American Jews Are Becoming Political Orphans

American Jews are in the process of becoming political orphans.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has made clear that it supports Hamas’s point of view that Israel is an occupying power imposed on all of the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean – in other words, Israel.

To Hamas and the progressives, it doesn’t matter if Israel wasn’t occupying one inch of Gaza before October 7, 2023. It would not matter if Israel evacuated all its settlers from the West Bank and allowed the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party wants Israel gone. Rashia Tlaib, US representative from Michigan has called for a “Free Palestine, from the river to the sea,” which will mean the deaths of millions of Israelis. They have an unfortunate ally in prominent climate change activist Greta Thunberg, a person I otherwise admire, who has participated in chants stating, “Crush Zionism.”

Progressives claim that Israel was somehow oppressing Gaza, even as the Israeli government left Gaza alone, calling it an “open air prison.”

This is yet another unfortunate case where the facts don’t matter, but which represents a stinging blow to American Jews and Israel. Did Israel order Hamas to acquire countless weapons, build an ingenious tunnel system half the length of the New York City subway system, and train tens of thousands of men to become soldiers in its war on Israel, which it could have spent on building businesses and prosperity for Gaza? Of course not. Additionally, Hamas provocatively placed weapons and military material in hospitals, schools, homes, mosques, in kids’ bedrooms, deliberately putting civilians, women and children in harm’s way.

Does it matter that Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 Jews, and committing countless atrocities, raping women, killing, and beheading babies, and taking more than 130 hostages back to Gaza?  Does it matter that Hamas has pledged to continue attacking Israel, as it is committed to in its charter? No to both questions.

All that matters in the current hive mind of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is that Israel is in Gaza now. From this point of view, Israel is not fighting to protect its people. It is committing genocide. The fact that Hamas has integrated its terrorist infrastructure within every inch of Gaza’s cities is not important.

As well, the extremely relevant point that Hamas is backed, funded, and trained by Iran, which is the real colonialist power in the Middle East right now, is ignored. They are useful idiots in Iran’s undeclared war against Israel, which it has embraced since the 1979 revolution. Iran has Israel more or less strategically surrounded, with Hamas to Israel’s west, Hezbollah to its north, in Lebanon, and the Houthis to its south.

According to Iran’s theocratic regime, Israel shouldn’t exist. Because Islam is supposed to be a universal, global faith, God’s last word on how the world should be arranged, Israel’s continued existence is a threat to their world view. If Israel is there, then doubt might arise in the minds of the mullahs and the faithful that Islam is not God’s final pronouncement. This is not possible in their worldview. Israel is a sin against Islam. They have to destroy it, or God’s word isn’t being carried out.

Progressives don’t see that Israel is the tip of a liberalizing Western spear into the heart of a theocratic government that finds democracy intolerable. No one is able to have a say in how they are governed in Iran, because Allah has already made their choices for them, as mediated by the mullahs. Iran’s viewpoint is that Jews can only live in the Middle East as long as they are subject to a Muslim system of government, as things stood from the founding of Islam in 632 AD, until 1948, with the founding of Israel.

We are seeing the Democratic Party fracture over Gaza. Arab Americans and Muslims have become a prominent voice in the party, particularly in Michigan, where they organized a “non-committed vote” with President Joe Biden in the recent primary race. Tlaib said she was proud to vote “uncommitted.” They got 100,000 people to vote for “non-committed” They see Israeli barbarism while blinding themselves to the atrocities of Hamas. Progressives are mirroring these positions.

Does Tlaib, a projection of the new political power of Muslims, really want to bring Donald Trump back to the presidency, the man who enacted a travel ban on Muslims from visiting the United States, and who will almost certainly give the Israeli government even more leeway to do what it wants in the West Bank in Gaza? Trump’s ability to take the Presidency again might well be the result of Tlaib’s ability to persuade her constituency to sit out the election.

As important, progressives view Jews in general as white oppressors. They know nothing about the history of the Jews being persecuted, tormented, and slaughtered in Europe or the Middle East for centuries, and they don’t want to know. That would confuse them. And distort their moral purity.

You can’t negotiate with those you see as evil. You must destroy them. So, with that mindset, we witnessed a recent progressive riot at the University of California at Berkeley. About 200 student demonstrators broke down the doors to the hall in which the deputy director of an Israeli think tank was to give a lecture. They allegedly assaulted at least one person, expressed anti-Semitic views, and assaulted or obstructed a police officer or emergency medical technician, forcing the attendees to evacuate the building.

We have seen anti-Jewish hatred from coast to coast, with supporters of Hamas holding signs urging the death of Jews.

Despite the many critical issues facing the nation, progressives are focusing their ire on Gaza? And that’s why they won’t vote for Biden, allowing the unstable white supremacist Donald Trump back into the most powerful political position in the world?

The extreme right wing of the Republican Party is no picnic either. The core of the problem is the absurdly false accusation that Jews are orchestrating the surge of immigrants into this country, from Central and South America, in order to displace the white majority from their position of power in the US.

Let’s take a moment to think about this. Do Jews control climate change? Did we cause the California wildfires using Jewish space lasers, as Georgia’s US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated? Are we running murderous drug gangs in the desperately poor countries of the Third World, thereby causing vast numbers of Spanish speaking people to flee for their safety? Are we creating droughts and food shortages, pushing these people to come to the US?

Of course not. The United States has the strongest economy in the world. Did the Jews singlehandedly develop this economy to be so attractive that it would draw millions of undocumented people? No to that one either.

But Tucker Carlson, among the more prominent leaders of this very big lie, has promoted the idea that Jews have conspired, using their evil superpowers of course, to bring millions of brown-skinned, undocumented people here in order to overthrow the white majority.

He’s also stated that the US should no longer provide weapons to Israel to defend itself. He wants the US to pull out of NATO, claiming it’s somehow an attack on American sovereignty, instead of a bulwark against a militarily aggressive, authoritarian Russia. He’s called the Jewish president of Ukraine “sweaty and rat-like,” rhetoric right out of the playbook of the Nazi Party.

To say that this is incredibly lazy thinking is to insult the lazy. Carlson and countless other Republican right-wingers have willingly short-circuited their brains in order to stream this junk, setting up the Jews as targets for discrimination, persecution, and murder (one tragic example: the slaughter of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh in 2017, by a man carrying both a gun and these delusions).

The presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination this year, Donald Trump, has whined and bleated that American Jews would be disloyal if they vote Democratic, because he did so much to support Israel, melding the two entities into one thing, as he always simplistically does with virtually every subject.

He also has refused to denounce Kanye West, who’s threatened to go “deathcon 3” on the Jewish people and expressed open admiration for Hitler on multiple occasions. Trump won’t denounce the comments of Nick Fuentes, the infamous white supremacist who has called for a holy war against Jews, because the Jews obey Satan’s orders. Fuentes has said that Jews have no place in America because we are not Christian. I suspect that even if every single American Jew somehow converted to Christianity overnight, Nick Fuentes would still go after the converted, in Spanish Inquisition style.

Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party, is quite comfortable with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.

Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest men, endorsed a statement on his “X” (formerly Twitter) social media site that Jews are promoting hatred against whites and reinforcing the lie that Jews are pushing people of color to immigrate to the US. “X” has become cesspool of white supremacist hate, with his enthusiastic approval.

What is the way out for American Jews? We have lived in America for 350 years, and many of us have earned great success. Yet it feels as if we are losing our place in the American story.

In terms of the Gaza war, it feels as if it doesn’t matter to progressives if many American Jews want Israel to move their settlers out of the West Bank, stop what feels like a riot of destruction in Gaza, try to set the foundation for a Palestinian state, and oppose Netanyahu’s position to deny  Palestinians any hope for self-determination, ever.  As far as progressives are concerned, American Jews have been fused in their minds with Israel, as a single monolithic bloc, just as Trump has done.

Whether American Jews support or oppose Israel won’t change progressives’ fundamental thinking that Jews are white oppressors. And on the extreme right, the fact that Jews exist in America is an intolerable idea.

The extreme left wants to get rid of Israel and the extreme right wants to get rid themselves of the Jews in America. So, there would be nowhere for us to go.

I don’t know if it’s possible to persuade people from these points on the political spectrum to stop trafficking in massively delusional conspiracy theories about the Jewish people. All I know is that when on the right side, you have Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, and on the left side, Rashida Tlaib and, Greta Thunberg —  people who are not on the same side of anything, describing the Jews as a pernicious, nefarious force in the world, American Jews are in deep political trouble.

Rhetorical arsonists and mobs are afoot in the land, and we know how that ends for the Jews.