Maybe There’s Hope for Israel and Palestine After All

Thrilled to read that the left-center national Jewish organization JStreet polled Jewish voters and discovered some amazing transformations in Tuesday’s elections in the US: 72% of Jewish voters supported Democratic congressional candidates; 76% disapprove of President Donald Trump’s job performance; democracy and the economy were the leading electoral concerns; 76% support sanctions against violent West Bank settlers; and most amazingly of all, 66% believe AIPAC’s campaign spending against candidates who criticize Israel increases antisemitism in the United States—and 80% believe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank increase antisemitism in the United States.

These are the actual subheads on their results press release, except that I added the phrase “and most amazingly of all” and combined their last two points. AIPAC is the acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby.

The group also raised $13 mm for its candidates. And 98 percent of the ~200 candidates JStreet endorsed won or appear to be headed toward victory!

This is a dramatic shift in the way mainstream Jews view Israel—AND a complete rejection of Trump’s attempts to drive wedges between the Jewish community and other constituencies—as well as a refutation of the despicable argument that any attack on Israel’s policies is antisemitism (especially if that false criticism provides cover for suppressing the speech of Arabs and Muslims).

The credit for that shift is partly the abject horror with which many Jews view Netanyahu’s policies. But it also represents decades of work within the Jewish community: progressive Jewish organizations like New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s and Jewish Voice for Peace in our own day—whose protests have been extremely visible since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas—Jewish-Palestinian partnership organizations like Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (an intercultural village), Combatants for Peace (joint appearances by speakers who fought on opposite sides), West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (a bicultural youth orchestra), and Standing Together (a solidarity organization), to name a few among many. And this in turn meant that groups like JStreet were not seen as too far to the left, because there were a lot of Jews and Jewish organizations well to their left.

Disclosure: I was an active core member of the Western Massachusetts New Jewish Agenda chapter and of the intercultural Middle East Peace Group and have donated to several of the organizations listed above. And when I was involved with Agenda, which was early to call for a two-state solution, the mainstream Jewish community was openly hostile to us. Now, there are many Jewish and mixed organizations who want to go farther, and many synagogues have had speakers from some of these groups.

What this means:

Jews and lawmakers in the US finally have cover to take positions that would have been anathema a decade ago. Israel’s repressive warmongers and racists in government can no longer count on the support of US Jews and the lawmakers of any religion who want to keep that constituency happy. And the new Congress is likely to be a lot less sympathetic to funding Israel’s attempt to dehumanize and destabilize Arab and Muslim communities—not just in Palestine, where the military has stood by while ultra-right Jewish settlers have forced Palestinians from their homes and communities, interfered with the olive harvest, and committed acts of violence—but in Lebanon and elsewhere. It also means T’s dream to wipe out or expel 2 million Gazans and turn Gaza into a fancy beach resort for wealthy people from the US isn’t going anywhere.

So, over the next couple of years, we can expect a significant realignment. Many prominent members of the US Congress have been openly supportive of Israel’s openly racist government—not just in their rhetoric but in their massive funding. Many of those folks felt they had to do this because Jewish voters are a significant constituency that votes in high numbers, and supporting Jewish causes means kowtowing to AIPAC. We who’ve been saying for decades that AIPAC has no authority to speak for the entire Jewish people now have solid evidence that US Jews are willing to be harshly critical of Israel, and those who do will not be ostracized. It might even mean a reluctance to participate in asinine foreign policy blunders of the sort that got us into an unnecessary, completely avoidable, and damaging war with Iran. That war, and both the human and economic consequences, are a big part of the Republicans’ losses this week.

And from my canvassing and door-knocking in the 2024 campaign, I can say with certainty that some people who would have voted for Harris chose not to over the Biden administration’s refusal to hold Israel accountable for the Gaza war. Would it have been enough to prevent T’ second term? We’ll never know?