The Democrats Turn on Israel

Joe Biden and his party are now antisemitism adjacent

With friends like this: Schumer the (fake) shomer.

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One of this year’s biggest political stories—and one unlikely to be covered by most of the media—is the Democratic Party’s accelerating slide into antisemitism.

That the progressive Left in America is virulently “anti-Zionist” has long been obvious, and it was the reverse of surprising when such groups as Democratic Socialists of America and Black Lives Matter reacted to the horrifying slaughter of October 7, 2023, with denunciations of Israel and applause for Hamas. Nor was it surprising that the chief bastion of postmodern progressivism, American higher education, reacted to the events of that day with an upsurge of antisemitic hate, including campus pogroms targeting Jewish students. The rot had gone that far—“anti-Zionism” having been folded into the narratives of imperialism, colonialism and oppression that now substitute for the study of history in our universities.

But a distinction was drawn between these illiberal leftist groups and the Democratic Party. President Biden had the reputation of being a pro-Israel politician, and this seemed borne out by his full-throated support for Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7. There was, indeed, dissent among the members of the party’s progressive caucus, voiced most loudly by those miserable wretches of the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades. Their Jew bashing was discounted, however. It was thought to be unrepresentative of the Democratic Party as a whole.

Only in recent weeks has it become clear that antisemitic attitudes, marketed as criticism of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza War, are far more prevalent among Democratic politicians and the party base than many people imagined. At the very least the Dems today are antisemitism adjacent.

Joe Biden’s behavior over the course of the war has demonstrated just how shallow, if not fake, his pro-Israel convictions are. Bit by bit, he has backed away from the initial, full-throated stance of support for the Jewish state. Bit by bit, he has adopted the bad-faith arguments of the enemies of Israel. The result is that today, without quite uttering the word, the President has signed onto the genocide narrative being promoted by the progressive Left.

In this Biden has been joined by the US Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who may be credited with greenlighting the chorus of denunciation now being directed against Israel by congressional Democrats.

On March 14, Schumer delivered a speech that attacked the Israeli government in the person of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyatu. He described the current government as an obstacle to peace, going so far as to compare it to Hamas. And he demanded new elections in Israel, supposedly to replace Netanyatu with someone devoted to a peaceful settlement of the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

This speech was (1) delusional and (2) despicable.

The delusion was embodied in Schumer’s claim that Israel under Netanyahu is blocking the realization of the mythical “two-state solution”: something that neither the Jews nor the Arabs want, and something that the October 7 Hamas pogrom has killed as surely as it murdered 1,200 Jews on that day.

Schumer’s jeremiad was despicable because he himself is a Jew, and because he has long marketed himself as the Democratic Party’s shomer—Hebrew for watchman—over Israel. And this is how he discharges the responsibility of that unofficial position: by meddling in Israeli domestic politics, and by equating the democratic Jewish state with a blood-drenched terrorist group. Some shomer!

What Schumer said was bad enough in itself. Worse was the ensuing pile-on. Representative Jamal Bowman, Democrat of New York and Squad member, proclaimed his one-hundred-percent support for Schumer’s speech, adding that “The majority of Gaza has already been destroyed through acts of collective punishment by this maniac, Benjamin Netanyahu.” Bowman, incidentally, is a notorious Jew basher who, among other outrages, has charged that Israeli women were lying about being raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7. That’s the character of Senator Schumer’s new best friend.

The blather of Jamal Bowman, puller of fire alarms and serious head case, might be written off, but worse followed. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, denounced Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” Gaza—an outright lie. Now, more and more Senate and House Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are demanding that the Biden Administration cut off aid to Israel, supposedly because of the recent killing of aid workers by the IDF, which Israel has called a tragic mistake. And though Biden claims that he still supports Israel, his gradual abandonment of a once-strong position on that subject raises the real possibility of a full rupture in US-Israeli relations—which would be a great victory for Hamas and its sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Incidentally, these congressional “anti-Zionists” have little or no breath to spare for denunciations of Hamas and Iran, which are the entities responsible for the death and destruction that is being visited on Gaza. It was they, after all, who turned Gaza into a terrorist base camp against Israel, thus provoking the present war.

A desire to stave off a confrontation with the US no doubt influenced Israel’s decision to order a partial withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza. But those who imagine that a permanent ceasefire and a peace settlement will follow should disabuse themselves of that notion. What has happened is this: The war is frozen, not ended, for in the long run Israel cannot tolerate the presence of Hamas in Gaza. Nor is it conceivable that Hamas would abandon its genocidal campaign against the Jewish state. The two belligerents are scorpions in a bottle; sooner or later one or the other must be stung to death.

As usual, therefore, Biden & Co. have decided against themselves. The war will now be prolonged through this US presidential election year—the exact opposite of which would be in the President’s political interests. Now, he will find himself unable to satisfy anybody, neither the Muslim-American jihadist vote nor the supporters of Israel. But what else could have been expected of the team that engineered the disgraceful Afghanistan skedaddle and botched the Russo-Ukrainian War?

And if the Biden Administration mounts a pressure campaign to force Israel to make concessions, that will mark the end of the special relationship between the two countries. Israel exists today because in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jews concluded that on the bottom line, they must depend only on themselves. The horrors of October 7 and the upsurge of antisemitism in America and Europe since that date can only have reinforced that conviction. With the Democratic Party’s turn against Israel, with its embrace of the false and lying narratives of Zionist evil and illegitimacy, how can the Jewish state maintain trust in America as the shomer over its security and welfare?