About 20 longtime pro-Israel activists gathered last month for a dinner meeting in suburban Washington, D.C. A veteran Democratic congressman was our guest speaker. Though his district contains comparatively few Jews and not Jewish himself, he has been for decades a staunch supporter of close U.S.-Israel ties, backed the Soviet Jewry movement and promoted other issues dear to most Jewish voters.
The representative expressed qualified optimism about November’s midterm elections. Though much can change, he said he expects the Democrats “to net at least 20 new seats” in the House. That would give them a majority in the lower chamber and likely make U.S. President Donald Trump a very lame duck in the last two years of his second term. Coupled with retaking the Senate, which pollsters say appears increasingly possible, a Democratic triumph likely would mean an agenda full of investigations, hostile legislation and threats of impeachment.
Although hopeful about this fall’s balloting, the congressman confessed concern and confusion about something else: growing hostility to Israel, on both the political left and right, and increasingly open antisemitism. He said it was one thing to be critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some cabinet members who opposed what he still endorsed as “the two-state solution” to the Palestinian conflict with Israel, but another to deny the Jewish state’s right to exist.
“Minorities have been oppressed throughout history,” the congressman observed. “But this hatred of the Jews, going back centuries or thousands of years—and constant. I don’t understand it.”
Jews, of course, have served unwillingly, but it seems inescapably as the miner’s canary in one stressed society after another. Perhaps the House veteran intuits that today, as it goes for the people George Washington called “the children of the stock of Abraham” and promised that in the new United States, each Jewish citizen “shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree,” so it will go for all Americans.
And the going in April was not good.
Two weeks either side of the congressman’s remarks, a torrent of examples confirmed his concern. A particular pretext runs through many of them. That is the accusation that Israel commits genocide against Palestinian Arabs. As this writer has observed previously, the genocide libel (noncombatant-to-combatant deaths in the Gaza Strip conflict being comparatively low for modern urban warfare) is the contemporary equivalent of the “Christ-killer!” malediction against medieval Jews. And it is made to the same end—justifying their murder.
Being marginalized
*“The Democrats Unify Against Israel” read the headline over Matthew Continetti’s April 22 Wall Street Journal column. “Israel is the Democratic Party’s new litmus test,” he writes, “and [Sen. Bernie] Sanders is leading the turn against the Jewish state. In 2024, 19 Democrats voted with him to deny military aid to a U.S. ally at war. In 2025, 24 did the same. This year, as America and Israel fought side by side against the Iranian theocracy, 40 of 47 Democratic senators were with Mr. Sanders.” Continetti pointed to a March Pew Research Center survey showing “60 percent of U.S. adults held an unfavorable view of Israel”—80% among Democrats.
*Maine Democratic Senate primary candidate Graham Platner calls Israel’s campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip “genocide,” bears a Nazi tattoo on his chest, appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast that traffics in antisemitic conspiracy theories and has declared himself a communist. Democratic senators Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), the minority leader; Senatorial Campaign Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.); and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) have pledged to support Platner against pro-Israel incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (Republican) in November. They joined earlier party endorsers Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Rueben Gallego (Ariz.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.) and socialist Sanders (Vt.).
*Two of the three hopefuls in Michigan’s Senate Democratic primary, Abdul El-Sayed, a physician, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, have accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. The third contender, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, supports close Washington-Jerusalem relations and has accepted contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s political action arm. AIPAC is the largest registered U.S. pro-Israel lobby. Activists booed and heckled Stevens at the party convention in late April. El-Sayed, endorsed by Sanders, has campaigned with popular online streamer Hasan Piker. Piker, who has said that the United States deserved the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, is antisemitic and pro-Hamas.
*A large group of thugs—“anti-Israel protesters” in news media speak—forced Noa Cochva, “Miss Israel” 2021 to cancel an appearance at the University of Oregon. Students for Justice in Palestine and the Eugene Women’s Revolutionary Committee, among others, labeled Cochva, a former Israel Defense Forces combat medic, a “murderer.” They blocked access to the event site and made death threats against Jewish students present, according to the university’s Hillel house. Cochva had cancelled an appearance at the University of Washington a few days earlier after a demonstration against her turned violent.
*University of California regent Jay Sures tore into student government representatives at the University of California, Los Angeles. According to the Jewish Insider, Sures, the vice chairman of United Talent Agency, “slammed the members of UCLA’s Undergraduate Student Association Council who authored a letter condemning the recent campus appearance of former Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov. The regent asked, “Why would anybody send out a letter condemning a hostage who is a student who was held in captivity for over 500 days? You’d have to be a complete lunatic to sign” it.
*New York City’s Democratic/Democratic Socialist Party mayor, Zohran Mamdani, vetoed legislation approved by the city council to create a buffer zone around schools, inside of which protesters could not obstruct foot traffic. Eleven Jewish groups, including the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York, the Anti-Defamation League of New York/New Jersey and the New York Board of Rabbis, said they were “deeply disappointed.”
Mamdani, who during his campaign last year charged Israel with genocide in the Gaza war, said he acted in part to protect free expression of those demonstrating on behalf of “Palestinian rights.”
Endangering a species
*Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, told an interviewer that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has led us down a road—and we have been part of it—that has, in essence, created a genocide in Gaza that has destabilized the Middle East.” Pushed, Sherman said, “I can’t make the legal analysis about whether it is literally a genocide. But there is no doubt that Gaza was demolished.”
Sherman, who is Jewish, said, “Palestinians deserve a home, dignity and peace. Israel absolutely deserves security and peace.” But if Palestinian Arabs’ century-long struggle for “dignity”—the 1929 pogrom against Jews in Hebron by Arab neighbors anticipated in microcosm massacres near Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023—requires the destruction of Israel and death of its Jews, what then? Demolition in the Gaza Strip was an inevitable result when terrorists embedded themselves among noncombatants and used those noncombatants as human shields in violation of the rules of war.
*Major League Baseball’s New York Mets released the team’s 2026 “Heritage Day” schedule. Included for recognition: Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Irish, Italians, Koreans, Japanese and blacks. Conspicuously absent from the list of ethnic/cultural groups, the Zionist Organization of America noted, and for the third consecutive year since the 2023 mass murders, were Jews. ZOA urged the Mets’ billionaire Jewish owner, Steve Cohen, to restore Jewish Heritage Day.
What is going on among Democratic Party leaders, says Hussein Abubakr Mansour, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America, is a growing shift leftward on issues related to Israel, in particular, and Jews, in general, in response to pressure from the activist left. “The establishment’s reasoning is basic strategic calculation: the left will not relent on Israel; a civil war inside the party over the Jewish state would destroy the coalition; therefore, the rational move is to concede this issue, preserve party unity and proceed with the moderate agenda on everything else: affordability, climate, migration, AI, etc. Feed this one thing to the beast, and the beast will be satisfied. It is an intelligent calculation, a genius one, really, but it is also a catastrophic one, because it rests on a complete misapprehension of what is being conceded and to whom.”
Aboubakr Mansour says today’s Democratic Party leadership, “which believes itself to be practicing realism, is not making a new mistake by imagining that a sacrificial logic can be controlled. In many ways, it is one of the oldest mistakes in politics.”
Our dinner speaker, a party warhorse, was asked who in the younger generation of members of Congress would take over the Democrats’ pro-Israel leadership. He thought for a moment, then suggested two names. When I worked with AIPAC in the 1980s, members—and in those days more Democrats than Republicans—lined up to sign pro-Israel letters or legislation.
T.S. Eliot famously pronounced a century ago in his poem “The Waste Land” that “April is the cruelest month.” In addition to being enduringly influential, Eliot was an antisemite. He would have felt quite at home in the United States this April.
