Discarded

In 1648, when Bohdan Chmielnicki’s Cossacks rose against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Jews of Ukraine were not the cause of the war. They were simply its most convenient victims. Polish nobles had leased their estates, mills and taverns to Jewish managers, making Jews the visible face of a system they did not run and could not change. To the Cossacks, the Jews were agents of the Polish lords. To the Polish lords, the Jews were expendable. Tens of thousands died, and the communities of Ukraine and southeastern Poland never fully recovered.

Two and a half centuries later, history repeated the pattern with grim precision. In the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war that followed, the White armies murdered Jews as Bolsheviks, while the Bolsheviks dismantled Jewish communal and religious life as bourgeois relics. Ukrainian nationalist forces and roaming warlords carried out pogrom after pogrom between 1918 and 1921, killing tens of thousands. In the wars over Poland’s borders, Polish soldiers shot Jews as suspected Bolshevik sympathizers, as in Pinsk in 1919, while the advancing Red Army saw Polish Jews as class enemies. And in the Second World War, the Nazis managed to cast the same people as both the commissars of Bolshevism and the bankers of capitalism. In the borderlands, Jews were denounced and murdered as Soviet collaborators by one side and deported as bourgeois elements by the other.

The lesson I teach my students, year after year, is the same. When Jews are placed in the middle of someone else’s war, whether a war of armies or a war of ideas, they end up as the target of both sides and the loser of all. It may not always start that way, but it almost always ends that way.

Which is why, in 2015 and 2016, I became something of a broken record. I watched a presidential candidate openly mock women, war veterans, POWs, disabled people and Muslims, and I kept telling anyone who would listen that I was afraid. Not because Jews were on the list, at least not yet, but because of what I knew as a historian. Where hatred is tolerated in a society, Jews will always end up the target. We may not be the first, but we’ll always end up in the crosshairs anyway.

In the decade since, I have unfortunately proved myself right. Charlottesville. Pittsburgh. Poway. And then, after October 7th, a wave of antisemitism (sorry, “antizionism”) from the other end of the political spectrum that no one on the left seemed willing or able to contain.

I had a second fear, too. I worried that the Trumpian habit of turning support for Israel into a partisan loyalty test, where Jews who voted Democrat were told they were betraying their own people, would backfire spectacularly. Every time Israel was waved as a Republican flag, it handed Democrats yet another a reason to see it as the enemy’s cause.

That fear is what led me, two years ago, to write a piece for this blog arguing that, for the sake of Israel’s future, Joe Biden had to win. It was not a comfortable thing to write. I was not, to put it gently, enthusiastic about him, and given what we have since learned about the extent of his cognitive decline, it is a mercy that he never got a second term. But my argument was never really about Biden. It was about what his party would learn if he lost.

If Democrats came to believe that standing with Israel had cost them the White House, they would conclude that Israel was a losing cause. And once a political party learns a lesson like that, it is very hard to unlearn it. Israel has survived for 78 years on the courage of its soldiers, the stubbornness of its people, and no small amount of hazlacha. But in the hard arithmetic of geopolitics, it has survived above all on American bipartisan support. Not Republican support. Not Democratic support. Both.

The moment Israel became a team jersey, I worried, one of the teams would eventually want to tear it asunder. In the last few years, it became clear that with the influence of the DSA, the first to shred it would be the Democrats.

This week, both teams tore it off.

On the morning of Election Day, President Trump called into Fox & Friends to announce that the United States would stop its roughly $4 billion in annual aid to Israel by the end of the year, claiming he and Netanyahu had agreed to it months ago. Israeli defence officials said they had no idea it was coming. It may not even be real policy, since the current memorandum of understanding runs through 2028. But the message was unmistakable. The man Israel chose for its highest civilian honour chose the morning of a national election to tell voters that Israel was a liability, explicitly to take a talking point away from Democrats like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed.

It didn’t work. Democrats swept, and El-Sayed, who made the US-Israel relationship the villain of his campaign, is headed to the Senate. Then, the day after the election, Vice President JD Vance posted his own post-mortem. Trump voters who had defected, he wrote, wanted four things, and the fourth was to change America’s relationship with Israel. Asked about it, Trump called the post largely true.

So here we are. The Democrats’ insurgent wing has concluded that opposing Israel wins elections. The Republican leadership has now concluded that supporting Israel loses them. For a decade, both parties used Israel as a card in their culture war. This week, they both seemed to decide that support for Israel was a sure bet for a losing streak.

I wish I could say I am surprised. But this is the Chmielnicki pattern, the 1919 pattern, the pattern of every borderland war my students study. Jews put in the middle of a broader fight, made into the symbol of one side, and then sacrificed by both when the symbol becomes inconvenient. A culture war that turned Israel into a weapon has ended, as these things always do, by turning on the Jews.

The pundits will spend the coming weeks arguing about what this election meant for Republicans. But watching from Toronto, I can’t help but think that the biggest loser on Tuesday was not the Republican Party. It was the Jewish community, in Israel and across North America.

I have never wanted so badly to be wrong.