https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-rhetoric.html
‘Erase Gaza’: War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel
Experts say that inflammatory statements by prominent Israelis are normalizing ideas like the killing of civilians and mass deportations.
Reporting from Jerusalem
November 15, 2023
New York Times
Shock, grief and pain have cascaded across Israel since Hamas gunmen poured out of Gaza to kill an estimated 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers on Oct. 7. So have anger and a thirst for vengeance, which the country’s leaders are verbalizing in language that critics in Israel say often crosses the line into incitement.
“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” said Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, two days after the attacks, as he described how the Israeli military planned to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.
“We’re fighting Nazis,” declared Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”
Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” had been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, said FakeReporter, an Israeli group that monitors disinformation and hate speech. The phrases were only mentioned 16 times in the month and a half before the war.
The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.
Incendiary statements are not limited to Israel, of course. Ghazi Hamad, a senior leader of Hamas, vowed on Oct. 24 that the group would wipe out Israel as a country, and appeared to exult in the barbaric acts that his militants had carried out against Israeli civilians. “We are not ashamed to say it with full force,” he said. “We have to teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it again and again.”
But the proliferation of such language by Israelis has opened a debate in Israel, where far-right and ultranationalist politicians were testing the boundaries of acceptable speech even before Oct. 7. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”
Concerns about the spread of extremist rhetoric are an extension of a political battle within Israel that has been raging all year between Mr. Netanyahu’s ultraright government and a civic opposition, some of whom now worry that it will inure Israelis to the civilian toll in Gaza as the war goes on.
The idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza was raised last week by another right-wing minister, Amichay Eliyahu, who told a Hebrew radio station that there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu, saying that his comments were “disconnected from reality.”
Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States, which has pressed Israel to allow daily four-hour humanitarian pauses in the combat.
Such reassurances are also belied by the language Mr. Netanyahu uses with audiences in Israel. His reference to Amalek came in a speech delivered in Hebrew on Oct. 28 as Israel was launching the ground invasion. While some Jewish scholars argue that the scripture’s message is metaphoric not literal, his words resonated widely, as video of his speech was shared on social media, often by critics.
“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and author of “The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights.”
“When ministers make statements like that,” Mr. Sfard added, “it opens the door for everyone else.”
Yehuda Shaul, co-director of Ofek, a think tank in Jerusalem, has collected 286 statements since Oct. 7 that he classifies as having the potential to incite unlawful behavior. His list includes Eyal Golan, an Israeli pop singer; Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Mr. Netanyahu; and Yinon Magal, a host on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14.
“Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Mr. Golan said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15.
“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas.
“It’s time for Nakba 2,” Mr. Magal wrote on X on Oct. 7, a reference to the mass displacement and flight of Palestinians before and after Israel’s creation in 1948, which Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”
In the West Bank last week, several academics and officials cited Mr. Eliyahu’s remark about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as evidence of Israel’s intention to clear the enclave of all Palestinians — a campaign they call a latter-day nakba.
On Saturday, the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said that the military campaign in Gaza was explicitly designed to force the mass displacement of Palestinians. “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” he said in a television interview. “Gaza nakba 2023.”
The rise in incendiary statements comes against a backdrop of rising violence in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes. Jewish settlers, some of whom are armed and informally allied with the military, have killed eight people, one of them a child, according to the United Nations.
Israeli officials point out that Hamas is also active in the West Bank and say that many of those clashes resulted from the military’s efforts to root out militants. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians since Oct. 7.
Eran Halperin, a professor of psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argued that the use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is not surprising, and even understandable, given the brutality of the Hamas attacks, which inflicted collective and individual trauma on Israelis.
For the first time since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, he said, Israel’s survival hangs in the balance. The country is facing the prospect of a multi-front conflict against Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as a potential uprising in the West Bank.
“People in this situation look for very, very clear answers,” Professor Halperin said. “You don’t have the mental luxury of complexity. You want to see a world of good guys and bad guys.”
“Leaders understand that,” he added, “and it leads them to use this kind of language, because this kind of language has an audience.”
Casting the threat posed by Hamas in stark terms, Professor Halperin said, also helps the government ask people to make sacrifices for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the evacuation of 126,000 people from border areas in the north and south, and the shock to the economy.
But Mr. Sfard warned that Israel’s dehumanization of the people of Gaza could open the door to further discrimination and mistreatment of Palestinian citizens in Israel. It will also make Israelis more inured to the civilian death toll in Gaza, which has isolated Israel around the world, he added. A civilian death toll of 10,000 or 20,000, he said, could seem to “the average Israeli that it’s not such a big deal.”
In the long run, Mr. Sfard said, such language dooms the chance of ending the conflict with the Palestinians, erodes Israel’s democracy and breeds a younger generation that is “easily using the language in their discussion with their friends.”
“Once a certain rhetoric becomes legitimized, turning the wheel back requires a lot of education,” he said. “There is an old Jewish proverb: ‘A hundred wise men will struggle a long time to take out a stone that one stupid person dropped into the well.’”
Adam Sella contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief. In three decades at The Times, he has been bureau chief in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, White House correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, European economic correspondent, and a business reporter in New York. More about Mark Landler
AIPAC Set to Spend $100 Million to Unseat Lawmakers Critical of Israeli Crimes
Incumbent Squad members are among the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s top targets.
-
PHOTO: Representatives
Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib listen
during a news conference calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the
U.S. Capitol building on November 13, 2023, in Washington, D. C. Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
The powerful lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee is expected to spend nine figures in a bid to unseat over half a dozen progressive U.S. lawmakers who have been critical of Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine, Slate reported Wednesday.
Slate politics writer Alex Sammon wrote that “close watchers now expect AIPAC to spend at least $100 million in 2024 Democratic primaries, largely trained on eliminating incumbent Squad members from their seats.”
Sammon said that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), and Summer Lee (D-Pa.) — “the most outspoken and unapologetically leftist contingent of the Democratic Party in national office” — are among AIPAC’s top targets.
Tlaib — the only Palestinian American member of Congress — has accused Israel of genocide for killing and maiming tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and forcibly displacing nearly three-quarters of the besieged strip’s people. Many experts concur with her characterization.
Tlaib, Omar, Bush, and a handful of other Democratic lawmakers have also called Israel an apartheid state, an assessment shared by a growing number of rights groups, international figures, and even former Israeli government officials.
However, the furthest most progressive Democrats have gone in criticizing Israeli policies and practices is endorsing a resolution introduced last month by Bush urging U.S. President Joe Biden to press Israel’s far-right government to agree to a cease-fire in Gaza.
On Wednesday, two dozen House members led by Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Biden calling for a cease-fire.
As Sammon noted, a recent Data for Progress poll found that two-thirds of U.S. voters, including 80% of Democrats, also back a cease-fire.
Connor Farrell, president of the progressive fundraising group Left Rising, told Sammon that AIPAC wants “to make the statement this cycle that no one is safe from their wrath, that if you speak out, you can be targeted no matter how popular or how many cycles of incumbent you are.”
“It’s extremely audacious,” Farrell added.
Progressive Democrats are no strangers to AIPAC spending big in bids to defame, defeat, or unseat them. As Sammon noted:
In the 2022 midterms, the Israel lobby became the largest single-issue outside spender in Democratic primaries, pouring in nearly $30 million via the super PAC the United Democracy Project, and millions more via the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. It was an astronomical amount of money, mostly directed at knocking progressives out of the primaries, largely in open and redrawn seats.
AIPAC’s heavy spending was blamed for helping Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) defeat incumbent Andy Levin — a self-described Zionist Jew — last year in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District Democratic primary.
Conversely, some of the staunchest supporters of Israel in Congress have benefited from AIPAC’s largesse. The group was the number one donor to both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) during the last election cycle.
AIPAC has also been a top contributor to lawmakers like Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), who not only vocally support Israel, but also attack colleagues like Tlaib and Omar for their pro-Palestinian views. AIPAC was by far Gottheimer’s largest contributor in the 2022 electoral cycle, donating more than $216,000 to his campaign. The same goes for Torres, who received over $141,000 from the group during the same period.
Some observers also believe it is no coincidence that Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) — whose third-biggest campaign contributor during the last election cycle was AIPAC — introduced a censure motion against Tlaib last month, baselessly calling her a terrorist sympathizer.
Progressive lawmakers haven’t taken AIPAC’s attacks laying down. Omar — who, like Tlaib has received death threats after being targeted by the group — has accused the organization of endangering her life. Pocan earlier this month called AIPAC “a cancerous presence on our democracy and politics in general.”
“I don’t give a fuck about AIPAC,” he said after the group falsely accused him and other representatives of “trying to keep Hamas in power.”
AIPAC has also come under fire from Democrats of all stripes for endorsing more than 100 Republican U.S. lawmakers who voted to subvert the 2020 presidential election in service of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that Democrats rigged the contest.
Alluding to right-wing support for the group, Bush wrote on social media Wednesday that “AIPAC is attempting to buy blue seats with GOP donor money.”
Sammon wrote that AIPAC’s effort to oust popular Democrats is fraught with risks for the group:
Toppling an incumbent is not easy. Tlaib, Omar, Bush, Bowman, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez are all well-liked, especially in their districts. Some, like Tlaib, are masters of constituent services. Others have shown incredible fundraising chops, and boast massive grassroots networks. There have been previous attempts to take out Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez that failed spectacularly, and expensively. Omar, who looked vulnerable in her previous race, didn’t really campaign that time around. AIPAC may find itself burning money to fight on inhospitable terrain. And if it fails, the group’s fearsome reputation in D.C. will be greatly diminished.
“That AIPAC feels the need to spend this much money at all could well be taken as a sign of weakness, not strength,” Sammon added. “Already, unlimited Israeli militarism is deeply unpopular; a full year of bombings of Palestinian hospitals and mass casualties of children in Gaza could make the AIPAC line even more unpopular still.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
AOC Leads Coalition of Democrats Calling for Biden to Demand Gaza Ceasefire
The group includes four Democrats who had not publicly called for a ceasefire before.
A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is calling on President Joe Biden to demand a “robust bilateral ceasefire” in Gaza as reports say over 1 in 200 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in just the last six weeks amid Israel’s siege and genocide.
The letter,
signed by 24 House Democrats in total, urges Biden and Secretary of
State Antony Blinken to call for a ceasefire in order to end the carnage
in Gaza. The group, led also by Representatives Mark Pocan
(D-Wisconsin) and Betty McCollum (D-Minnesota), says they are especially
concerned with the “grave violations” against the rights of children in
the region.
“We write to you to express deep concern about the intensifying war in Gaza, particularly grave violations against children, and our fear that without an immediate cessation of hostilities and the establishment of a robust bilateral ceasefire, this war will lead to a further loss of civilian life and risk dragging the United States into dangerous and unwise conflict with armed groups across the Middle East,” the lawmakers said.
“We reaffirm our unequivocal condemnation of the Hamas attacks on Israel that took place on October 7th, in which Hamas killed over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, and captured over 200 hostages, who were subsequently taken to Gaza,” the group continued. “We also share dire concerns with the ongoing Israeli response, in which the Israeli Defense Forces have killed over 11,078 Palestinians, nearly half of whom have been children.”
The lawmakers detail some of the atrocities that Palestinians in Gaza have faced in the past weeks, including Israeli forces’ assault on residential neighborhoods, refugee camps and other United Nations shelters, as well as Israel’s blockade of basic needs like food, water and electricity.
In addition to Ocasio-Cortez, Pocan and McCollum, the letter was also signed by Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib (Michigan), Cori Bush (Missouri), Jim McGovern (Massachusetts), Mary Gay Scanlon (Pennsylvania), Raúl Grijalva (Arizona), Pramila Jayapal (Washington), Joaquin Castro (Texas), Delia C. Ramirez (Illinois), Hank Johnson (Georgia), Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús “Chuy” GarcÃa (Illinois), Bonnie Watson Coleman (New Jersey), Nydia M. Velázquez (New York), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts), Jonathan L. Jackson (Illinois), Barbara Lee (California), André Carson (Indiana), Jamaal Bowman (New York), Summer Lee (Pennsylvania), Veronica Escobar (Texas) and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota).
The signatories included four lawmakers who had not previously voiced support for a ceasefire in Gaza, bringing the total number of members of Congress in support of the idea to 31.
As the letter was made public on Wednesday, Israeli forces were carrying out a long raid of the largest hospital in Gaza, al-Shifa Hospital, where there were hundreds of staff and patients and thousands of residents taking shelter in the hospital grounds.
The hospital has been turned into a war zone, with Israeli forces stripping the clothes of some staff members and people taking shelter inside and blindfolding them while arresting them. The troops have closed in on the hospital in recent days, and thousands are trapped in the facility, including dozens of newborn babies. Doctors have been forced to perform manual respiration on the babies in order to keep them alive because of the fuel embargo imposed by Israel.
The assault on al-Shifa came just hours after U.S. Pentagon officials repeated Israel’s supposed justification for invading the hospital, saying that Hamas is using it as a base, even as human rights groups have said that Israel’s hospital attacks should be investigated as war crimes. In fact, analysts have drawn parallels between Israel’s claims about Hamas and the U.S.’s own false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which were used as an excuse to launch a devastating war in the Middle East.
In their letter, the lawmakers similarly invoke the U.S.’s “mistakes in the aftermath of September 11th” and say that Biden should heed his own words about the U.S.’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — conflicts that in hindsight, Biden said, required “being deliberate” as he advised Israel’s leaders in an address after the October 7 attack to make “an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve [your] objectives.”
The lawmakers say that Biden should acknowledge that further military activity will not bring about lasting peace in the region. Thus far, even as Biden and other top officials have been careful to use softer language about Israel’s attacks in public, the Biden administration has in private been expanding its military aid to Israel while internally suppressing lower-level administration staff who have spoken up against the genocide.
“Recognizing that there is no military solution that will end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we urge your Administration to obtain clarity on the specific strategic objectives of a large-scale ground invasion, their achievability, what may come after Hamas, the risks to hostages and civilians in the region, the national security implications of a multi-front war in the Middle East, and the potential threats to American citizens in the region,” they wrote.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/opinion/israel-democratic-party-jamaal-bowman.html
The War in Gaza Is Splintering the Democratic Party
Representative Jamaal Bowman, whose district encompasses several affluent Westchester County suburbs as well as a small part of the Bronx, last week planned a “healing breakfast” with Jewish constituents pained by his pro-Palestinian politics. A member of the informal alliance of a half-dozen or so young Black and brown left-wing representatives known as the Squad, Bowman won a primary against the district’s staunchly pro-Israel incumbent in 2020, fueled largely by the energy of that summer’s racial justice protests. But now, with the conflict in the Middle East inflaming American politics, he seemed likely to face his own primary challenge in June, one that will test the coalition between liberal Jews and people of color that is key to the progressive movement both in his district and in the country more broadly.
Bowman didn’t get into politics to work on Israel and Palestine. A brash, impassioned and sometimes impetuous former middle school principal, he was motivated by education and criminal justice reform. But like other members of the Squad, Bowman has developed a sympathy with the Palestinian cause that makes him an outlier in a Congress where deference to Israel is the norm.
He was one of nine Democrats to vote last month against a resolution expressing support for Israel and condemning Hamas, because, he said, it didn’t call for a two-state solution or for military de-escalation. Speaking at a rally held by Rabbis for Ceasefire this week, he said, rather presumptuously, “By me calling for a cease-fire with my colleagues and centering humanity, I am uplifting deeply what it actually means to be Jewish.”
Plenty of Jews in his district, including some who loathe Israel’s right-wing government, disagree, and have grown alienated from their congressman and the strain of progressive politics he represents. “People like me are not being given much to work with when we go to some of our beleaguered, anxious and frightened Jewish friends, and they are saying that the left is so infested with antisemitism that they can no longer be part of it,” said Lisa Genn, a local progressive activist who is part of a group called Jews for Jamaal.
With tensions in the district high, Bowman organized the breakfast so the community could talk things out in person. “Nobody’s going,” the head of the Westchester Board of Rabbis told New York Jewish Week, adding, “The relationship with the congressman has hit rock bottom, and he knows it, we know it.” Nevertheless, so many people R.S.V.P.ed that the meeting was moved from Bowman’s office in White Plains to the nearby Calvary Baptist Church.
When I arrived at the church that morning, a small group of protesters stood outside clutching signs. “Jews are not idiots. We know this is a P.R. stunt!” said one, held by a woman in a blue “Zioness” sweatshirt. “Bowman does not protect our Jewish students,” said another, held by Nancy Weinberger, a Democrat who has two children studying in Israel, and who was particularly incensed by Bowman’s recent vote against a House resolution condemning “the support of Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations” on college campuses. “Can’t he give us one win?” she asked. “Can’t he vote in our interest at all?”
Soon the pastor of the church showed up, saw the demonstrators, and appeared to grow worried that Calvary Baptist would be seen as anti-Zionist. He abruptly canceled the event and called the police to clear everyone out. As Bowman’s staff tried to find a new location, Guy Baron, a protester wrapped in an Israeli flag, confronted the congressman in the church parking lot. “Your actions as our representative in Washington, D.C., are so painful to our community,” he said. “You have no idea. You are so out of touch with the Jewish members of your community.”
Baron inveighed against a slogan defended by Rashida Tlaib, another member of the Squad and the only Palestinian in Congress: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The slogan was a major reason Tlaib was censured by the House last week, with 22 Democrats joining almost all but a few members of the Republican caucus.
“That is a call to genocide,” said Baron, “and you’re on their team.”
Bowman listened, his hands folded, then thanked Baron for sharing his feelings. “We are horrified by the rise of antisemitism that is happening all over the world, right here in our country, and right here in our community,” he said. “That is why we’re having this meeting and conversation today. Because we know and we acknowledge the trauma and the pain and the fear.”
Eventually, the meeting was moved back to Bowman’s office. About 40 people, including several of the protesters, gathered in a crowded semicircle in a low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit room. Trays of bagels, scrambled eggs and pastrami sandwiches were brought in, but they went mostly untouched. Emotions were intense — there were repeated invocations of the Holocaust — but by absorbing his constituents’ outrage and grief, Bowman was able to keep the conversation civil.
“I am deeply concerned that the people that I’ve spent my life marching with are not marching with me,” Bill Giddins, a retiree from Bronxville, said to applause. “I am deeply concerned that when a Black person is damaged in America, I want to protect that person. I don’t feel the same from you and your office.” A few days before, a man had been arrested near the site of a local rally for the victims of Oct. 7 on charges of illegally carrying a semiautomatic weapon; his car was flying a Palestinian flag and had a swastika intertwined with a Jewish star scrawled on the side.
Bowman’s Jewish constituents tried to convey how an ancestral terror of annihilation had been newly awakened. “This is Westchester!” said one mother of young children. “How can we be feeling unsafe as Jews?”
“I myself can’t keep you safe,” said Bowman. “We, in this room, in this community, and me and my colleagues in elected office can do so. Not just with words, or political pandering, or virtue signaling,” but “sleeves up, in the room, figuring it out.”
Whether Bowman can figure out how to heal the rifts in his district will have implications beyond his slice of New York. Ahead of the existentially important 2024 election — which could bring Donald Trump, increasingly unabashed in his embrace of vengeful authoritarianism, back to power — some polls show Joe Biden’s support among young people and Arab Americans collapsing, likely because of the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza. “People tell me they’re not voting Democrat, without me asking,” Bowman told me.
A series of ugly primary campaigns fought over Israel will only widen the progressive political divide. But with horror at conditions in Gaza and Jewish fear both ratcheting up, an intraparty clash over the future of the Squad now looks inevitable.
As the left-leaning journalist Ryan Grim points out in his forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” the politics of Israel and Palestine have bedeviled the group ever since its first members burst onto the political scene in 2018.
The most famous figure in the Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rarely spoke about the Middle East in 2018, during her first congressional campaign, which was centered on the same economic issues that powered the Bernie Sanders movement. But that May, she’d tweeted about the Israeli military’s shooting of protesters in Gaza, calling it a “massacre.” After her primary victory, she was questioned about that tweet, and her stance on Israel, on the TV show “Firing Line.” She grew visibly flustered, and afterward decided to stop doing national interviews for a while.
“At the time, she betrayed a visceral sense of just how treacherous the issue could be for her, but she could never have guessed how significantly she had underestimated it,” wrote Grim.
It was even more treacherous for Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women in Congress, who’ve both voiced support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. Both spoke for many left-wing voters, especially young ones, who see in the Palestinian struggle a reflection of their own battles against various forms of oppression. Both also, occasionally, invoked what many Jews see as antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and dual loyalty. Less than a week into her first term, for example, Tlaib tweeted that Senate supporters of an anti-B.D.S. bill “forgot what country they represent.” Not long after, Omar tweeted that fealty to Israel by U.S. political leaders was “all about the Benjamins.” Some of the early weeks of the new congressional session were consumed by an attempt, eventually watered down, to officially rebuke her.
Soon after the original members of the Squad were sworn in in 2019, Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who once did work for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, started a group called the Democratic Majority for Israel aimed in part at stopping their influence from growing. “Most Democrats are strongly pro-Israel and we want to keep it that way,” Mellman told The Times. “There are a few discordant voices, but we want to make sure that what’s a very small problem doesn’t metastasize into a bigger problem.”
To that end, the Democratic Majority for Israel tried hard to thwart Bowman when he ran against Eliot Engel in 2020. The group spent almost $2 million in the race, much of it on ads slamming Bowman for unpaid taxes. As Grim noted, hitting “a working-class Black man for financial troubles before he’d risen to become a successful principal in the area would have been considered tone-deaf in a New York Democratic primary in any recent cycle,” but especially amid the summer’s protests over the killing of George Floyd. The attack failed; Bowman ended up winning a blowout 15-point victory.
The district, whose contours have changed with redistricting and could change again before the primary, is about 50 percent Black and Latino, and voters of color were Bowman’s base. But they were joined by some Jews, who are thought to make up about 10 percent of the district’s population. “It was the time,” said Giddins, the Bronxville retiree, who backed Bowman in the past. “We have to coalesce and give Black people power. They’re entitled to it.”
But despite Bowman’s popularity, growing disaffection among Jews — who, according to The New York Times, probably make up 20 percent to 30 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in his district — could make him vulnerable. He’s one of several Squad members facing potentially formidable primary challenges over their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Omar is going to have a rematch against a former Minneapolis City Council member, Don Samuels, who lost to her by about two points in the 2022 primary. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat who emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement, is facing a primary challenge from a former political ally, the St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. Summer Lee, a Pittsburgh Democrat whose district includes the Tree of Life synagogue, the site of an antisemitic mass murder in 2018, is being challenged by Bhavini Patel.
Bowman doesn’t have a strong opponent yet, but last month 26 rabbis in his district wrote a letter to Westchester’s popular county executive, George Latimer, imploring him to get into the race. Last week, a local TV station reported that Latimer had indeed decided to jump in, though he told me he still hadn’t made a formal decision and wouldn’t until he returned from a solidarity trip to Israel.
Should a few members of the Squad lose their primaries, the blow to Democratic unity could be severe. “Many of the young people or people of color, Muslim and Arab Democrats who support the Squad will feel like the party is not a place for them,” said Waleed Shahid, former communications director of the Justice Democrats, the group that recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for office, and a senior adviser on Bowman’s 2020 campaign. “And they’ll either stay at home or they’ll go to a third party.”
Already, there are signs that the party is fracturing over Israel. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about three-quarters of Democrats want a cease-fire, but few in the Democratic establishment share their views. Last week, in a rare gesture of defiance, more than 100 congressional staffers walked out to demand that their bosses back a cease-fire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and Democratic Party staff members have signed a letter imploring Biden to call for a cease-fire, saying, “If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”
If the conflict in Israel cools down in a few months, it might recede from the center of American politics. But the wounds it’s torn open will be hard to mend, because so many people are feeling betrayed. Many liberal Jews, mourning the mass murder in Israel and shaken by the upsurge of antisemitism at home, believe they’ve been abandoned by their allies. Advocates for the freedom and safety of Palestinians, horror-struck by more than 10,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, believe that the Democratic Party is giving its approval to atrocities. Bowman’s attempt to transcend this split in his own district, knowing how much ire would be directed at him, struck me as decent and brave. But when people discover that they see the world so radically differently, better communication alone might not be enough to bring them back together.
From the time he was elected, Bowman has had to traverse a minefield on the Middle East, facing pressure from both his pro-Israel Jewish constituents and from some of the left-wing groups that backed him. He’s mostly refused to tiptoe. Coming into office, Bowman was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he angered the organization when he voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. After he traveled to Israel and the West Bank with the left-leaning pro-Israel group J Street in 2021, some in the Democratic Socialists, which has a policy of boycotting Israel, moved to expel him. He ended up dropping his membership.
For all the blowback from the left, however, the trip solidified his abhorrence of the occupation of Palestine. “I got to see the giant wall built around the West Bank,” Bowman told me. He described being turned away from a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron, where Palestinian movement is curtailed to accommodate a few hundred fanatical settlers, because he wasn’t Jewish. “And I thought that was ironic, because I’m literally a sitting member of Congress voting to support funding for the state of Israel,” he said.
He saw firsthand the way settlement expansion is making a contiguous Palestinian state nearly impossible. “I left feeling pretty overwhelmed and pretty dejected,” Bowman said, adding, “The rhetoric at home didn’t match the reality on the ground there, and specifically, the rhetoric around a two-state solution.” Bowman still believes in two states, but said, “The policies of the Israeli government haven’t gotten us there, and the U.S. hasn’t held Israel accountable towards helping us to get there.”
“At Jamaal’s core, he’s someone who believes in racial and social justice,” said Shahid, his former adviser. “And I think that a lot of the ways he thinks about the world were confirmed” by his trip to Israel. Shahid compared Bowman’s experience to that of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, speaking on the left-wing broadcast “Democracy Now,” described his own shocking encounter with the brutal segregation in Hebron. “I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited,” said Coates. “Where your voting rights are inhibited. Where your right to the water is inhibited. Where your right to housing is inhibited, and it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.”
It was familiar to Bowman, too. Given the congressman’s “experience as a racially conscious Black person,” said Shahid, “it’s hard not to see the parallels.”
Before going to Israel and Palestine, Bowman had co-sponsored legislation encouraging Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel. When he returned, he withdrew his sponsorship and announced he’d vote against the bill because, among other things, it didn’t take Palestinian interests into account. The move appalled rabbis in his district. Later, Bowman angered many Jewish constituents by co-sponsoring Tlaib’s resolution commemorating what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, referring to their expulsion from Israel during the country’s founding. He angered them further by boycotting the speech by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to Congress in July.
Oct. 7 brought an already simmering discontent to a raging boil. A few days after the attacks, Bowman wanted to attend an Israeli solidarity rally held by the Westchester Jewish Council, but organizers advised him to stay away because he’d be received poorly. He has spoken out repeatedly against antisemitism, denouncing, for example, an Oct. 8 demonstration in Manhattan, promoted by the New York Democratic Socialists of America, where Hamas’s attacks were celebrated. But he hasn’t backed away from his fundamental view of the conflict, leaving the mainstream Jewish community feeling as if he’s run roughshod over their interests and sensitivities. “Actions against Israel affect the safety of the Jewish people everywhere,” said Weinberger, the woman with two children in Israel, adding, “We feel so helpless in Congress because of him. He’s taken our voice away.”
In 2022, despite mounting unhappiness with Bowman among some local Jewish leaders, national pro-Israel groups sat out his primary, determining, as Jewish Insider reported, that he “was likely unbeatable.” (He ended up winning about 57 percent of the vote in a four-way race.) But pro-Israel groups — one of which received funds from the disgraced crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried — poured an unprecedented amount of money into other primaries that year, a foretaste of the resources we could soon see mobilized against Bowman.
As Politico reported, the Democratic Majority for Israel spent $2 million to defeat the Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat Nina Turner in a 2022 Ohio primary. In Michigan, the United Democracy Project, a super PAC tied to AIPAC, spent a staggering $4.3 million to help beat Representative Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat who had been outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s occupation. Some funding for the United Democracy Project came from Republican megadonors, including the Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, a Trump supporter. These are not, needless to say, people who are averse to creating lasting ill will among Democrats.
“I’ve been in politics for 30 years, local, state and federal,” said Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat and former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “But last cycle was the first time I saw a really disturbing new phenomenon, which was two groups — cryptocurrency folks and AIPAC — getting involved in Democratic primaries with huge amounts of money,” often more than the candidates were spending themselves. We can expect to see even more outside money from groups supporting Israel deployed against the Squad in 2024. “The level of concern and engagement on the part of the pro-Israel community is at an extraordinarily high level,” Mellman, of Democratic Majority for Israel, told me.
These big-footed donors, who are overwhelmingly targeting representatives of color, are going to exacerbate the fissures in the Democratic Party. But they did not create them. Talking to some of the disenchanted voters at Bowman’s event, I was struck most not by their anger but by their heartbreak.
Diana Lovett, a Democratic Party district leader who held a fund-raiser for Bowman last year, said polarization over the congressman was tearing apart local Democrats. Leaving the event, she told me, with great sadness, that she didn’t feel she could back him anymore. “I love him personally,” she said. She’d spoken to him in October about their disagreement over Israel. “He was lovely, and he’s amazing, and he was the same warm and openhearted person that he was today,” she said.
But Lovett, who’d recently been hanging posters of kidnapped Israelis around town only to see them being torn down, had come to believe that their views on the Middle East are irreconcilable. “I think he sees what he believes to be an injustice, a grave injustice,” and that his votes are coming from a deep “moral consciousness,” she said. “And I think the pain and suffering he is causing to his constituents is some kind of collateral damage to that higher principle.”
If Bowman were a more transactional politician, he might have compromised on an issue so fraught in his community. But he is, for better or worse, very sincere. Lovett was dreading “an insanely divisive primary,” but didn’t see any way around it. “He’s not going to convince us, and we’re not going to convince him,” she said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. @michelleinbklyn
