The End of Jewish Influence in the USA
The results are in and the big losers were the GOP.
Just kidding.
It was us.
I don’t mean that Republicans did well. They got wiped out, and watching it was about as much fun as I have had since my refrigerator died before Pesach. I mean that underneath the seat counts and the exit polls and the Vice President’s posting habit, something happened on Tuesday that should bother American Jews considerably more than who ends up running the House Agriculture Committee, or how many people the Democrats will try to impeach.
No. What we should truly fear is that we just found out we don’t matter anymore.
Not that we matter less.
That we don’t matter at all.
There used to be a question American Jews asked before they voted.
Is it good for the Jews?
When I was growing up the question got asked half as a joke, except everyone knew it was not really a joke. My parents always voted Democrat. When I registered Republican at eighteen, to their considerable consternation, I had to point out that they had voted Republican in the last three elections, and that it was mostly about where the candidate stood on Israel.
Nobody asks it anymore, because there is no longer a unanimous answer.
This is not a complaint about young people, or assimilation, or whatever we are blaming this month. It is arithmetic. The question only works if everyone arrives at the same answer, and for sixty years we did, because the answer was Israel.
Israel was the thing that mattered to almost every Jew, almost universally. On Israel we were of one mind. We became an influential voting bloc, and because we had concentrated ourselves in New York, California, Illinois, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, politicians counted us. Carefully.
That is over.
Not weakening.
Over.
Today American Jews no longer agree on Israel. We do not agree on the war, on Netanyahu, on the settlements, on whether Zionism is a liberation movement or a colonial enterprise. Our organizations are split. Our families are split.
We no longer see eye to eye on any of it.
So when a politician in Brooklyn or Los Angeles looks at Jewish voters now, he no longer sees a bloc. Actually, he sees nothing.
Politicians are many things, but they are not bad at counting, and they go where the numbers are.
Look at what happened to our enemies. For decades the reason open antisemitism stayed on the fringe was not that Americans woke up every morning full of warm feeling for the Jews. It was that there was a price for publicly showing disdain. Say the wrong thing and the organizations moved, the donors moved, the editorial boards moved, and suddenly your career went poof.
Times have changed.
People now say things on television that would have ended them in 2010, and the consequence is a longer podcast contract.
Our inability to shut it down is the proof. The fact that two of the most prominent voices defending Israel are Michael Rapaport and Boy George should tell you something ( btw I went to his concert last night and it was great).
Our friends and allies are silent or hiding. The few who have stood by us, like the evangelicals, never bothered to explain to their kids why Jews and Israel matter. We are one generation away from having no supporters at all.
This is the beginning, and where I think it is headed is depressing.
As of today the two most likely people to be sworn in as president in January 2029 are JD Vance and Kamala Harris. Harvard/HarrisX last week had Vance at 40 percent of Republicans and Harris at 34 percent of Democrats. Both lead their fields by double digits and nobody is close.
Take a good look at both of them.
Harris was asked on national television whether she agrees with the members of her party who call the war a genocide. Her answer was that it is a term of law for a court to decide, and that given the number of dead children we should all step back and ask the question honestly.
Read that again. She did not say no. She is a former prosecutor. She knows the legal definition of genocide does not turn on how many children are killed. It turns on intent.
Then there is Vance.
The day after the midterms he posted that Republicans lost for four reasons, and reason number four was our relationship with Israel. His source was a pollster he declined to name, with data nobody has seen, which is a convenient kind of pollster to have. No exit poll asked a single question about Israel. They asked about Iran. Iran and Israel are not the same country, a distinction I would normally expect a Vice President to manage.
He made it up, or close enough.
The question is why, and I think the answer is that his real base was never the Republican party as it used to exist. It is Tucker Carlson and his ilk, who have been building this exact argument for three years while the rest of us assured each other it was a fringe thing. Vance can count. And here is the part that should keep you up: I do not think he is faking it.
He believes it, which is why he has never repudiated those idiots.
So here is where we are. One likely president who will not say the word genocide but will think it. Another who has already decided, publicly, that his party’s problem is Israel.
Whoever wins, Israel cannot count on the United States the way it has since 1967.
And the place that gets ugly first is not Washington. It is New York.
Forty-second Street and First Avenue.
The Security Council.
Since 1972 the United States has used its veto more than forty times to kill resolutions against Israel. That veto is the only thing between Israel and the full South Africa package. Mandatory sanctions, arms embargoes, the complete set. Not another General Assembly resolution with no teeth.
Now we are talking about Chapter Seven.
Chapter Seven is the part of the UN Charter that lets the Security Council declare something a threat to international peace and then actually do something about it. Sanctions. Arms embargoes. Blockades. Force, if it comes to that. Everything the General Assembly produces is a suggestion. Chapter Seven is law, binding on every member state, and it is the mechanism that was used against apartheid South Africa.
A president who thinks Israel cost him the Senate does not spend political capital on that veto. A president who thinks genocide is an open question for the courts does not either.
Nobody will announce it. There will be no speech, no press conference, no hard decision taken in a wood-panelled room. There will be an abstention one Tuesday afternoon, and a statement about how the United States has concerns regarding certain elements of the text while believing the international community must be heard.
Even if we still have our friends in Congress, it will not save us. This is the president’s call alone. Just ask Obama, who on his way out the door let Resolution 2334 through by abstaining, the one declaring East Jerusalem occupied territory and every Jewish neighborhood built there since 1967 illegal.
Game over.
Here is what I keep coming back to. They worked this out before we did. They understood that the wall was never the ADL, or the donors, or the strongly worded op-eds. The wall was that we voted together. Break that and the rest is decoration.
They broke it. Though in fairness, we handed them the hammer.
They figured it out.
When will we?
