies lie with the Palestinians; only twenty-seven percent claim that their sympathies lie with the Israelis. In 2013, those numbers were nearly reversed: 37% of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Israelis, while only ten percent of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians.

As NBC goes on to report, this stark turn in the Democratic electorate is now driving a series of Democratic primary contests in congressional races across the country. There’s little doubt that it will also shape the 2028 presidential primary.

Like the push toward democratic socialism, the organizing work on the question of Palestine has had a genuine impact on party politics. It has not yet shaped government policy, but that’s obviously the end game. An end game that no one takes more seriously than the organizations and individuals who are dedicated to defending the State of Israel, no matter what.

Which brings me to the question of action.

For the last twenty years or so, we have been engaging in a bit of a dance around the question of Palestine. Palestinian Americans, Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, students, faculty, and progressives of all persuasions, have pushed for BDS at the level of universities and local institutions, issued one resolution after another denouncing the actions of the Israeli state, launched debates over Zionism and anti-Zionism, and conducted an ongoing cultural war over terms like genocide, apartheid, and more.

These campaigns have played a central role in shaping public opinion.

But given the shifts in Democratic Party opinion, and the fact that most of the leadership of the party remains well to the right of the views of their voters, it’s time to translate those views into action.

I have a simple proposal to do so. We should unite around and back a presidential candidate who, among other things, commits to cut off all non-military and military aid, including all weapons shipments and all weapons sales, to the State of Israel.

I’m aware of the thousand and one questions and objections, the ten thousand and two nuances and qualifications, that the pundit and political class will raise to this demand. While we will have plenty of time to answer and address all of those questions and objections, nuances and qualifications, my proposal is aimed right now at the people who would be making this demand, which is not the political class, but the voters and organizers, the movement builders and activists, the real leaders of the everyday life of the left. And to them I say, think back to the past, particularly the Vietnam War and the battles around Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The demand were simple and straightforward—and, most important, correct and just, both politically and morally. The demand of the antiwar movement, by the mid-1960s, was “out now.” Not negotiations, not de-escalation, but…out…now. And that is ultimately what the United States did. It got out, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives, and thousands of American lives. Had the government and the press and the party elites heeded the demands of the antiwar movement sooner, those lives could have been saved.

In Central America, our demands were also simple: no support for dictators, death squads, or homicidal regimes. The State of Israel fits all three. There are death squads running rampant in the West Bank. The regime imposes a dictatorship upon most Palestinians who live between the River and the Sea. And it is homicidal.

The time for arguing about words like apartheid or genocide, about Zionism and anti-Zionism, is over. The time for settling for simply defending the speech rights of campus activists is over. It’s time to go on the offensive, to say to the US government, out now, stop supplying aid to this homicidal regime of death squads and dictators.

The people we need to say that to, first, are the people who would claim our vote to lead the Democratic Party in the next presidential contest. Every progressive organization needs to make this a top priority, not the exclusive priority, but a top priority, part of the package of demands we expect anyone claiming to represent the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—which now consists, at least on this issue, of roughly 2/3 of the party—to support, in the next presidential election.

If you’re part of any these groups, start raising this demand now. Get leaders to sign on to it, and commit to organizing around it, to convening some sort of progressive summit in the next six months, where it can be established as the bedrock of the progressive movement’s demands for 2028.