The U.S. has spent the last few years supporting one of the worst atrocities on the planet, largely because we are told that Israel shares our alleged wonderful values. Israel’s most passionate supporters say it hasn’t done anything wrong in Gaza, deny the testimony of Palestinians and the analysis of experts, and accuse Israel’s critics of dishonesty, hatred, and bigotry. And most critically, if you criticize them for this, they claim victimhood.
Support for Israel and Zionism, we are told, is a central part of the Jewish religion and Jewish identity, and if we criticize that, we are bigots.
No one should be impressed by that argument. The world is full of people who make a collection of religious or ideological beliefs part of their identity, and if some of those beliefs are factually wrong or even immoral, they can cause problems. The list of examples here is endless and includes cases that are very different from support for Israel, but the underlying principle is the same. There are people who believe their clergy couldn’t be pedophiles. There are people who believe the Bible is a science textbook or that people who oppose their beliefs are heretics whose rights should be suppressed. There are people who still think the Confederacy was fighting for noble principles and people who thought the Soviet Union was a workers’ state.
People have the right to their beliefs, but they don’t have the right to suppress criticism, and if they claim to be victims if their beliefs are criticized, they are simply wrong. Furthermore, if they deny atrocities or downplay them or dismiss testimony by the victims of their favored state, they are morally wrong and quite often guilty of bigotry themselves.
We see this controversy playing out in Abdul El- Sayed’s senate campaign in Michigan, in which he has been attacked in bad faith from all different angles largely over his criticism of Israel, with Zionists demanding apology after apology.
An aside: To be fair, in my opinion, there was one important point where his critics were correct and El- Sayed apologized. In response to the March attack on a synagogue in Michigan, in which the alleged attacker, a Lebanese man, had recently lost family to Israeli bombs, El-Sayed had said: “ hurt people hurt people.” While often true, I believe this was not the appropriate thing to say when, in this case, the Jewish community was justifiably horrified by what had happened and fearful of further attacks. But that is only a part of the criticisms aimed at El- Sayed. The majority of the attacks are unfounded and bigoted.
Cue the latest controversy surrounding El-Sayed, Israel critics, and Israel defenders.
The mainstream media has, in recent weeks, become obsessed with the story of leftist social media commentator Hasan Piker and his support for El-Sayed. Since El-Sayed’s defeat of Hailey Stevens and the more than $30 million of Israel lobby spending that came with her, the establishment (both Democratic and Republican politicians, as well as the media) has zeroed in on Piker’s & El-Sayed’s relationship as evidence of El-Sayed’s so-called antisemitic beliefs (i.e., his criticism of Israel).
Commenting on El-Sayed’s relationship with Piker, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, suffering from a serious attack of pundit brain, said that El-Sayed should do what then-Senator Obama did in 2008 with his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (also a vocal critic of Israel), and throw Piker under the bus. Goldberg’s entire argument falls into the trap of making El-Sayed responsible for everything Piker has said or supposedly said. Would that win over his critics? No, as we will soon see.
For context, when Obama’s associations with Wright and his sermons (which included criticism of U.S. foreign policy against Palestinians, and domestic policies against African Americans, among others), Obama called Wright’s comments “divisive,” “racially charged” and “views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.”
In Goldberg’s memory, Obama’s speech was a fair and wonderfully balanced response to the pressure he faced to distance himself from Wright. In reality, Obama was pandering to Israel supporters in a period where the majority of Americans were paying little or no attention to Israeli apartheid.
And Obama’s speech was not simply the wonderfully fair and balanced production that Goldberg remembers. Here is what Obama said in that speech about Wright’s comments on Israel and Palestine:
“But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s efforts to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems — two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change — problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”
There is a lesson to learn here, not about a great speech pulling us together, but about who gets thrown under the bus, and it’s not just Wright or Piker. It’s the entire base that voted for El-Sayed, in part due to the shared belief that, yes, Israel is committing a genocide, and America should not be funding it.
Further proof that the solution Goldberg offered would not actually satisfy El-Sayed’s critics, is the “nonnegotiable” petition that has since been launched by a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders, which makes it quite clear that the issue isn’t some Twitch streamer— it’s anti-Zionism. And contrary to what Goldberg wrote in her piece, it isn’t just about Zionists not feeling welcome— it is about what Zionists in the Democratic Party have always wanted, which is to make anti-Zionists unwelcome.
Michelle Goldberg was worried that Zionists wouldn’t be allowed in the Democratic Party. The petition is not asking for a big tent with Zionists and anti-Zionists uneasily allied to defeat the Republicans. They want anti-Zionism expelled and treated as antisemitic.
The petition demands that everyone accept and embrace a political ideology (Zionism) because some people have made it a central part of their identity and religion. As an argument, it has no force. As a political threat, it might have some.
El-Sayed is in a difficult position because at least some Zionist democrats are willing to support his republican opponent, Mike Rogers, and therefore Trump, if El-Sayed does not capitulate. But if he does what they want, he shows he is just another cynical politician with no integrity.
A bit off the topic of El-Sayed, but this article mentions the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg a number of times. You will want to read her recent editorial
Why Israel Fears This Searing New Documentary…Israel is treating the new documentary “NAZA,” by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, less like bad publicity than a national security crisis….After seeing it, I can understand why Israel finds it so threatening. Its subjects described factory-scale targeting, enabled by artificial intelligence, in which little effort was made to avoid enormous numbers of civilian casualties. “The goal was quantity, not quality,” said one of the speakers. According to the sources in the film, the military chose to target members of Hamas, some low-level, at home at night rather than when they were out during the day because it was easier, even though it meant killing their families and neighbors. One man told of hacking into the phone of a 12-year-old girl to learn when her father arrived home, and then ordering a bombing in which she was killed….“Israel has been in a state of denial now for close to three years,” said the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov, author of the recent book “Israel: What Went Wrong.” Until “NAZA,” he said, there had been little debate in the country about the leveling of Gaza. Now, he said, people are “actually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.”…It’s hard to tell whether Israelis are enraged by “NAZA” because they think it’s full of lies, or because they know or fear it’s true.
Opinion | Why Israel Fears This Searing New Documentary – The New York Times