The political news from Israel is tragic. Whether Netanyahu stays or goes, none of the Jewish parties is talking about the only issue that matters to the world, Palestinian freedom. The leading parties to replace Netanyahu are committed to the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and are openly racist, declaring that they won’t form a governing coalition with Palestinians. Even the few left-Zionist candidates are vague about a Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu campaigns on two big achievements — he’s waging war on Lebanon and convinced the United States to go to war against Iran.
Israel’s character is plain: it is a militarist ethno-state, not a democracy. And its only answer to its fundamental problem — what does a Jewish state do with the indigenous Palestinian population? — is to entrench apartheid and ethnic cleansing, passing laws that give Jews greater rights. And waging endless wars with those who resist.
These realities are at last naked to Americans. The rapper Macklemore dominated cultural news by getting fired from the Ed Sheeran tour for the brave act of saying “Free Palestine” in stadiums.
Macklemore’s refusal to be silenced was swiftly echoed by every other supporting act on the tour, and Ed Sheeran has been badly damaged. Not the pro- Palestinian voices, for once.
Yahoo reports that Robert Kraft of the Patriots teamed up with three other Jewish NFL owners (Jeffrey Lurie, David Tepper, Arthur Blank) to get Macklemore thrown off the Ed Sheeran tour. So these Jewish leaders provided fodder to antisemites by doing just what the haters have accused us of doing—using financial power behind closed doors to suppress free speech on Israel.
Meanwhile, Jewish leaders in Michigan are trying to force the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to accept “Jewish sovereignty in Israel” as a “non-negotiable” principle of the Jewish community. They are blessing apartheid.
This is very bad for the Jews, as my mother used to say.
Israel’s collapse in U.S. politics is a crisis for the community that I care most about. The Jewish community in its official dimension is exposed as the basis of U.S. support for a militant apartheid state. My community in its official dimension has demanded that politicians and media figures accept the slaughter of 20,000 children — triggering a rebellion in U.S. politics.
For three generations, my community — one of the most liberal, privileged, educated demographics in the U.S.— has enforced foreign-policy and cultural orthodoxy on Israel by way of the Israel lobby. “We became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy,” as Dershowitz wrote. You were an antisemite if you supported Palestinian human rights. You shut up about Israeli massacres or you lost your career in journalism or the arts. You got canceled like Jimmy Carter for calling apartheid apartheid.
The lobby destroyed the two-state solution, demanding even Obama’s compliance with the illegal colonization program. The lobby gave us two wars that were in Israel’s interests not ours. First Iraq, as Walt and Mearsheimer informed us, 20 years ago. Now Iran, as everyone from Kamala Harris to the authors Ian Lustick and Eli Clifton explain today.
This has been a historic feat. Never before has a tiny client-state so dominated the politics of a superpower.
That influence is under siege and coming to an end. The Gaza Genocide being live-streamed…the social media uprising over that genocide even as leading media signed off on it… the destruction of Kamala Harris’s campaign in part because of her support for the genocide… the stunning rise of insurgent politicians who dared to criticize the Jewish state, like Zohran Mamdani and El-Sayed — all signal the political crisis of the Israel lobby. AIPAC is exposed, and people despise it.
This is a Jewish crisis because Jewish communal support for a pariah state could make pariahs of Jews. It will isolate Jews in America as backers of bigotry against non-Jews.
The lobby continues to exercise power. And it is a distortion of Jewish traditions. That petition in Michigan stating that “Jewish sovereignty in Israel” is a core Jewish principle is an attack on the separation of church and state, the principle under which Jews have thrived in American society. Yet leading Jewish intellectuals underwrite such claims by arguing that Zionism is now Jewish religious culture.
Thankfully, elements of the Jewish community are fighting back. They call for universal human rights and adherence to international law, not “Jewish sovereignty.” Many Jews in Michigan are organizing support for El-Sayed.
Anti-Zionists are still in the minority in the Jewish community. We have the next generation, and we have won some former Zionists (like Peter Beinart, now a defender of Palestinian freedom). J Street is being undermined by its own base demanding action.
We are winning over more Jews day by day for a simple reason. People recognize Israel’s monstrous behavior. Israel will need generations to reform, not years, says Anshel Pfeffer on a recent Haaretz podcast.
American Jews cannot wait. The Jewish future depends on our awakening.
