The tension in the air at the St. Louis Grand Hotel was palpable as the Democratic NationalConvention’s platform drafting committee’s meeting stretched well beyond its scheduled early Friday evening adjournment and into the early hours of last Saturday morning.

After a spirited and, at times, contentious, daylong set of debates on issues such as whether the party should endorse a $15-per-hour minimum wage, support abolishing the death penalty, and back a carbon tax on fossil fuel use, the 15 committee members tensed as they prepared for the final, and perhaps most highly anticipated, amendment to its draft platform.

Crafted with “direct input” from Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), according to James Zogby, a Sanders campaign appointee to the drafting committee, the amendment called for “an end to [Israeli] occupation and illegal settlements so that they [Palestinians] may live in independence, sovereignty, and dignity.”

At first blush, the language of the amendment appeared noncontroversial. After all, the Obama administration has spent the past eight years pursuing these same policy goals. And presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, as President Obama’s first secretary of State, spoke out vigorously against Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestinian land and the imperative of ending Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, an occupation which just entered its 50th year.

Read more in The Hill.