Israeli view: Democrats anti-Israel shift here to stay

After Democrats retook both houses of Congress in what has been widely described as a “blue tsunami” — unseating Republicans in decades-long GOP strongholds — Israeli experts told JNS they doubt the growing anti-Israel cohort in Congress is a blip that a pendulum swing will correct next cycle.

“It’s an evolving trend that shows greater signs of permanence than temporary quality,” Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told JNS.

Diker, who co-hosts a JNS podcast, noted that Michigan’s Democratic senator-elect, Abdul El-Sayed, who in January will become the first Muslim to serve in the Senate, joins anti-Israel Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — as well as Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a harsh critic of the Jewish state.

He called it a “shocking development” that Mamdani — who pledged during his campaign to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York — was elected. The mayor “sounds exactly like El-Sayed, but within the context of New York City politics,” he said. “Look at the evolution.”

“The major shift now is that this assault, which had been more on the fringes, on the left fringes of American politics since the 1960s, has now moved into the center of American politics and has now embedded itself in the US Senate,” he said. “That’s the danger. It’s become part of the legitimate mainstream discourse in America.”

El-Sayed, who declined to say whether the Iranian regime — which has killed hundreds of Americans since 1979 — is more dangerous than the Jewish state, is “the poster child for the red-green assault,” Diker said.

“There is a many-decades-long trend toward the penetration of the red-green assault, talking in far-left American terms about colonialism and imperialism and apartheid and occupation and racism,” he said. “These are fake. These are slanders and libels that I think the American Jewish leadership and Israel underestimated and underemphasized and, in fact, tabled, brushed under the rug, to their great peril. We see the results of this nearly 60-year trend playing out right now in America.”

During the campaign, El-Sayed called the Israeli government “bloodthirsty” and said it is “as evil as Hamas.” After a terrorist attacked Temple Israel, a synagogue with a preschool in West Bloomfield, Mich., in March, El-Sayed said that “hurt people hurt people” — a remark he later apologized for.

Eytan Gilboa, a professor at Bar-Ilan University and Reichman University and an expert on US-Israel relations, told JNS that the political shift away from support for Israel in the United States is likely to endure.

“Unfortunately, I think it will continue,” he said. “Right now, I think the exit polls show that 69% of American Jews voted for the Democrats, and this is compatible with the 70% we know of American Jews who usually support Democratic candidates. It seems that even in Michigan, there was a huge split in the Jewish community.”

An exit poll of Jewish early voters in Michigan, commissioned by the Jewish Majority, an advocacy group that opposes anti-Zionism in politics, found that 57% backed El-Sayed. The poll, which had a large margin of error, was taken before outgoing Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), who lost the Democratic primary to El-Sayed, endorsed Republican Mike Rogers.

In New York, 30% of Jews voted for Mamdani, Gilboa said.

“Many anti-Zionist Jews think that antisemitism in the United States increased because of the war and if the war stopped, then perhaps there would not be so much antisemitism,” he said. “I think that they are very naive and don’t really understand what is happening.”

Progressives and social democrats want to “completely change the American political and social system,” Gilboa said, and he expects that coalition to “gain power until the majority of Americans see where they are leading the United States.”

Martin Sherman, founder and CEO of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, is concerned yet hopeful.

“Certainly, I’m worried,” he told JNS. “I’m not sure that Israel can continue to rely on the United States as its sole strategic prop. I don’t think we can work on the assumption that this is going to go away by itself.”

“I’ve warned that this is going to have strategic consequences, and it’s going to affect not only Israel but the Jews,” he said. “Israel should invest between $2 billion and $3 billion a year in public diplomacy, which for Israel is very affordable.”

That investment, he said, would be but a “few percentage points of the state budget.”

“It’s no less strategically important than Israel’s strategic air fleet, air force,” he said. “This is something that has to be confronted very vigorously. Hopefully, it’s not too late to make an assertive assault on public opinion in the United States and in Europe.”

Danny Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2002 to 2006, is also hopeful. “Is everything lost?” he told JNS. “Of course not.”

“It is up to Israel now, with the Jewish community in the United States, with the evangelical communities in the United States, with all our supporters in the United States, whether it is in business, defense,” he said. “We should, first of all, fight back and try to isolate those anti-Israelis, anti-Zionists, who basically are also anti-Jewish and antisemites. It is high time to do that.” —JNS