How Israel Became the Biggest Litmus Test in American Politics. By Mark Halerpin at The Free Press.
A political earthquake shook New York City on Tuesday night, and it is about to reverberate throughout the entire Democratic Party.
Democratic Socialist candidates won a trio of House primaries, each backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders. More than any other issue, these upstarts are united by their opposition to Israel and to U.S. support for the Jewish state. …
How did opposition to Israel become the toxic litmus test in Democratic Party politics — so rapidly, so emotionally, and so completely? …
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic politics. Israel was welcomed as a true ally of America and the West: modern, tolerant, open-minded, generous, and stalwart. Israelis — the government and the people — were considered evolved, formidable, and brave.
That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Key elements of the Democratic coalition — young voters, female voters, black voters, urban voters — have all undergone this total shift in attitude. …
Ethnic hatred and communism rear their ugly heads in NY:
The visceral explanations are harder to measure and more piercing to contemplate. They mirror centuries — and even millennia — of instinctive antisemitism, a raw dislike and distrust of Jewish people.
The left media:
In our 21st-century incarnation, traditional media has played a role. Not by inventing Palestinian suffering, which is real, or by making criticism of Israel illegitimate, which it is not. But by creating a daily rhythm of coverage in which Israel is almost always framed as the active agent and Palestinians almost always as the passive victims. The New York Times and its imitators waited only a beat or two after October 7 before returning to their familiar posture: Israel is the problem to be interrogated, the actor to be doubted, and guilty until proven innocent.
Social media and YouTube have done the rest, faster and with even fewer restraints. A generation of influencers, streamers, podcasters, and algorithmically rewarded stars has discovered that anti-Israel certainty performs beautifully. Complexity does not go viral. Layered ambiguity does not build a following. A tragic conflict between two peoples becomes, in the hands of the platforms, a simple morality play: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, villain and victim.
Muslim and Chinese money:
Then there’s the foreign money and foreign influence. Qatar has spent years investing in American institutions, from universities to media to political networks, shaping the atmosphere in which elite opinion is formed. China’s role is different but no less consequential. Beijing does not need to care deeply about the Middle East to understand that TikTok and related information flows can amplify narratives that divide Americans, weaken confidence in Western institutions, and turn young Americans against their own country’s allies.
Qatar and China did not create every sentiment now coursing through Democratic politics. We don’t know exactly how much they have done to sow anti-Israel feeling on the left. But we can be confident that, with remarkable dexterity and efficacy, they have created some of the content and helped build and fuel the pipes through which those sentiments travel. …
The toxic result:
There has developed around Israel a kind of Pavlovian disgust association that now seems wired into many otherwise thoughtful people.
Jew. Jew. Jew. Jew. AIPAC. Dead children. Netanyahu. USS Liberty. Epstein. Weinstein. Occupation. Apartheid. Christ killers. NYPD trainers.
On and on and on.
Some of those associations involve serious subjects. Some are distortions. Some are outright nonsense. But the human mind is not a courtroom. It is an associative machine.
The mind can take only so much repetition before it is affected by it. And once the psychological ground has been softened, permeability to newer facts, factoids, allegations, images, and narratives rises dramatically. Almost everything flows in one direction.
The result is not necessarily hatred. It is something in some ways more powerful: a presumption.
A presumption that Israel is wrong. A presumption that Israel is lying. A presumption that Israel is acting in bad faith.
Leftist’s lack of principle makes them more vulnerable:
Years ago, I worried that parts of the progressive movement were dismantling some of the intellectual guardrails against bigotry. The principle used to be simple: Judging people based on immutable characteristics is wrong.
Increasingly, the argument became that some groups deserved less protection than others because of their perceived power. That shift has consequences. …
The evidence suggests that the anti-Israel litmus test inside Democratic politics is not weakening. It is growing stronger. And at the moment, no outside force capable of reversing, or even slowing that movement, is anywhere in sight.
Perhaps third world immigration has brought old ethnic hatreds into the West. Once in power, the haters will act on them.
According to Solzhenitsyn, something similar happened after the Russian revolution. Foreigners (in this case Jews, Georgians, etc.) who hated the Russian people seized control using the sweet promises of communism — and then proceeded to slaughter Russians:
