An outspoken critic of US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, Dershowitz has advocated for a president’s authority to order the killing of US citizens abroad and has opposed the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he wrote, “There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” adding that this “represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world.”
Thus, despite his decades as a Democrat and professed commitment to liberal social policy, Alan Dershowitz announced that he will proactively campaign to “prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate” and urged his sympathisers to “campaign and contribute for continued Republican control of Congress”.
Never mind that many of his fellow scholars have warned that Trump’s unchecked power is undoing America’s constitutional republicanism before our eyes. Israel’s support is on the line, and that’s what matters.
Around the same time, Wall Street Journal columnist Matthew Continetti fretted that “Backing America’s closest Middle Eastern ally now jeopardizes one’s future in the Democratic Party” as anti-Israel sentiment manifested itself in the form of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a pro-Palestine democratic socialist, and “Abdul El-Sayed, a [Bernie] Sanders-endorsed anti-Israel physician tied for the lead in [Michigan’s] Senate primary.”
This is part of a broader discourse in US politics that claims the Democrats have descended into anti-Israel madness, a consequence of left-wing pressure on its moderate core.
The National Review’s Rich Lowery called this the emergence of “Dearborn Democrats,” a nod to the predominantly Arab-American and Muslim city whose swing state status gives these voters profound political agency, the same way anti-communist Cuban-Americans in Florida sway national discourse–it is a phenomenon the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board cried about two years ago.
The Forward, reporting on New York City Jewish elected leaders’ reservations about Mamdani, said the mayor has “vowed not to continue the tradition upheld by previous mayors to travel to Israel”, fulfilling his campaign commitment to spend time on the city’s issues rather than jetsetting like his predecessor.
Citing how even mainstream Democrats like Rahm Emanuel have said, “there should be ‘no more U.S. military aid — financial assistance from the taxpayers—for Israel’”, the right-wing Washington Examiner said in an editorial: “The Democratic Party has become an anti- Israel party.”
Why is the freak-out happening now? Recently, 40 Democratic senators voted to block the delivery of bulldozers to Israel, a rebuke not just to the Israeli government but to the widely accepted pro-Israel consensus in Washington.
AIPAC appears to be losing its political cancellation power. Pundits express alarm that the pro-Palestine Internet celebrity Hasan Piker has become the Joe Rogan of progressive Democrats, desperately raising the party’s cool factor at the expense of subservience to Israeli policy’s whims.
But the shift is less about ideological realignment among the party’s elders than about the party following the national mood, allegedly the politicians’ job in a democracy.
Pew Research said in early April, “60% of U.S. adults have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53% last year”, and “59% have little or no confidence in [Israeli President Benjamin] Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs – up from 52% last year.”
Americans sympathise more with Palestinians than with Israelis, Gallup reported in February. NBC said of its own polling in March that the negative shift on Israel among voters “has been especially pronounced among independents and Democrats”.
Naturally, far-right Jews look to anything but the state of Israel when it comes to assigning blame. Too much social media showing carnage in Gaza and man-bites-dog media sensationalism are the usual culprits.
The “Antisemitism” canard comes up. Wokeness discourse in American liberalism, which wraps its tentacles around young minds in universities, has vilified oppressors and elevated victims, the latter being non-whites, LGBTQ people and an assortment of colonised peoples, including Palestinians.
Jewish conservatives have always begged Israel’s critics to treat their beloved nation like any other and to stop tearing it apart under some imagined double standard. Public opinion of a country is never static; it shifts with its actions.
Yet for its defenders, Israel stands outside the back-and-forth of global politics. The mere idea of a democratic Jewish state must be upheld at all costs, no matter what it really does. You just have to like it and accept that it’s good, and never ask about the details.
Someone over the age of 40 can remember Israel before its collapse into a pariah state. They can recall the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo talks.
They might even remember innocent Israelis being torn to shreds by suicide bombers because they went to the wrong pizza shop at the wrong time, allowing for a “pox on both your houses” approach to the conflict.
Younger people have experienced something entirely different. All they know are periodic campaigns of shooting fish in barrels in Gaza and Lebanon, and an illiberal Jewish state governed entirely by the right, with no meaningful left check on its power.
The unpopular war against Iran is inextricably linked to Israel, dragging its reputation down even further. The anti-democratic behaviour of its corrupt leadership doesn’t help.
Netanyahu’s repeated governments since 2009 put him in the rogues’ gallery alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, late Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
It doesn’t take a genius to see how all that could negatively impact a country’s likability in the polls, especially with the left-leaning. Decades of this will change public opinions about a place. No appeal to the Holocaust and allegations of Antisemitism can change that.
The easy response is to tell the nattering nabobs of the mainstream that if they want Israel to have more friends in the US, it should pressure the country to behave itself, look inward and reform itself as a democracy with equality rather than an ethno-garrison state.
The harsher reality is that the Gaza genocide and Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation in southern Lebanon indicate that it has reached a point of no return. Articles like Dershowitz’s recent op-ed reflect that.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
