Stop it: They Don’t Want You Anyway
My Jewish Democrat Friends,
The next time you are sitting around a dinner table with like-minded ostensibly “pro-Israel” friends and family, or perhaps a mixed, but not too virulently pro-Hamas DSA crowd, notice how often you or your cohort say “I hate Netanyahu, not Israel.” It is said quickly, even when all of the interlocutors generally agree and the phrase does not really need to be said given the context of the conversation. You want to prove that you are the reasonable kind of Jew, the kind who can be trusted, the kind who will not make anyone uncomfortable by rocking the boat too much. The kind that while knowing that Venn diagrams of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism overlap fully, you can certainly see “nuance.” You are an individual who despises extremes, a thinker, an intellectual who can still be invited to polite dinner parties.
Stop it.
This throwaway line has become a permission slip. It lets you engage in and nod along while people who have no real understanding of Israeli policy beyond knee-jerk reactions, use it either as shorthand credentials for being a good member of the Democratic Party or as cover for their objections to Jewish self-determination. When you say “I hate Netanyahu, not Israel,” you think you are drawing a reasonable line, but what you are doing instead is using the vocabulary that the movement to delegitimize Israel most needs, which is the reassurance that a “good Jew” agrees with the fixation on projecting all the perceived ills of Jewish self-determination on Israel’s current head of state. You can despise Netanyahu (by whatever logic) with every fiber of your being, and that still has nothing to do with whether Israel should exist or not. Juxtaposing these two concepts is a logical fallacy. You have allowed yourself to buy into this juxtaposition because it buys you a moment of social peace and allows you to be counted as the good Jew who is still a Democrat, even though the party to which you wish to belong (or think you still belongs) has long become the party that does not want you and is actively seeking to expel you from its midst. It lets you deceive yourself and not question why the same crowd that “hates Netanyahu,” does not hate anyone else.
The Jew-hating contingent does not care about “bad” governments as such or elsewhere. When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani impotently rages for Netanyahu’s arrest in New York City during UN Week, his sole focus is the political head of the only Jewish state. He does not call for arrest of dozens of other heads of state or terrorist organizations, e.g., Iran, China, Hamas, etc., who have actually oppressed, tortured and murdered countless of its citizens (many of Muslim faith) for simply having the temerity to try to oppose the murderous regimes that control their lives.
When Mamdani calls for “mostly peaceful” protests of Netanyahu, he plays to his base, and his base can certainly read between the lines. Witness the insane increase in anti-Semitic incidents across the five boroughs, including stabbings and assaults, one as recent as on Tisha b’Av a few weeks ago. Good job, New York – You Are #1!
The obsession with Netanyahu is simply an excuse. Unlike the Cornell student who explicitly wrote to a prospective employer that he did not want to be “working for a Jew,” politicians of a certain stripe still have not crossed that Rubicon, but they have found their scapegoat.
You are helping them.
Stop it.