El-Sayed’s Jews and Their Self-Delusions
It should come as no surprise that as many as 57% of Michigan’s self-identified Jewish voters cast their ballot for Abdulrahman “Call Me Senator” El-Sayed despite his many demonizations of Jews. That’s even more than the third of New York Jews who voted for anti-Israel mayor Zohran Mamdani, yet with national as opposed to municipal office at stake, El-Sayed’s views have far greater salience. Although “progressive” candidates like El-Sayed purport to draw a sharp line between hatred of Jews, which they rebuke, and hatred of Israel, which they don’t deny, the veil falls easily. Anti-Zionist rhetoric becomes undeniably antisemitic when it targets Israel uniquely and obsessively, or when it slips into antisemitic tropes that cast Jews as scheming puppet-masters with money.
El-Sayed has doubled down on both. He condemns Israel’s existence as a Jewish state (with equal rights for all citizens) but not the many countries where Islam is explicitly designated as the state religion. He decries Israel’s imaginary genocide in Gaza despite the actual increase in its Palestinian population since October 7, 2023, and Israel’s “apartheid” that saw Arab Muslim citizens vote in record numbers during the recent election. West Bank Palestinians don’t vote in Israeli elections but U.S. voters don’t choose Canada’s prime minister and no one calls it apartheid. That Palestinians haven’t held an election since 2006 is no fault of Israel.
There is no dearth of explanations why even self-identifying Jews vote against communal interests when the candidate is a Democrat. These include politics as the new religion that casts Democratic talking points as today’s Jewish catechism; privileging that catechism to avoid being seen as merely tribal; and of course good old self-hatred. The Kotel has borne silent witness to Jewish complicity with their oppressors for two thousand years.
Lamentable as such choices may be, they are freely made and Israel will survive them, as it will survive El-Sayed’s lurid caricatures of its society and defense forces. Israel is strong economically, militarily, and – most importantly, despite all the internal disputation – socially cohesive. It is among the happiest societies on the planet.
Fundamental decisions concerning the relationship between Israel and the U.S. ultimately depend on facts. By any objective measure, the facts favor Israel, which has always made great military efforts to spare civilians while its enemies undertake greater efforts to ensure civilian deaths as a military strategy. Slander ultimately withers in the harsh light of truth. Self-delusion, on the other hand, is much hardier. And consequently a greater threat.
The blood had barely dried across southern Israel following the Hamas-led Palestinian invasion when many self-styled supporters of Israel, including the American secretary of state, argued that a pathway to Palestinian statehood had never been more urgent. It would “seize the narrative from Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian backer,” argued a New York Times writer. The answer to decades of war with a Palestinian statelet, culminating in the barbarities of October 7, 2023, was, to these minds … more Palestinian state.
Such thinkers see Israel’s original sin as having allowed Jewish settlement in territories captured in 1967 rather than, in effect, holding those territories in trust for the Palestinian population until it, and Israel’s adversary nations, were ready for peace. To this day, most of the countries Israel has fought have not made formal peace, the Palestinians least of all.
Progressively more generous offers of statehood, culminating in the 2008 overture that conceded essentially all stated Palestinian demands, have been rejected or ignored. And no wonder. The vast majority of Palestinians have always supported “armed struggle” against Israel and continue to do so, even amid the ruins of Gaza, while Palestinian support for statehood has always been weak. More than three decades after the Oslo Accords, Palestinians rely on Israel for 97% of their electricity and most of their water; and again, they have not held an election for 20 years.
The self-deluded reject the reality: most Palestinians oppose Jewish sovereignty in any sliver of the Dar al-Islam and have little interest in building the institutional foundations of statehood. To face such reality is too terrifying. If Palestinians will settle for nothing less than dhimmi subjugation of the Jews or their ejection from the land of Israel altogether, then we are powerless – doomed to eternal struggle. Our best intentions, all the levers of incentive and accommodation we pull to address political conflicts, are useless if the conflict is rooted in religious hatred rather than politics.
The self-deluded are determined to believe that all of humanity shares fundamental desires – for security, for sustenance, for a better future for our children. The notion that some parents might see that better future as martyrdom achieved by killing Jews is unthinkable nihilism, the fantasy of a bigoted imagination. (“God bless you!” cried the proud father of an October 7 murderer who phoned home to boast, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”)
The self-deluded also see malign politicians like El-Sayed as basically reasonable supporters of consensus positions such as the (failed) two-state solution. But in fact, the progressive wing of the U.S. Congress now prefers the eradication of the sole Jewish state. The more cunning among them hide this preference behind self-negating endorsements of two states. “If the Palestinian people decide, and the Israeli people decide that they want two states for two people, and they decide that on equal terms, I’m for it,” El-Sayed told 60 Minutes. If you believe one side is suffering genocide and apartheid, how can the terms ever be equal? That El-Sayed opposes even purely defensive arms sales to Israel does not trouble the serenely self-deluded.
Self-delusion is hardly confined to the majority of Jews who consider themselves idealistic liberals. Self-delusion swept the IDF out of Gaza in 2006 because not even the right-wing paragon Ariel Sharon could imagine the territory becoming an impregnable terror state. Self-delusion is a better term than conceptzia for the thinking that permitted the funding of Hamas and dismissed early warnings before October 7. Because, despite its genocidal charter and proclamations, surely Hamas preferred economic stability; surely all that crazy talk was just hot rhetoric.
Some day, perhaps, a new generation of Palestinians will be ready to accept a neighboring Jewish state and their own place among nations. But we’ve been waiting generations for that generation. We cannot reinvent our adversaries with wishful thinking. Some problems cannot be solved, only managed – despite the best of intentions and the finest minds. The scales must fall from the eyes of wishful thinkers before self-delusion ends in self-destruction.
