This past May, we attended our first, and last, Maine Democratic Party convention in Bangor. An annual event to rally the party around a platform championing fundamental human rights, this year’s convention had less energy than Tuesday night bingo.

We could have sworn we saw tumbleweed but maybe this was the effect of keynote speaker, Rep. Jared Golden, fleeing the convention early to substitute his star turn with a canned campaign video. Or it might have been the rows of unoccupied seats in the cavernous Cross Insurance Center.

Golden must have been warned by his handlers that there would be delegates and spectators in attendance, to confront him over his enthusiastic support for Israeli war crimes. He’s brayed loudly about keeping foreign money out of U.S. elections. But there’s nothing patriotic in the former Marine’s relationship with Israel and its powerful lobby, AIPAC, which is Golden’s top campaign contributor.

Had we the chance, we might have pressed Golden on the glaring disconnect between his recent endorsement of an assault weapons ban – post-Lewiston massacre – and simultaneous support for unlimited weapons shipments to a regime committing war crime after war crime. We might have asked also why Golden’s change of heart would not include all victims of violence, regardless of what language they speak or what god they worship.

Golden subsequently denied a request to meet with his constituents and has instead doubled down on Israeli talking points: Israel has “the right to defend itself” and “Iran is Israel’s enemy” and thus, our enemy too.

We know that Golden is capable of supporting legislation such as a “democracy and human rights” bill for Pakistan (H.R. 901), so why is Gaza different, less deserving of fundamental human rights?

There’s a similar staggering disconnect within the Democratic Party, which champions women’s rights but is oblivious to its own complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children in Gaza. Schizophrenic may be the operative word for a party that would enshrine Roe. v. Wade into law, while continuing to rubber-stamp the shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to a war zone in which schools, hospitals, libraries and places of worship have been deliberately targeted.

What similarly contrary motives would have caused a majority of Democrats to stand and applaud Bibi Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, even as the International Criminal Court was seeking his arrest for war crimes?

In light of the many crimes against humanity that Israel is guilty of – genocide, ecocide, scholasticide – uncommitted Democrats in Maine are making a perfectly reasonable ask of our party and Maine’s politicians. We are demanding that Rep. Golden, and Sens. King and Collins, honor American laws that prohibit sending weapons to a country committing human rights violations.

A year’s worth of tepid demands for a ceasefire in Gaza may now cost the Democratic Party the votes of a generation of young people. Many of them – and uncommitted voters across all age groups – are no longer willing to vote for the status quo of genocide and endless wars, for politicians who are wholly beholden to defense industry and Israeli lobbies. We want our democracy to expand its big tent, not create more tent cities.

If the Democratic Party resists divesting itself from its catastrophic allegiance to Israel, the uncommitted will simply add the Democrats to the list of complicit entities from which we have already divested.