Israel’s international isolation has begun

We’ve never lived through such rapid change in the politics of Israel as we are now. Two nights ago more than half of Democratic senators – 27– voted to block some arms sales to Israel. A day before that, the UK and Canada said they will recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N, echoing France’s recent statement. 

These are steps that advocates for Palestinians thought might be years away. But today the world is shocked by Israel’s starvation of Gaza, and the mainstream press is at last reporting the charge of genocide.  

Israel’s international isolation has begun. 

These political changes were driven by the street. For years, Israel’s favorability has been sliding in global opinion and in the U.S. among Democratic voters. But party leaders defied the shift — and then Zohran Mamdani won the NY primary for mayor last month, in a groundswell that overwhelmed Cuomo’s $25 million in negative ads. A poll shows that nearly four of five Democrats in NY say Israel is committing a genocide. And Trump’s base is catching up. “My people are starting to hate Israel,” Trump reportedly warned a “Jewish donor”.  

There are several lessons the left should recognize. 

Pressure works

We always said that the way to stop Israeli war crimes is for western nations to sanction or abandon Israel. The change in official tone proves the point. Israel is now seeking to moderate its brutality, and reports from Israel say that some Israelis are ashamed by the front-page coverage of starvation. The west could have ended the occupation a long time ago. 

Our media failed us

When the reckoning on genocide comes, it will include all the voices who explained away children buried in rubble by American bombs. Liberal voices in the Times, on the cables and NPR acted like Gaza was normal—then the people arose.

“Truthfully, it goes back decades,” Donald Johnson writes. “Israel has been an apartheid state for a long time, even by liberal Zionist standards. Jimmy Carter was right about apartheid in 2006 and the press didn’t want to listen.” (In fact, Carter was pilloried by Wolf Blitzer and Terry Gross and ostracized from the Democratic Party.)

The Israel lobby is exposed

Biden and Harris and Blinken and Power did nothing to stop a genocide, just sent more bombs—why? Democrats for years embraced the illegal settlement project, and Obama insisted on “undivided Jerusalem” language in the Democratic platform in 2012–why? Dem leadership in NY has failed to endorse Mamdani weeks after his victory—why? 

There is only one factor that keeps leading Democrats “allegiant” to Israel, as James Carville phrased it, and that is the pro-Israel forces inside the Party, embodied by DMFI and AIPAC and the big donors.   

The good news is that the corruption is now obvious. “Support for blocking bombs to Israel, recognizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and holding Israel accountable for its violations of the law is not simply the opinion of the majority of Democratic voters, it is the vast, vast majority, and any Democrat who stands with AIPAC instead of their own voters is running the real risk of getting voted out of office,” says Margaret DeReus of IMEU. 

 While former Obama aide Tommy Vietor said on his podcast that the Dems’ policy of hugging Netanyahu is a failure, he pleads guilty, and — “there is no going back to a pre-October 7 Democratic Party”. 

For years the lobby claimed that the U.S. was on Israel’s side because Israel served the American interest, and anti-Israel activists claimed that if Americans only knew they would abandon Israel. The anti-Israel activists were right. There is no American interest in racial oppression. There is no American interest in arming a country that bombs one neighbor after another creating instability across the world. 

The liberal Zionist branch of the lobby is also vulnerable. For over a year it has denied that there is a genocide– as it has denied apartheid and ethnic cleansing and war crimes in years past. The liberal Zionists served a vital function for the lobby, keeping progressive Democrats on board. To that end, they have fostered delusions — that real pressure on Israel is bad policy and antisemitic, and that Israel is a “democratic Jewish state.” 

Today the liberal Zionists are scrambling to get ahead of the shifting Democratic politics of the issue, but they ought to be challenged. For instance, J.J. Goldberg says Americans should sympathize with Israelis’ “fear at the prospect of accepting a new structure of full equality and integration, as though a century of Palestinian anger will just go away”. There were similar fears in the Jim Crow south and South Africa. 

The Jewish community is in turmoil and it should be

The American Jewish community is the most reactionary force in the Democratic Party on Israeli apartheid. Leading Jewish organizations sought to kneecap any politician who stepped out of line. These politics among the most liberal highly educated voting bloc in the U.S. should have produced an internal Jewish crisis a long time ago. Yes, horror over Israeli actions generated Jewish Voice For Peace and IfNotNow 10 and 20 years ago, but today is a revolutionary moment. As Arielle Angel writes, “The Gaza genocide has made plain what many leftist Jews have long feared: that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot.” (This rot sadly extends to Bernie Sanders, the leading moral voice for Democrats, whose refusal to call a genocide a genocide surely reflects his youth volunteering at an Israeli kibbutz.)  

It’s understandable that many Americans are so afraid of the antisemitism label that they won’t call out Jewish organizations’ role in oppressing Palestinians. But Jews can do so freely—and young Jews must take down the pro-genocide establishment. 

The root cause of the Israel/Palestine conflict is Zionism

An ideology that grants Jews greater rights to land and to civil freedoms is inherently hateful and will always produce the sort of revolt we saw on October 7 (horrific war crimes against civilians took place in Algeria and South Africa too). 

It is great that European politicians are finally trying to give Palestinians sovereignty. The effort is way too late, but it demonstrates the truth that political freedom is all that will guarantee security in the land. 

The recognition and denunciation of Zionism must accelerate. Zionism might have made sense 100 years ago (or even 80) as a liberation from European persecution. But over and over as they gained power, Zionists took the wrong path. They chose ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid. They chose disdain for their neighbors in favor of superpower politics. They bragged of their “villa in the jungle” – a racist fantasy of Jewish supremacy that even liberal Zionists like J Street promoted. 

Can Israel be reformed? I don’t know. But Zionism cannot be. Know it by its fruits. It is apartheid genocide and famine, and the American people have awakened.