In my widely unread novel, Total Jihad (RavensYard, 2003) – the book is out of print, the publisher out of business – African-American members of Congress loyal to Rev. Louis. Farrakhan played a minor role in the separation of the United States from Israel and fragmentation of U.S. Jewry.  Total Jihad was set in the future, beginning in 2007, when a neo-isolationist Democratic administration, led by a young, charismatic president, would join Europe in imposing a suicidal "peace" on Israel.

Given the Obama White House's recurrent pressure on Israel, one recalls comedian Judy Tenuta's signature tag line to one improbability after another: "It could happen!"

Actually, fragmentation between the Democratic Party and Israel, between the reflexive liberalism of most American Jews and the Jewish state – has been happening since the 1980s.

The leading contender for chairman of the post-Hillary Clinton Democratic Party is Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.).  One of two Muslims in Congress, Ellison has disavowed his earlier connection with Farrakhan's anti-Semitic Nation of Islam.  But he's more recently opposed additional funding for Israel's Iron Dome short-range missile defense system and signed a congressional letter portraying Israel's partial blockade of the Gaza Strip as punitive, among similar moves.  His friendship with and campaign financial support from leaders of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim Brotherhood spinoff and unindicted co-conspirator in a 2009 terrorism funding trial (Hamas via the Holy Land Foundation), is of long standing.

The Anti-Defamation League reportedly certifies Ellison's rejection of anti-Jewish bigotry and his support for Israel, though retired ADL head Abe Foxman is not so sure.  Foxman, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency says, sees Ellison's endorsement by party officials including incoming Senate minority leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) as symbolizing the Democrats' continuing difficulty with – Republicans say retreat from – reliable support for the Jewish State.

In the early 1980s, I worked as press secretary to U.S. Rep. Robert N. Shamansky (D-Ohio).  Bob sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Europe and the Middle East Subcommittee.  One day, a delegation from our hometown Columbus Jewish Federation visited.  These were the years of international – including U.S. – condemnation of Israel for bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, the U.S.-Saudi AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control Systems planes) deal – which passed despite strenuous objection from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – and Israel's war against the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon.

After the meeting ended, I asked a Columbus friend what had been discussed.  "The usual," he said – "abortion, church-state separation, the Moral Majority."

"Israel?"

"Of course," he replied.  "But the sooner we get Israel out of the headlines, the more some of our folks will be able to focus on issues that really motivate them."

Shamansky lost re-election to a state senator named John Kasich in November 1982.  I went to work for the Columbus federation's Jewish Community Relations Committee.  We focused on pro-Israel activism; support for endangered Jewish populations in the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and elsewhere; abortion; church-state issues; and inter-faith and inter-racial relations.

Participants at one of our "Black-Jewish Dialogue" lunches discussed the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 Democratic presidential primary campaign.  For some of the Jewish members, Jackson was nearly toxic.  His "Hymie-town" reference to New York City and impromptu "We Shall Overcome" vocalizing with PLO leader Yasser Arafat during a 1979 visit to Beirut were all we needed to know.

But for the black participants, the reverend stood beyond reproach.  Why, they wanted to know, had I circulated a New Republic article critical of Jackson as pre-luncheon reading?  That day featured not dialogue, but parallel monologues, revealing a gap that in some respects would become a gulf.  As Israel's enemies have refused to free it from the headlines, many liberals – Democrats and Jews among them – have tried to escape the heat in the political kitchen.

Before the 1988 presidential campaign, I was back in Washington, editing Near East Report, the weekly newsletter on U.S. Middle East policy and U.S.-Israel relations published in affiliation with AIPAC.  Some of our lay leaders, including prominent Democrats, were dubious about the Middle East bona fides of the party's nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis (Mass.).  But senior staff was positively utzed by Democratic National Convention organizers' decision to allow James Zogby a televised speaking slot, even if not prime time.

Zogby had been active in the National Campaign to Defend Ziad Abu Eain, a Palestinian Arab fighting extradition to Israel, where he eventually would be convicted of participating in a fatal 1979 PLO terrorist attack.  Zogby later co-founded the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, which seemed to spend as much energy opposing the Jewish State as fighting anti-Arab bigotry, and founded the Arab American Institute.  In 1988, he also was a member of the Democratic convention's platform committee.

That, like Jackson's strong showing (second to Dukakis, far ahead of Sens. Al Gore, Tenn.; Paul Simon, Ill.; and Rep. Richard Gephardt, Mo. in 1988's Democratic presidential primaries), was another straw in the wind.  A few AIPAC staffers argued among themselves whether being pro-Israel would become an anomaly in a party less internationally minded, more likely to see Palestinian Arabs as an oppressed minority group, and more interested in social spending than defense.

Over the intervening decades, the trend clarified itself.  As Politico reported this past March 29, Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vermont) and ten House members "asked the Obama administration to investigate claims that the Israeli and Egyptian security forces have committed 'gross violations of human rights'  –  allegations that infuriated Israel's leader, but, if proven true, could affect U.S. military aid to the countries."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired back that contrary to Amnesty International, on whose claims Leahy based his letter, Israeli troops defended the public against "bloodthirsty terrorists who come to murder them."  According to Netanyahu, "this letter should have been addressed instead to those who incite youngsters to commit cruel acts of terrorism."

The ten House members on Leahy's letter?  All Democrats, mostly members of the Congressional Black Caucus.  Veteran pro-Israel lobbyists pointed out that in the past 30 years, the de facto "anti-Israel caucus" on the Hill had grown from roughly 15 to 20 to 30 or 40, mostly in the House.  And the majority-minority party affiliation has flipped, from Republican-Democrat to Democrat-Republican.  In fact, reflexively anti-Israel congressional Republicans have become an endangered species.

Among Democrats, though, that species has grown.  By dint of repetition, conveyed from faculty lounges through mass media to kefiyeh-wearing "social justice warriors," James Zogby's worldview gains U.S. political ground.  This view sees a repressive Israel, armed by the United States not primarily in American national interests, but rather mostly at the urging of American Jews, unjustly crushing aggrieved Arabs.

(When worn by Westerners, the kefiyeh is, as I have argued previously, a fashion statement.  Not just a signal of "revolutionary cool," the kefiyeh, first popularized for non-Arabs by Yasser Arafat, states: Those who kill Jews are fashionable.)

This brings us to the instructive fates of those Jewish Democratic senatorial bookends Joseph Lieberman and Bernard Sanders.

Lieberman was a longtime senator from Connecticut, an observant Jew proudly positive about his heritage, conventionally liberal on domestic issues yet strong on defense and American intervention abroad when required.  In 2000, he became the first American Jew on a major party presidential ticket, chosen as Sen. Gore's vice presidential running mate.  Like then-senators Gore, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, Democrat Lieberman supported President George W. Bush's 2003 decision to invade Iraq.  Unlike them, by 2006 he was championing, with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a troop "surge" to defeat a bloody insurgency and suppress a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war.

For that, his long and loyal party service notwithstanding, Lieberman had to go.  The self-described liberal party brooks no dissent – that is, no dissent to the right.  One can lean ever leftward, like Sanders, and be embraced by the party base.  So, having lost the 2006 Connecticut Senate Democrat primary to a challenger from the left, incumbent Lieberman won re-election as an independent.

But the handwriting was on the wall, in neon.  It would be Lieberman's last term.

The wall-writing got a soundtrack at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.  Somehow, the platform committee had forgotten to include the 2008 and 2004 foreign policy plank declaring Jerusalem the "indivisible, eternal capital of Israel."  This had been the Israeli government position – certainly in advance of any negotiated compromise with Palestinian leadership, the possibility of which remains vaporous – under recent coalitions led by Netanyahu's Likud Party.  It was the view of many if not most pro-Israel Americans, including AIPAC, even earlier.

Convention organizers, noting the Jerusalem plank's omission, moved to include it by voice vote before adoption of the whole platform by delegates.  Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, chairing the session, called for a vote.  Stunned when the "nays" outnumbered the "yeas," he announced to a disbelieving floor that the outcome had been too close to discern.  Amid muttering and jeers, he called a second vote.  Again the "nays" had it, more loudly this time.  Down came Villaraigosa's gavel.  The chair still can't determine the result, he asserted, drawing catcalls.  On the third vote, both yeas and nays loudly asserted themselves, with the latter dominant.  No matter.  The yeas had it, the chair declared, overruling the floor.

Party elders, no doubt concerned about potential unhappiness among pro-Israel voters in key states like Florida, Illinois, and New York, and in particular among significant Jewish donors, denied the base.  One does not need the contrast between party treatment of Lieberman and the base's embrace this year of Sanders, who described J Street as a key source of his Arab-Israeli views, to recognize in the 2012 struggle over the Jerusalem platform plank a party establishment rear-guard action.

J Street is the "pro-Israel, pro-peace" lobby.  Quotation marks are required, given that J Street was funded initially and covertly by the non- if not anti-Zionist, anti-AIPAC George Soros and almost invariably finds fault with Israeli counter-terrorism while minimizing if not excusing Palestinian incitement and rejectionism.

Sanders's strong challenge to former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination highlighted the continuing erosion of bipartisan support for Israel and unraveling of the Jewish liberal-American Zionist connection.  As columnist Charles Krauthammer noted, Sanders – unlike Lieberman – primarily expressed his Jewish affiliation negatively – that is, in Holocaust remembrance.  Of course, many American Jews do likewise.

But Sanders also parroted false anti-Israeli propaganda about "disproportionately high" non-combatant Arab casualties in the 2014 Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.  At the time, however, Gen. Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Israel went to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian fatalities.  If anything, Palestinian non-combatant deaths in Gaza had been "disproportionately low."

Sanders also nominated Zogby, Rep. Ellison, and Prof. Cornel West (described by The Washington Post as a "racial justice activist" but not also as an anti-Israel hysteric who has falsely alleged Israeli massacres of Palestinian Arabs and who supports the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish boycott, divestment, and sanctions [BDS] movement).  The Vermont senator also, "privileging" his post-liberal-left affiliations over any Jewish ties, invited one of the leaders of Spain's anti-Semitic, far-left Podemos Party to be his guest as the Democratic Party Convention.

The Democratic Party does not harbor numerous anti-Israel, anti-Jewish local and national officials, as does Great Britain's once pro-Israel Labor Party.  Bernie Sanders has not hosted and praised representatives of Hezb'allah and Hamas in Congress, as Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn has in Parliament.  But the trend, hardly new, gathers momentum.  The tie between American, especially Jewish, liberalism and pro-Zionism once was axiomatic.  Now the growing contradiction between pro-Israel and illiberal progressive seems likely to stretch that tie until it snaps.

The writer is a Washington, D.C.-based communications consultant.  Any opinions expressed above are solely his own.