Hours after Democrats retook both houses of Congress in what is widely described as a “blue tsunami,” which unseated Republicans in decades-long GOP strongholds, Israeli experts told JNS that they are bearish on the growing antisemitic cohort in Congress being a blip, which a pendulum swing is likely to correct next cycle.
“It’s an evolving trend that shows greater signs of permanence than temporary quality,” Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs, told JNS.
Diker, who co-hosts a podcast for JNS, said that Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, of Michigan, who is to be the first Muslim in the upper chamber in January, joins anti-Israel Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is a harsh critic of the Jewish state.
He told JNS that it was a “shocking development” that Mamdani, who campaigned on having the Israeli prime minister arrested, was elected. The mayor “sounds exactly like El-Sayed, but within the context of New York City politics,” he said. “Look at the evolution.”
“The major shift now is that this assault, which had been more on the fringes, on the left fringes of American politics since the 1960s, has now moved into the center of American politics and has now embedded itself in the U.S. Senate,” he told JNS. “That’s the danger. It’s become part of the legitimate mainstream discourse in America.”
El-Sayed, who declined to say that the Iranian regime, which has killed hundreds of Americans since 1979, is more dangerous than the Jewish state, is “the poster child for the red-green assault,” Diker said.
“There is a many-decades-long trend toward the penetration of the red-green assault, talking in far-left American terms about colonialism and imperialism and apartheid and occupation and racism,” he told JNS.
“These are fake,” he said. “These are slanders and libels that I think the American Jewish leadership and Israel underestimated and underemphasized and in fact tabled, brushed under the rug, to their great peril.”
“We see the results of this nearly 60-year trend playing out right now in America,” he said.
El-Sayed also said on the stump that the “bloodthirsty” Israeli government is “as evil as Hamas,” and when a terrorist attacked a synagogue, with a preschool, in his state, he said that “hurt people hurt people.”
Eytan Gilboa, a professor at Bar-Ilan and Reichman Universities and expert on U.S.-Israel relations, told JNS that the political shift away from support for Israel in the United States is likely to endure.
“Unfortunately, I think it will continue,” he said. “Right now, I think the exit polls show that 69% of American Jews voted for the Democrats, and this is compatible with the 70% we know of American Jews who usually support Democratic candidates.”
“It seems that even in Michigan, there was a huge split in the Jewish community,” he said.
A Jewish Majority survey, which had a large margin of error and which came before outgoing Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) endorsed the Republican against El-Sayed, suggested that 57% of Jewish early voters in Michigan supported El-Sayed.
In New York, 30% of Jews voted for Mamdani, Gilboa told JNS.
“Many anti-Zionist Jews think that antisemitism in the United States increased because of the war and if the war stopped, then perhaps there would not be so much antisemitism,” he said. “I think that they are very naive and don’t really understand what is happening.”
Progressive and social democrats want to “completely change the American political and social system,” a coalition that he expects to “gain power until the majority of Americans see where they are leading the United States,” he told JNS.
Martin Sherman, founder and CEO of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, is concerned yet hopeful.
“Certainly, I’m worried,” he told JNS. “Im not sure that Israel can continue to rely on the United States as its sole strategic prop.”
“I don’t think we can work on the assumption that this is going to go away by itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that has to be confronted.”
For years, Israel has failed in its public diplomacy and in “presenting its case,” according to Sherman.
“I’ve warned that this is going to have strategic consequences, and it’s going to affect not only Israel but the Jews,” he told JNS. “Israel should invest between $2 billion and $3 billion a year in public diplomacy, which for Israel is very affordable.”
That investment, according to Sherman, would be but a “few percentage points of the state budget.”
“It’s no less strategically important than Israel’s strategic air fleet, air force,” he said. “This is something that has to be confronted very vigorously. Hopefully, it’s not too late to make an assertive assault on public opinion in the United States and in Europe.”
Danny Ayalon, Israeli ambassador to the United States from 2002 to 2006, is also hopeful. “Is everything lost?” he said. “Of course not.”
“It is up to Israel now, with the Jewish community in the United States, with the evangelical communities in the United States, with all our supporters in the United States, whether it is in business, defense,” he told JNS.
“We should, first of all, fight back and try to isolate those anti-Israelis, anti-Zionists, who basically are also anti-Jewish and antisemites,” he said. “It is high time to do that.”
Jews and Israelis are “not racist” against Muslims, he said.
“We are only against Muslims who support terror or call for the destruction of the State of Israel, like this Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan,” he told JNS.
The former Israeli envoy thinks that “we have to fight in a very, very coherent and coordinated way” and “should present a much better face of Israel, the true face of Israel.”
Mark Regev, who was Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2016 to 2020, said that 2027 won’t be the first time that there will be “many open antisemitic voices in the U.S. Congress.”
“If you go back to isolationism and nativism, that were once very common in the United States, yes, not wanting to let in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and so forth,” he told JNS. “There was a time when that was much more common.” (Regev co-hosts a JNS podcast.)
Since World War ll, there “haven’t been too many elected members of the House and the Senate who have been very public in their antipathy toward the Jewish people and the Jewish state,” he said.
“It’s definitely a trend,” he said. “Is that trend a passing trend, or is it something more sustainable? No one can answer that question.”
“We do know this,” he told JNS. “Antisemitism is the oldest hatred in history that has remarkable staying power.”
