The Political Price of Democrats’ Anti-Zionism
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews
The Political Price of Democrats’ Anti-Zionism
The party welcomes antisemitic cranks and will have to face the consequences.
By Barton Swaim, WSJ
Oct. 14, 2026 4:31 pm ET
The moral and geopolitical effects of Democrats’ turn against Israel deserve more debate than party leaders want to give them. For now, the conceit that progressives’ ill will toward the Jewish state has mainly to do with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, not with Israel’s existence and certainly not with the Jews, has just enough plausibility to keep Democrats mouthing it.
Republicans have their own troubles in this area. But prominent officeholders—Sens. Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, Ambassador Mike Huckabee, Rep. Elise Stefanik—have criticized their side’s antisemites. For Democrats, the honest debate may have to wait for adverse political effects.
The choice that Democratic leaders seem increasingly inclined to make—aligning themselves with the international left on Israel—will offer short-term relief but create hellish problems that have nothing to do with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The “anti-Zionist” academics, activists, influencers and troublemakers Democrats wish to gather into a winning coalition despise democratic politics and loathe the whole idea of a coalition. A spokesman for Justice Democrats, a spinoff of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, told Politico this week that “all of our candidates are uncompromisingly against this genocide and uncompromisingly supportive of an arms embargo in Israel.”
Note the adverb.
You’d have to work hard to abhor Israel more than Zohran Mamdani does, yet when he attended a vigil last week commemorating the victims of the Oct. 7 attacks, protesters heckled New York’s mayor and called him a traitor. Why? During the United Nations General Assembly in September, he bowed to legal reality and declined to have Mr. Netanyahu arrested.
You would think Mr. Mamdani’s anti-Israel supporters would feel they’d achieved a feat for the ages in getting such a man elected mayor. The great majority of the city’s electorate doesn’t obsess over a tiny country on the other side of the world. That the mayor does marks a singular triumph for New York’s small but energetic Israel-hating minority. You would think they would allow him some flexibility. They won’t. They believe in a single righteous cause and don’t accept the slightest departure from it.
Democrats didn’t learn the lesson Michigan tried to teach them in 2024. For more than a year, the Biden administration contorted its Middle East policy, one minute supporting America’s only reliable ally in the region, Israel, the next ostentatiously blaming it for policies it hadn’t pursued. Manifestly the White House had an eye on Michigan’s Israel-averse Muslim population, clustered around Dearborn. That population rewarded the Democrats by staying home, voting for third-party candidates or choosing Donald Trump in the mistaken hope that he would act on his isolationist instincts and abandon the Mideast.
Already some of this year’s primary winners in deep-blue districts, having defamed Israel in an effort to mollify their party’s anti-Zionist left, have drawn animus from the voters they tried so hard to gratify. Scott Wiener, a nominee to replace U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, at first opposed but eventually agreed to the slander that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Yet when Mr. Wiener, a gay Jewish man, attended a San Francisco Trans March in June, hecklers surrounded and shouted insults at him. “Scott, do you have anything to say?” one heckler says in a video as Mr. Wiener tries silently to leave the march. “You do not belong here anymore, Scott. I want to support someone who’s so positive on trans rights, but you’re a piece of s— on Gaza.”
Brad Lander, who defeated Rep. Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th District, has done about all he can do to ingratiate himself with the anti-Israel left. He indulges the genocide lie, advocates the creation of a Palestinian state as a response to Oct. 7, and opposes the sale of “offensive” weapons (meaning weapons) to Israel. At a public event in August his presence attracted the rage of an Israel-hater. “We don’t want no Zionists here. Get the f— out!”
Mr. Lander, also a Jew, likely hasn’t endured the last such threat.
Abdul El-Sayed affords a pretty accurate representation of the mindset Democratic leaders aim to please with their incremental shifts away from Israel. The Michigan Senate nominee, who unlike Messrs. Wiener and Lander competes in a purple constituency and could lose in November, has had every opportunity to temper his rhetoric on Israel. He refuses. His righteous vision will allow no tempering.
Democratic leaders aren’t stupid. Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, et al., perceive the crankery of Mr. El-Sayed and others like him. But they think exclusively in the short term and don’t grasp that the anti-Israel left would rather destroy them and their party than moderate or compromise.
Even a decisive loss by Mr. El-Sayed won’t convince Democratic honchos that alliances with antisemites didn’t need to happen. They can always blame AIPAC. The defection of Jewish donors may concentrate a few minds. But the party will require a longer rethink, and more pain, before it considers dumping its new friends.
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