The Israel-Loathing Left Has Become the Future of America’s Democratic Party
From a glance at the news headlines, one might be tempted to conclude that the political right and left across America are now competing to show who can do more to normalize hatred of Jews and Israel. Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are going strong; but so too are Zohran Mamdani and the Congressional squad.
Both sides of this sordid contest deserve loud and clear condemnation. But the equally reprehensible beliefs now rising from the fever swamps of both right and left have not translated into an equivalence between how America’s two political parties are responding to those surging hatreds. While both parties have failed in some ways, the scale of those failures has been orders of magnitude greater on the part of the Democrats.
The principal Republican failures consist of the President’s and Vice-President’s inadequate verbal responses to toxic antisemitic rhetoric on the far right. First was JD Vance’s failure to condemn the recently-publicized racist and antisemitic text messages shared among several young Republican volunteers, including “jokes about gas chambers . . . and praise of Hitler.” Vance dismissed the hateful rhetoric as just “edgy, offensive jokes” by young kids. Next came President Trump’s refusal to condemn Tucker Carlson’s interview of the antisemitic Nazi cheerleader and Stalin fan Nick Fuentes – even as Trump spoke in defense of Carlson’s right to host and broadcast such an interview. Both Vance and Trump easily could have and should have denounced the hateful activists’ texts, Fuentes’ toxic views, and Carlson’s obsequious failure to challenge them. To their credit, several Republican leaders did issue such denunciations, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Republican Jewish CEO Matt Brooks, author and influencer Ben Shapiro, and former Vice-President Mike Pence.
But while not excusing Trump’s and Vance’s rhetorical failures, the fact remains that Trump’s first term and the Trump-Vance second term have witnessed the most forward-leaning of all Presidential administrations both in opposing antisemitism and in defending Israel’s national security. In 2019, Trump issued an executive order clarifying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to “institutions that traffic in anti-Semitic hate” – which for the first time brought Jewish students under the protection of civil rights laws on college campuses. Trump’s reinstating that order in 2025, along with several similar executive orders, led the Combat Antisemitism Movement to publicly single out Trump’s “historic commitment to protecting the Jewish community by deploying all levers of American federal power to combat the scourge of antisemitism in our country.”
President Trump also has done far more than any other President to shore up Israel’s long-term national security. In his first term Trump formally recognized Israel’s claim to the strategically critical Golan Heights; fulfilled the long-promised but equally-long neglected American pledge to relocate our embassy in Jerusalem; successfully ordered the killing of Quasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s vast and violent Mideast regional terrorism apparatus; imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, which forced Iran to reduce its funding of regional terror-proxies; and most importantly, brokered the Abraham Accords, which produced the first genuinely warm peace between Israel and several Arab countries.
Trump also withdrew from the deeply flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which not only explicitly permitted Iran to resume production of nuclear weapons after ten years, but also lacked any functional enforcement mechanism: it effectively banned “no-advance-notice” site inspections, and wholly barred outside inspectors’ access to the especially sensitive Parchin production site.
Trump’s second-term actions further solidified Israel’s security – along with that of the free world – by partnering with Israel to obliterate what by 2025 had become Iran’s almost-complete nuclear weapons production sites. Trump also robustly supported Israel’s highly justified war to eliminate the explicitly genocidal Hamas dictatorship – in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s frequent hectoring of Israel to dial back those necessary military actions, which hectoring included punitive public arms embargoes.
In fact, this contrast between the actions of Republicans and Democrats now extends across the whole range of issues pertaining to antisemitism and the US-Israel alliance.
As regards the post-10/7 surge of antisemitism, neither the Biden administration nor Congressional Democrats sought to take any significant action against the widespread violations of Jewish students’ civil rights that erupted across American campuses in October 2023. The scandalous inaction of Biden’s Justice Department in those months invites the question whether his Civil Rights Division Chief, Kristen Clarke, still retained the antisemitic perspectives that she had sponsored during her past years as a student activist at Harvard.
Nor did the Biden administration make any attempt to rectify the entrenched and well-documented anti-Israel bias that permeates federally-subsidized Middle East Studies Departments across American campuses – which the Trump administration has vigorously sought to remedy through its proposed new higher education Compact. As far back as 2012, an assessment of the academic atmosphere regarding Israel found that “on campuses today Israel is regularly, though falsely, condemned for being created ‘illegally’ – through the ‘theft’ of Palestinian lands and property – and therefore has no ‘right to exist.’” Until President Trump’s second term, no President of either party sought to address this toxically impactful bias, which now shapes America’s rising leadership classes.
Nor have the Democrats done anything to oppose the further spread of this false anti-Israel pedagogy into K-12 education – in fact, the Democrats are often facilitating and supporting it. Under California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the notoriously anti-Semitic “Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (LESMC) has been adopted by several school districts to satisfy California’s mandatory high school course requirement in ethnic studies. Drawing from Marxist theory, the LESMC presents an explicitly anti-Zionist agenda, promotes the BDS movement, and defames Israel as “a racist, white supremacist colonizing project that deprives the true indigenous people of the land of their right to self-determination.”
California is not the only Democratic outpost pushing this antisemitic grab bag of curricular falsehoods. Though little reported, the Democrats’ 2024 Vice Presidential candidate, Gov. Tim Walz, signed into law in 2023 a mandate that all Minnesota public and charter schools teach the Israel-defaming LESMC.
Nor is the Democrats’ record on Israel’s national security any better. As already noted, President Obama’s 2015 Iran deal, which was falsely sold as preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, actually ratified their eventual acquisition, all while blocking effective inspections and enforcement of the deal’s promise of “prevention.” To be clear, this empty shell of a deal was made with the same Islamist dictatorship that had armed and encircled the Middle East with its many terror proxies, repeatedly pledged to annihilate Israel, has mass-murdered hundreds of American soldiers in the region, and whose legislature regularly erupts in cheers of “Death to America.”
As also noted, the Biden administration repeatedly brought pressures to bear on Israel not to finish its war to eliminate Hamas – yet still faced rising opposition from anti-Israel activists and voters for what support the administration still did provide to Israel. This is especially concerning insofar as Biden may well be the last “old school” Zionist Democrat to attain the party’s presidential nomination. Biden’s most likely successors all draw from the so-called progressive-left wing of the party, where robust support for Israel is increasingly deemed a badge of dishonor and grounds for ostracism.
This deeply worrisome trend is abundantly documented by the public stands of the Democrats’ 2028 Presidential contenders. Current national polls put Gavin Newsom in the lead, followed by Kamela Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On antisemitism and Israel, they differ only in how much of Trump’s favorable record they reject.
California Gov. Newson’s record is slightly less problematic than the other three, insofar as he recently produced a statewide plan to oppose antisemitism, and unlike many Democrats, he refrained from denouncing President Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But as noted, his administration has failed to take any action against the many California school districts teaching the blatantly antisemitic LESMC curriculum. He also chose to remain silent amid revelations of an even more radical anti-Israel curriculum pushed by the San Francisco school department, which blames Israel for Hamas’s mass rapes and slaughters, denounces Israel as guilty of terrorism “significantly worse than that of the Palestinians,” and rationalizes Palestinian terrorism as “committed in pursuit of just causes . . . .” In March 2024 Newsom also issued a public letter to California’s Muslim communities, which recycled the false claims of “burgeoning disease and starvation” across Gaza, and endorsed President Biden’s demands for Israel to enter a cease fire, which would have kept the genocidal Hamas dictatorship in full control of Gaza – leaving Israel vulnerable to future repeats of the 10/7 horrors.
Far worse are the false facts and deleterious policies embraced by Presidential contenders Harris, Buttigieg, and Ocasio-Cortez. All three have recycled the false claim that Israel was causing mass starvation across Gaza, with Ocasio-Cortez specifically accusing Israel of “carrying out a genocide.” All three have leanings toward a possible arms embargo on Israel, with Harris having told a questioner during her 2024 Presidential campaign that she was open to discussing the idea, while Buttegeig explicitly endorsed an embargo (and called Netanyahu’s conduct of the Gaza war “horrifying”). Ocasio-Cortez actually co-sponsored legislation for an embargo.
Regarding the Iranian nuclear threat, Harris, Buttegeig, and Ocasio-Cortez all supported the empty JCPOA deal, which as already noted, actually protected Iran’s march to nuclear weapons capacity. Given Harris’s 2024 interview admission that she could not think of anything she’d have done differently than President Biden, this places her on the same page as Biden’s full-on Iran appeasement policies, which included “weakening sanctions, unfreezing Iranian funds, and attempting to revive the hugely flawed Iran nuclear deal.” Ocasio-Cortez took an even more extreme line, denouncing Trump’s B2 air strikes on Iran’s nuclear production facilities as grounds for Trump’s impeachment.
Far from representing outliers, these several troubling stands on Jewish-related issues now reflect the mainstream of the Democratic Party. This explains such alarming incidents as the party leadership’s response to then-New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdanis’s defense of the Palestinian movement’s use of the phrase “Globalize the intifada” (i.e., calling for the mass murder of Jews worldwide, including in the United States): the Democrats’ National Chairman Ken Martin refused to condemn that incitement to antisemitic slaughter. Other leading Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), endorsed Mamdani’s candidacy.
All this is distressingly consistent with the rising hostility to Israel among the Democrats’ voting base. An April 2025 Pew poll found that 69% of those who lean Democratic “express unfavorable opinions of Israel,” as compared with just 37% of Republicans. For the 18-29 year old demographic, 76 percent of Democratic leaners have a favorable view of the Palestinian people, while only 42 percent have a favorable view of Israelis.
In other words, absent a wholesale opinion change among younger Democrats, virulent hostility to Israel is destined to keep rising across America’s Democratic party mainstream. This is a crisis not just for Jewish Democrats, but for all Jews both in America and worldwide.
While this crisis demands a broad array of specific responses, one overarching strategic lesson is clear: Diaspora Jewry’s entrenched focus on the antisemitism of the far right must be broadened to address the surging antisemitism of the hard left. And that lesson must be informed by this fundamental recognition: While the West’s leading opinion-shaping institutions have largely ostracized proponents of right-wing antisemitism, many of those same institutions have been colonized and captured by proponents of left-wing antisemitism.
The future of the Jewish people may well depend on whether we recognize and act on those unwelcome but critically important realities.
