Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Post-Biden Democratic Party
Seth Mandel for Commentary.org
In one of Joe Biden’s final interviews before he dropped out of the presidential race, Complex Networks’ Speedy Morman asked him: “Are you a Zionist?” It is not the first time Biden has been asked the question, though it’s not exactly a common question in national politics. Biden’s answer hadn’t changed: “Yes.”
The president then said that people who love to make trouble for Zionists don’t know what the word means. Do you, the president asked his interviewer with obvious relish, know what a Zionist is? Morman then vindicated Biden’s contempt for him on the spot by weaseling out a weak “I just ask questions, I don’t answer.”
Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he will be ending his political career after one term in the White House left me wondering: How would Kamala Harris answer that question if asked tomorrow? How would anybody else in the upper echelons of the president’s party, the keys to which he is now handing over, answer it?
The Democratic Party’s changing of the guard is almost certainly a milestone in American politics, a bold notch on the timeline marking a point of departure for the party’s approach to anti-Semitism and the Jewish state. The party’s standard bearer 24 hours ago considered himself a Zionist and routinely condemned—even if his administration took no appropriate action against—Jew-baiting mobs on campus. The party’s standard bearer today fears and admires those mobs for, in her preposterous words, “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”
Members of the Biden-Harris administration who resigned over the president’s support for Israel against Hamas see Harris’s succession in that light. Lily Call, a former Interior Department staffer and member of the virulently anti-Israel group IfNotNow, expressed hope that Harris might enact an arms embargo on Israel. “I’ve worked for Kamala, and I know she’ll do the right thing,” Call told Politico.
Josh Paul, who resigned as a State Department point man on weapons transfers because Biden insisted on arming our Mideast allies, told Politico that Harris will probably be better (i.e. more evenhanded in her treatment of Israel and Hamas) than Biden. As I explained in December, Paul displays a remarkably aggressive ignorance on all things Middle East, and seems to have been particularly radicalized by his misreading of a story about donkeys in Gaza. This is the other reason for concern: U.S. agencies are apparently littered with a combination of entitled but inexperienced activists and historically illiterate fame-chasers. Things can easily get out of hand without a president who knows how to say “no” to them.
Yesterday on CNN, John King noted that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is being considered as a potential running mate for Harris. The fact that Shapiro is Jewish—and not part of the self-hating AsAJew movement—means “there could be some risks in putting him on the ticket.” Progressives have been relying on token anti-Israel Jews willing to publicly renounce the Jewish people. Shapiro does not appear to have the appetite to do so. King is therefore correct.
King is also correct to reject euphemistic word games. Shapiro’s Jewishness would be a target of the progressive base’s ire, even if those voters tried to hide their ignobility by using the word “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew.”
On July 9, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced it would be cracking down on this game. “Going forward, we will remove content attacking ‘Zionists’ when it is not explicitly about the political movement, but instead uses antisemitic stereotypes, or threatens other types of harm through intimidation, or violence directed against Jews or Israelis under the guise of attacking Zionists,” the company wrote on its site.
Zionism is at heart a simple position in favor of Jewish civil rights. Since 1948, anti-Zionism means the destruction of the Jewish nation. There isn’t actually any gray area here. We have indeed arrived at a moment when a politician’s Jewish faith is considered a mark against him. This, a mere quarter-century after Joe Lieberman was nominated as Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate.
Both the corporate and the political worlds have opened the door to this downhill trend. A major European airline removed from its in-flight entertainment menu a show about a British Jew—not an Israeli—because they were afraid it would upset customers and/or social-media activists. The review of a book by Jewish farmers was pulled because, the editor said, “In the current, rather febrile, atmosphere I think we need to give a wide berth to anything which references Jewish people and Judaism. It just isn’t worth the hassle that will ensue.”
We can expect the ceding of a degree of policy to any figure who is sensitive to the very loud and public tantrums of progressive activists. Whatever his faults, Joe Biden ignored them when those tantrums demanded the right to persecute Jews here or abroad. Those days are over, and what lies ahead is cause for trepidation.