Israel: Is criticism of its leaders anti-Semitic?
“Festering anti-Semitism” in the Democratic Party has “leaked into public view once more,” said Judson Berger in National Review. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, drew wide condemnation after she called Israel a “racist state” while addressing pro-Palestinian protesters at a recent event in Chicago. Jayapal, who apologized, was rebuked by all top-ranking House Democrats, while 43 House Democrats issued a letter declaring their opposition to “anti-Zionist voices that embolden anti-Semitism.” But the remark cracked the door on the “restless hostility to Israel” growing within Democratic ranks. That enmity was on display when at least five members of the progressive “Squad” boycotted a speech to Congress by moderate Israeli President Isaac Herzog, suggesting they are not opposed to any specific Israeli policy but rather to “Israel itself.”
What a “hysterical overreaction,” said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Jayapal made a “rhetorical misstep”—as she explained in her apology, she didn’t mean that Israel as a nation is racist but rather that it has “racist leaders” who treat Palestinians as “second-class citizens or worse.” The ferocious backlash from Democrats and Republicans suggests “a brittle political denial about Israel’s increasingly authoritarian, jingoistic turn.” Meanwhile, polls show a “profound shift” in Americans’ views of Israel, said Yasmeen Serhan in Time. For the first time this year, an annual Gallup survey found Democrats’ sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis, by 49 percent to 38 percent; 78 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israelis. In a 2021 poll of Jewish American voters, 25 percent respondents agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state.” Yet for the most part “this disquiet has yet to manifest itself within Washington.”
Republican outrage at Jayapal shows glaring hypocrisy, said Rabbi Jay Michaelson in CNN.com. Piling on her is politically useful for Republicans eager to paint Democrats as “anti-Israel.” Yet those same Republicans invited Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently claimed Covid was “engineered by a shadowy conspiracy” to spare Jews, to give testimony before the House on supposed government censorship. I’m far more troubled by RFK Jr.’s “overt anti-Semitism,” and by watching MAGA types buddy up to white supremacists like Nick Fuentes and rail in code against “elites” in New York and Hollywood. Jayapal’s comment was “an unfortunate misstep.” Republicans’ “mainstreaming of anti-Semitism” is “a step toward darkness.”