The other day, while the civilized world was celebrating the ceasefire brokered by President Trump, ending the current hostilities between Israel and its neighbors in Gaza, the folks at the New York Times were wondering what Israel could possibly do to “repair its ties to Americans.”
According to the Times—and the smart set it represents—Israel’s “conduct” of the war has likely “cost it the support of an entire generation of U.S. voters.” Israel, you see, did its best to destroy its enemies: in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, and in Yemen. It destroyed Hamas’s leadership and its ability to conduct operations. It ended Hezbollah’s four-decade reign of terror. It set the Iranian nuclear program back by years, if not decades. And it, by and large, made the Persian Gulf safe for trade and travel again.
I won’t go so far as to say that it accomplished all of its goals and won a decisive victory. Some of the very smartest analysts of the Middle East I know and respect think that the deal Israel agreed to is problematic at best. Nevertheless, the war didn’t go the way much of the American Left would have liked, and so its media mouthpieces think it did ugly and horrific things.
Ironically, despite the fact that Israel’s “conduct” of the war was, by most honest accounts, as just and as conscientious as any such efforts could be, the New York Times isn’t necessarily wrong about Israel’s support in the United States. That support has suffered, and it is unlikely to be easily restored.
For reasons that the Times and the rest of the American ruling class seem hellbent on pretending don’t exist, Israel may indeed have lost the support of an entire generation of Americans—if not more.
In a now-deleted exchange on Twitter/X, the British-American political commentator and Islamist apologist Mehdi Hasan gave the giveaway. Angry about the terms of the ceasefire and the fact that he will no longer be able to prattle on endlessly about genocide and other inanities, Hasan lashed out at the American journalist Eli Lake.
In response to a tweet by Lake noting how quickly Gaza seemed to recover from its terrible ordeal, Hasan complained, “One of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of the previous genocides—Rwanda, even the Holocaust—is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over. They were shunned/deradicalized/prosecuted.”
This was quite a statement—even for Hasan, a noted, radical Israel-hater. Not only did he compare Gaza to the Holocaust and Eli Lake to the Nazis, but he also suggested that people like Lake should be prosecuted and shunned, even though Lake had nothing whatsoever to do with the war, its conduct, its conclusion, or the losses Hasan’s Islamist allies suffered. Indeed, that was the entire point.
Here’s the thing: Eli Lake is an American. He was born in Philadelphia. He went to college in Connecticut. He lives in Washington, D.C. He is, by any measure, more “American” than Hasan, who was born in England, went to college at Oxford, and maintains dual American and British citizenship. Yet Hasan compared Lake to the Hutus in Rwanda and the Nazis in Germany.
He could, in theory, have compared Lake to Charles Lindbergh, a famous American who opposed American entry into World War II and is often accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. But he didn’t. He went out of his way to compare Lake to the “Nazis” to label him a perpetrator of the alleged genocide in Gaza. To Hasan, Lake’s nationality and profession are irrelevant. Lake is guilty of genocide exclusively and specifically because he is Jewish.
I have argued elsewhere that the American Democratic tradition of expressing hatred for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is part scapegoating and part dog whistle. For years—decades, really—Democrats could wink and nod to their anti-Semitic fellow travelers by criticizing Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s mere existence allowed Democrats to blame “the Jews” without actually having to blame the Jews. It gave them a handy, ready-made explanation for the failure of the two-state solution and enabled them at least to try to play both sides of the issue. In public, they could say things like, “Of course I support Israel and its right to defend itself,” even as they’d smile coyly at their identitarian supporters, as if to say, “We know, we know. It’s really the Jews’ fault.”
Over the last couple of years, the Democrats have found it increasingly unnecessary to make any rhetorical concessions to Israel, to play “both sides.” They are—as the New York Times documents—increasingly free to attack Israel, despite reality and the facts on the ground. But just as with Netanyahu, it’s not really about Israel. It’s not really about “Zionism.” It’s about Jews, pure and simple.
When college protestors shriek and shout and march about for “free Palestine,” they don’t limit their harassment to “Zionists” or Israeli citizens. They target their Jewish cohorts. They celebrate and advocate for the “globalization” of the Intifada, which is to say the targeting of Jews wherever they are, not just in Israel.
The Times quotes Shibley Telhami, “a pollster and scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Maryland,” who says that “We now have a paradigmatic Gaza generation like we had a Vietnam generation and a Pearl Harbor generation. It’s a new generation where Israel is seen as a villain.”
Telhami, for the record, is a Palestinian-born American citizen, a Christian of Arab descent who has long blamed the violence in the region on the five-plus decades of Israeli “military occupation” of Palestinian territories. I’m not sure what explanation he gives for the violence that led to Israel occupying those lands, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he thinks that’s Israel’s fault, too.
In any case, his assessment is likely mistaken. Given the real and threatened violence against Jews that accompanies protests and the fact that anti-Semitic violence in general has skyrocketed since the start of the October 7th War, it’s pretty clear that we have a paradigmatic Gaza generation where Jews are seen as villains.
For the entirety of my adult life, I’ve pushed back against the generally outdated notion that anti-Semitism is a right-wing phenomenon. It may have been historically, but that’s hardly been the case over the last several decades. Until now, that is.
Many conservatives—including the vice president—have dismissed the rampant racism exposed in texts/chats of a handful of young Republicans. I think that’s a mistake for a handful of reasons, most relevantly in this case because of the anti-Semitism also expressed in those chats. That is telling—and alarming.
The Times notes, for example, that “Despite Republican efforts to identify their party with Israel and to tag Democrats as providing aid and comfort to its enemies, younger evangelical Christians are breaking with their parents on the issue, seeing Israel as an oppressor rather than as a victim.”
Again, it’s not just evangelicals, and it’s not just Israel. This is about Jews, and young conservatives are playing with the embers of a long-dormant fire.
Unfortunately, what all of this suggests is that the Cultural Marxist endeavor launched by Edward Said has largely succeeded. The anti-Semites have taken the institutions, and they’ve won significant victories.
To return to the New York Times’ question, “What can Israel do to repair its ties with Americans?” The answer is “nothing.” This isn’t about Israel, and Israelis can’t fix this problem. As with everything else, the only solution is to make the long march back through the institutions and to take them away from the Cultural Left.
One can only hope Israel and the world’s Jews can survive until we do.
