El-Sayed Isn’t Denying Our Connection to Israel. He’s Saying Something Else.
One post I read this week argued that a Muslim Arab American has no authority to decide the place of Israel in Judaism. It reminded readers that Jews have prayed “next year in Jerusalem” for two thousand years, and that the Torah, the Prophets, and the Sages bind the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Other posts made the same point: Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, they claimed, denies that the Jewish people have any connection to Israel.
Everything those posts say about Judaism is true. But it doesn’t answer El-Sayed, because that is not what he said. The Rambam teaches, in his introduction to Shemoneh Perakim, “שמע האמת ממי שאמרה” – accept the truth from whoever says it. The other side of that teaching is that we must hear our opponents accurately before we respond. When we attack a claim he never made, we let him dismiss us, and we persuade the people who listen to him that we aren’t serious.
What El-Sayed actually argues
El-Sayed argues that we must separate Judaism and the Jewish people from the State of Israel. On Meet the Press, he said he loves and reveres Judaism and the Jewish people, and that his quarrel is with AIPAC and an Israeli government he accuses of genocide and apartheid. After the election, on Morning Joe, he compared it to Egypt, his family’s country of origin: he criticizes Egypt’s government, and his Egyptian heritage does not mean he excuses its human rights abuses. In the same way, he says, opposing Israel’s government is not opposing Jews.
That is not a denial of the Jewish connection to the land. It is a claim that support for Jews and Judaism can be separated from support for the Jewish state.
Where I disagree about Israel
I believe his charges of genocide and apartheid are wrong. Israel is a democracy in which Arab citizens vote, serve in the Knesset, and sit on the Supreme Court, and it fought a war it did not choose after the massacre of October 7. That debate deserves its own discussion. But even someone who shares some of El-Sayed’s criticisms of Israeli policy should be troubled by what comes next.
The real question: consistency
To El-Sayed’s credit, his criticism is not limited to Israel. On 60 Minutes, he said he opposes using American tax dollars to arm Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and he has called Egypt a military dictatorship. If we claim he criticizes only Israel, we will be wrong, and he will say so.
But notice the difference. With Egypt, he criticizes the government. With Israel, he questions the state itself. Asked whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, he said: “I often struggle with the question… because what they now ask is, ‘Do you believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state,’ which, to me, forces the question of a definition of what a Jewish state means.” He then asked how a Jewish state is “consistent with any form of liberal values that we say we believe in here in the United States.”
That is a fair question, but only if he asks it of everyone. Egypt’s constitution declares Islam the state religion. So do the constitutions of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and others, some two dozen countries in all, many of which restrict the religious freedom of their minorities in ways that Israel does not. I am not aware of El-Sayed ever saying that he struggles with whether any of these countries has a right to exist as a Muslim state.
If El-Sayed believes that no country should have an official religious or national identity, let him say so and apply that principle to every country, including Egypt. That would be consistent, even if I disagree. But if the only national identity he questions belongs to the one Jewish state in the world, his argument is not about liberal values. It is about Israel being Jewish. Alan Dershowitz has long proposed a simple test: does a critic single out Israel while ignoring countries with comparable or far worse records? Criticizing Israeli policy passes that test. Treating the Jewish people as the only people whose national self-determination is up for debate does not.
The obvious objection
El-Sayed’s supporters will answer that Israel is different. It receives more American military aid than any other country, and it controls millions of Palestinians in the West Bank who are not its citizens.
The first point explains why Israel dominates a debate about foreign aid. It does not explain why only Israel’s identity is called into question. Aid is a question of policy; legitimacy is a question of existence.
The second point is serious, and Israelis themselves argue about the future of the West Bank. But that is an argument about borders and a political settlement, not about whether a Jewish state may exist. On 60 Minutes, El-Sayed said that if Israelis and Palestinians choose two states for two peoples, he supports it. A two-state solution means a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, and the Palestinian Authority’s Basic Law already makes Islam the official religion of Palestine. If a Palestinian state with an official religion is acceptable, then the problem with Israel cannot be that it has a religious or national identity.
What would answer the question?
For most Jews, the Jewish state is not just a foreign government. It is the fulfillment of two thousand years of prayer and the refuge our grandparents did not have. El-Sayed told 60 Minutes that his faith teaches him to speak the truth even against himself. I ask him to apply that standard here.
If El-Sayed affirmed Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, while continuing to criticize its policies as forcefully as he likes, I would take his distinction between Judaism and Israel seriously. Until then, the question stands: if a Jewish state is inconsistent with liberal values, why aren’t the dozens of Muslim states equally so? So let’s stop attacking El-Sayed for something he didn’t say, and start asking him the question he hasn’t answered.
