The Fringe Cult of Anti-Israelism on the Left

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

 

If the anti-Israel voters whom Democrats have cultivated as an element of their base were going to push their weight around, it would have been in Michigan. To judge by the Biden administration’s repeated efforts to mollify this restive force — dispatching envoy after envoy on listening tours to the state, only to be rebuffed by its unappeasable activist class — the administration knew it. And yet, Michigan Democrats spent the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s primary rending garments over the White House’s supposed failure to take seriously the threat to the president’s electoral bottom line.

 

“I feel like this is 2016 all over again,” one anguished Michigan Democrat told Politico last week. “If the president doesn’t change course, I would not be surprised if Biden loses the state.” Unnamed Democrats used the cover of anonymity to go even further. Potential Biden voters are hardening their hearts against the president, one party strategist lamented. “Every day, as violence in Gaza continues, getting those voters back becomes more of a challenge for Biden.” Anti-Israel Democrats tried everything from emotional blackmail to political extortion to get Biden to see the light and abandon his support for Jewish state’s war against Hamas. “If they’re not going to be moved because of the humanity of the Palestinian people,” state representative Abraham Aiyash said, “then perhaps they’ll view things differently when there’s a political calculus they have to make.”

 

As Biden entered the Michigan primary, activists’ anger over his refusal to bend to their demands reached a fever pitch. But the president didn’t heed their advice, and in the end he had little to worry about.

 

I’ve already parsed the spin on offer today from both the pro- and anti-Biden camps in Michigan, but the results demonstrate that one side of this debate has the better argument. Anti-Biden Democrats tried to humiliate the president by boosting the total number of votes for “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary. The effort was more or less a bust, even though “uncommitted” won just above 101,000 votes. The raw vote that “uncommitted” secured is impressive, but its grand total is not: It was 13 percent of the overall vote, just 2 percent better than the protest vote lodged against Barack Obama in Michigan in 2012. Moreover, in what was supposed to be the heart of the rebellion against Biden — Wayne County, which is home to Arab-American-heavy Dearborn — 78 percent of the more than 150,000 voters who turned out to vote in the Democratic primary backed Biden.

 

The question that looms largest over Team Biden today should be: Why has the campaign devoted so much nervous energy to fretting over the anti-Israel protest vote? Polling has long indicated that discomfort with Israel’s conduct in its defensive war against Hamas was a rump issue. Sure, Democrats are increasingly inclined to echo the sentiments they encounter on a near-daily basis from the party’s opinion-makers — namely, that a cease-fire should be the goal. But those same voters don’t want a cease-fire if it means leaving elements of Hamas in control in Gaza. They also don’t want military aid to Israel limited to the point where it would force Jerusalem to abandon the cause around which most Israelis are united: the defeat and destruction of Hamas. That alone should have been a wake-up call for this White House.

 

Indeed, with each passing day, elements on the Left most committed to anti-Israel activism are demonstrating the degree to which they can be — in fact, must be — ignored if not opposed.

 

While Michiganders were descending on the polls yesterday, students at the University of California, Berkeley, were forced to escape into hiding as a wild mob of protesters erupted in violence, fighting to get at the Jews assembled to hear an IDF soldier speak. The demonstrators “broke through the glass doors of a campus theater” and shouted “intifada” at their fellow students, the New York Post reported. “In one clip, a student could be heard telling his friends inside the auditorium that a woman outside spat on him and called him ‘Jew, Jew, Jew — literally right to my face.’” Even for UC Berkley, this was too much. In an email to students, the school’s chancellor and provost called the incident “an attack on the fundamental values of the university.”

 

The dialogue on the far-left end of the political spectrum this week prominently featured outright praise and admiration for a mentally disturbed individual who committed suicide by self-immolation, ostensibly in protest against Israel. For leftists, this act of violence was not the culmination of a series of failures by lawmakers or caregivers or anyone who knew the man — none of whom intervened on his behalf. Rather, they said, his setting himself on fire was a noble exercise in “self-sacrifice,” meant to help educate Americans about an ongoing “genocide.”

 

When they’re not making a menace of themselves, anti-Israel activists descend into spectacle, with the aim of maximally annoying Americans. They disrupt holiday parades. They threaten airports and compel the delay of flight schedules. They block thoroughfares and bridges. These and other similar displays have achieved little other than straining public services and irritating people.

 

The anti-Israel Left has done everything in its power to communicate that it is defiantly uncompromising. What is also on display, however, is its whole-scale impotence. Democrats have tolerated their antics thus far only because of the unspoken assumption that these activists are the most vocal vanguard of the party’s base. The results in Michigan’s primary call that assumption into question. Indeed, they suggest that the real risk to Democrats lies in giving this unsympathetic fringe vastly more positive attention than it deserves.

 

Many have noted that the primary results in the Great Lakes State have raised a number of “red flags” for Biden ahead of November’s election. The most glaring of these has to be that Democrats have invested too much time and energy in a cause that’s at odds with what most Americans want. Now that Democrats have some hard vote totals demonstrating just how peripheral their anti-Israel critics are, perhaps the Biden White House can steer clear of the brick wall the activist fringe is dead set on smashing into.