The commentator Charles Krauthammer famously said that two things are necessary for Israel’s survival: the will of its people to live and the friendship of the United States. Six months after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, that second prong, the friendship of the United States, is now in question. The Democratic Party’s support for Israel has diminished substantially in the face of relentless assaults from its progressive, anti-Israel base. With one of the major American political parties becoming anti-Israel, the US-Israel relationship is at grave risk.
There are four pillars to this weakening of Democratic support for Israel:
(1) Islamist supremacism. Islamist supremacists, led by Iran, seek to restore the caliphate to the Middle East and to expand Islamic control throughout the world. They view Israel as “a bone in the Arab windpipe,” territory that rightly belongs to Islam and is part of the ummah. Many immigrants to the US have been indoctrinated in this worldview and continue to express it (withness the “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” chants in Dearborn, MI recently). Many of those immigrants currently are Democratic voters.
(2) The international progressive Left. This may be the strongest pillar in the West, as it is widespread in academia, and increasingly, in elected office. Although the Soviet Union initially supported Israel’s independence, mainly as a way to remove the British from the Middle East, the Soviets turned against Israel after it became clear Israel was not going to fall into the Soviet orbit during the Cold War. After the humiliating failures of the Soviets’ Arab clients in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel, the Soviet Union–which styled itself as an anti-colonial power supporting the Third World against the capitalist West–propagandized Israel as a colonial power oppressing the native Arab population. The PLO Charter was written in Moscow, and current Palestinian Authority President Mahmood Abbas is a graduate of Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University. The Soviet Union was the primary driver of the UN’s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1975.
Although the Soviet Union is no longer with us, the Soviets’ anti-Israel propaganda remained in the world’s bloodstream through the left-wing Marxist movements and sympathizers in academia, politics, and the media. Politicians and professors today were brought up with this propaganda in the 1970’s, and 1980’s, and they have passed it onto subsequent generations.
(3) Modern American identity politics. The American left has become obsessed with race and identity, through Black Lives Matter (which was led by avowed Marxists), the Women’s March (which notoriously was inhospitable to Jewish participation and leadership, as Tablet magazine exposed), the application of critical race theory to the Arab-Israeli dispute (categorizing Israel as a “settler colonial state,” and Jews as “white,” while characterizing Palestinians as a non-white “oppressed” and “colonized” population), as well as the Democratic Party, which had learned that it could stifle debate by accusing their opponents as racists, misogynists, etc. No society obsessed with race, identity, or religion has been good for Jews, from Inquisition Spain to Nazi Germany. The more obsessed with race and identity a society is, the worse it is for Jews.
(4) Angry people who are looking for an avenue to righteously vent their rage. Ever since the 1960’s, people have wanted to recreate the protest movement to feel the frisson of revolutionary activity. College campuses are full of such people desperate to have a cause to protest like their parents and forebears in the 1960s. No matter how righteous the cause, screaming in people’s faces is inappropriate and counterproductive–it is unlikely that screaming in people’s faces, as protesters most recently did before a high-dollar Democratic fundraiser in New York, will persuade anyone to change their views. The screaming is not about persuasion–it is about releasing personal anger in an “approved,” even righteous manner. If Palestine wasn’t the cause du jour, the people in this category would find another excuse to scream in people’s faces and interfere with their daily lives (blocking roads, etc.).
The trend in the Democratic Party is bad and has been bad for more than a decade. This has been apparent since the election of President Obama. Obama was really our second academic president (the first being Wilson) and he brought many of the barmy international progressive Left shibboleths about Israel–injected into the world’s bloodstream by the Soviets–into office. He also viewed himself, because of his identity, as uniquely capable of bridging the Western and Islamic worlds and capable of bringing Iran in from the cold. His election was the first evidence of a turn against Israel within the Democratic Party, and his presidency was replete with aggressive efforts to put “daylight” between the US and Israel. It was also replete with evidence that the Democratic party had begin to turn against Israel at the grassroots level.
- One of Obama’s first calls to a world leader after his inauguration was to Abbas.
- Obama’s first foreign policy speech was in Cairo in 2009, in which he inaccurately characterized Israel as simply a product of the Holocaust and made clear his desire for a rapprochement with the Islamic world.
- Obama’s failure to support the Green Movement in Iran after sham elections in 2009.
- In 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, delegates booed the Democratic platform plank acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
- Obama’s obsequiousness toward Iran, a terror state, in a desperate effort to get a nuclear deal, and his inaccurate framing of the deal being the only choice other than war (which Trump disproved with his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran).
- The US vote in support of the UN resolution in December 2016 that, among other points, said East Jerusalem was occupied territory; this undermined Oslo by prejudging final status talks.
The Obama foreign policy continued in the Biden Administration (staffed mainly by Obama-era retreads), The Biden team churlishly refused to acknowledge or support the Abrahamic Accords, even though they represented the biggest breakthrough in Middle East Peace since Jordan normalized relations with Israel in 1995.
But it took the events of October 7 to expose how deeply the anti-Israel rot had infected the Democratic Party. Before Israel even had begun to respond to October 7, progressive leftists were in the streets supporting Palestine. Had an Israeli committed a terrorist act, Jewish organizations would have been tripping all over themselves to condemn it, to apologize for it, to disavow it and to take steps to ensure it did not happen again. By contrast, the progressive left took October 7 as a signal to let their true anti-Israel colors show. That they no longer had to hide their anti-Israel views. October 7 empowered pro-Palestine activists to express their desire to annihilate Israel and create a Palestine “from the river to the sea”)–a chilling but telling fact.
Democrats had been able to hide the metastasizing anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments in their base by deflecting, pointing to examples of right-wing antisemitism–mostly, the Charlottesville march and riot. Democrats seized upon any example of right-wing antisemitism to prove their case. Del. (Dan) Helmer accused Harold Pyon, my personal friend and his opponent in the 2021 elections, of mailing an antisemitic flyer identifying the rising cost of living in Fairfax County from inflation with a picture of stacks of coins showing the before-inflation and after-inflation costs of goods in Fairfax County, with a picture of Helmer next to it. Helmer screamed bloody murder that this was antisemitic, but had nothing to say about Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, or closer to home, Fairfax County School Board member Abrar Omeish and Del. Ibrahim Samirah, all of whom had done far worse and all of whom were elected officials. He had nothing to say about the so-called Democratic “Squad” votes against the Iron Dome–votes, had they carried the day, wold have gotten Jews killed. Democrats were only interested in fighting antisemitism when doing so provided them political advantage.
Indeed, the October 7 attack revealed much of the progressive movement as interested only in power and political advantage, only in using their supposedly high-minded principles for political advantage. The “Me Too” and “Believe All Women” (campaigns), which immediately accepted as true Christine Blasey Ford’s unsubstantiated allegations against Justice Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearings, suddenly demanded evidence of Hamas’s sexual assaults and rapes in triplicate. BLM tweeted support for Hamas on October 8–while Hamas’s attack was ongoing and many Mizrahi Jews, indigenous to the Middle East, were murder victims or hostages.
While the history is important, we are where we are, and we face an essential question: where do we go from here? What should supporters of Israel do today? There are several steps we should take to (embolden) support for Israel in the US.
(1) Jewish organizations must get back to supporting Jewish issues. Jewish organizations like the ADL and the JCRC can no longer act as adjuncts for progressive policy lobbying on issues that are not specific to the Jewish community–abortion, gun control, etc. Their focus must be laser-like on combatting antisemitism and supporting Israel’s right to exist. Several years ago, I proposed including an anti-BDS component to the JCRC’s legislative agenda in Virginia. They rejected the suggestion because our supposed “allies” have a different view on the topic. No more of that. We must support ourselves, and if our supposed allies won’t stand by us, they aren’t our allies.
(2) Israel needs to decouple itself from dependence on the American arms industry and the US government for resupply. Israel needs alternative sources of weaponry now that the Democrats are openly hostile to it and cannot be relied upon to provide resupply in Israel’s hours of need.
(3) Jewish Americans need to make some political examples by defeating rabid antisemitic politicians. It is likely two “Squad” members, Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York, will lose their primaries. We should also target the Maryland Senate race, where the popular Larry Hogan is running for an open seat while the other Maryland senator, Chris Van Hollan, has been harshly anti-Israel. If Larry Hogan runs on a pro-Israel platform, ties the Democrat to Van Hollen’s anti-Israel policies, and wins, that will be a shot across the bow of the Democratic Party. Politicians who are aggressively, virulently anti-Israel should face election challenges. Nothing focuses the mind of a politician quite like the threat of losing their election.
(4) Agitate for regime change in Iran. All this ends if the Islamic Republic falls. All of Iran’s satraps, from Hamas to Hezbollah to Syria, will wither on the vine. The sooner the mullahs fall, the better for everyone (including the people of Iran).
(5) Maintain our solidarity. There are 50 million Black Americans. There are 60 million Hispanic Americans. There are 16 million Jews in the world. We are a minority everywhere but Israel. We punch above our weight because of our success and our contributions to society. But if we fray and don’t stay united, we will weaken ourselves. We need to marshal every last ounce of our community to compete with the loud anti-Israel activists.
All this is doable. Israel has survived and will continue to survive. But the United States should be by Israel’s side. It is the politically right–and the morally righteous–place to be.
Mike Ginsberg is the Chairman of the 11th District Republican Committee, Republican Party of Virginia. This article is based on remarks made to the American Israel Traditions and Values on April 7, 2024, in Fairfax.