Can Biden win the Jewish and the antisemitic vote?

The president clearly put Schumer up to bashing Netanyahu, but it's highly unlikely his strategy will work.

This week has been a bit of a slog for those of us in the Jewish media due to the deluge of reactions to Chuck Schumer’s speech bashing Benjamin Netanyahu. Obviously, the speech was atrociously timed and frankly rather silly, but it shouldn’t have been particularly surprising.

At the moment, the Biden administration is in a serious bind, in that a disturbingly large chunk of the Democratic party has essentially gone Nazi, while at the same time—albeit more quietly—American Jews are making it clear that there are quite a few things they’re no longer willing to ignore or put up with.

Biden or at least those around him, however, appear to believe they can’t win without both the Jewish and the antisemitic vote. Needless to say, this puts them in a bit of a bind.

Since the White House clearly put Schumer up to it, its strategy seems obvious: Make Netanyahu the issue rather than Israel or the war. By doing so, Biden can appear to be distancing himself somewhat from Israel without (he hopes) alienating American Jews. He can also retain progressive sympathies by bashing a foreign politician progressives loathe.

It’s a craven strategy, but it may prove to be effective. One can’t be sure, obviously, but my guess is that most American Jews still don’t really want to leave the Democratic party. They may be willing to swallow the idea that this is all about Netanyahu rather than Israel. If we just get rid of Netanyahu, they may decide, everything will go back to normal.

Personally, however, I have my doubts that this will be the case. The intensity of the trauma American Jews have undergone since October 7 cannot be overstated. They feel endangered, isolated, and above all betrayed. They rarely say it outright, but they’re mad as hell and I don’t think they’re going to take it anymore.

If that is true—and I think it is very likely—then the implications are ominous. It means that, at some point, Biden will have to choose between his party’s Jewish and antisemitic supporters. I think that if it were entirely up to him, he would choose the former, but a lot of people around him would happily choose the latter because they are the latter. In the midst of what is likely to be a close-run presidential campaign, things could go either way. And either way, things will get very ugly indeed.

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It’s worth asking precisely why progressives hate Netanyahu so much. Obviously, Muslim antisemites hate him because they hate Israelis and Jews, and Netanyahu is a Jew who is the leader of Israel. Progressives are a somewhat more mysterious issue.

There are some likely explanations, however.

First, there’s the obvious fact that Netanyahu is a right-wing politician and has cultivated strong connections to the Republican party. For decades, progressives have believed that anyone to the right of Fidel Castro is a Nazi, but this belief has become particularly intense since Donald Trump was elected. As a result, they would probably hate Netanyahu to some extent no matter what he said or did.

More importantly, however, Netanyahu was one of Barack Obama’s foremost rivals on the world stage. Progressives’ attitude towards Obama, for the most part, remains what it was back in 2008: They consider him the messiah or at least something very like it. Even those who believe Obama wasn’t enough of a progressive still revile anyone who stood against him. As such, Netanyahu cannot be seen as anything other than a kind of antichrist—an enemy of God himself. Thus, progressives not only hate him but consider him an abomination. This is quite close to dehumanizing racism, of course, but the irony appears to be lost on them.

Finally, there’s simple denial. Progressives, by and large, simply don’t want to see what’s happening to their movement. Used to considering themselves a caste of saints by virtue of holding the right opinions, they do not want to consider the possibility that a great many of them have more or less sold their souls to the devil. 

That is, none of them want to think about the fact that, when it comes to Israel and the Jews, people like, for example, Cornel West have essentially become genocidal racists. They do not want to hate Cornel West, so they decide to hate Netanyahu. If it’s all Netanyahu’s fault, then his opponents are absolved and remain saints, no matter how hideous their behavior may be.

But progressives should hate Cornel West and everyone else who thinks as he does. Until they do, they’ve rendered themselves hypocrites by virtue of their own moral arrogance. Again, the irony appears to be lost on them.

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My latest column at JNS deals with recent surveys that show rising levels of antisemitism—including genocidal antisemitism—among young Americans and the possible economic reasons behind it.

Put simply, I believe that the American middle class (and I think this is primarily a middle-class problem) signed a social contract that they now feel has been violated. Chuck Palahniuk expressed the resulting rage brilliantly in Fight Club: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

The villains supposedly behind all this are given various names—“corporate America,” “the 1%” and so on—but they all amount to the idea of an amorphous, unthinkably wealthy, and brutally rapacious omnipotent plutocracy. It’s a very short step from there to the Elders of Zion. 

Read it all here.

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Betrayal has always been one of the more galling aspects of Jewish history. Over and over again, Jews have given their passionate support to others, only to find themselves abandoned or worse at the first opportunity. 

This is not just the case in politics. One can see it today in the tech world. The number of Israel-haters who use Waze or cell phones with Israeli chips boggles the mind, yet they see no contradiction in this and feel no sense of guilt or obligation whatsoever.

I’ve often thought that Israel would do well to take certain technological measures in this regard. It would be interesting to see what would happen if there were a single button in Tel Aviv that, once pushed, would shut down all Israeli technology everywhere in the world. Let’s see how the antisemites do at orchestrating their mob attacks without cell phones. Let’s see how many countries keep bashing us when their GPS systems suddenly shut down. 

The Arabs eventually discovered the effectiveness of the oil weapon. Israel may want to start developing a tech weapon.