I don’t recognize the Left anymore.

Israel has become far too important to people whose lives it barely affects.

photo: Duncan Shaffer/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

I used to understand the Left. Heck, I grew up in Los Angeles in a leftist household.

Back then I understood what the Left claimed to stand for.

Workers should have dignity. Minorities should be protected. Racism should be confronted. Women should have equal rights. Religious fundamentalism should not dictate public life. Refugees should be treated like human beings. Powerful institutions should be scrutinized. Vulnerable communities should not be made to fear for their safety.

You could argue about how to accomplish those things. You could argue about taxes, healthcare, policing, immigration, foreign policy, unions, regulation and a hundred other questions.

But I understood the principles.

Today, I do not.

Somewhere along the way, a part of the Left developed an obsession with one tiny country thousands of miles away — and with the Jews who refuse to apologize for its existence.

Not China. Not Russia. Not Iran. Not North Korea. Not Pakistan. Not Turkey. Not Qatar.

Israel.

Not the dozens of governments involved in wars, territorial disputes, repression, occupation, ethnic conflict, or religious extremism around the world.

Israel. Again and again and again.

Israel at city council meetings. Israel at university protests. Israel in congressional primaries. Israel in union resolutions. Israel in activist organizations. Israel in political litmus tests. Israel in conversations that seemingly have nothing to do with Israel.

And eventually you have to ask a question that polite people keep avoiding: Why has the Jewish state become one of the central moral obsessions of the Western Left?

I have family and friends in the United States, Europe and Australia. Like most people, their actual lives revolve around their families, jobs, mortgages, rent, schools, taxes, healthcare, relationships, neighborhoods, and the economies of the countries in which they live.

Whether Israel builds an apartment building in Jerusalem does not determine their mortgage payment. Benjamin Netanyahu does not set their income tax rate. The Knesset (Israeli parliament) does not determine whether their children can afford a house. The IDF does not decide whether their local school is good.

And yet you could follow certain corners of Western progressive regressive politics today and conclude that the State of Israel is somehow one of the most important forces shaping daily life in London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Paris, and New York.

It isn’t.

Israel matters strategically. The Middle East matters. American foreign aid deserves attention. But that does not explain the obsession.

Something else is happening, and the Democratic Socialists of America make it unusually easy to see. The DSA has hijacked portions of the activist Left, and increasingly it has discovered that one of the easiest ways to exercise political power is through Democratic Party primaries. The DSA itself openly explains that it generally runs candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line because America’s two-party system makes that the most effective path to power.

And Israel is not some peripheral issue inside the organization. It has become a test of ideological legitimacy. The DSA’s national endorsement requirements now explicitly require candidates to meet organization-wide “Anti-Zionist requirements.” Candidates seeking its national endorsement must support the BDS movement, refrain from affiliation with the Israeli government or what the organization calls “Zionist lobby groups,” and support legislation advancing what the DSA describes as “Palestinian liberation.”

Think about how extraordinary that is.

Imagine a major American political organization requiring candidates to establish the correct ideological position on India before receiving its endorsement. Or Ireland. Or Armenia. Or Ukraine. Or Taiwan.

But the existence and legitimacy of the Jewish state have become a political purity test.

And that should tell Jews something: Increasingly, the argument is not about what Israel does. It is about what Israel is. The DSA’s own statements describe Zionism as a form of supremacy, and it calls for replacing Israel’s existence with a “democratic secular state, from the river to the sea.”

If your political movement’s admission price is rejecting the right of Jews to national self-determination, then Jews should at least have the courage to understand what they are being asked to surrender.

October 7th should have made this impossible to ignore. On the very day Israelis were being slaughtered, kidnapped, and raped, the DSA released a statement declaring that the events were a “direct result” of Israel’s policies and insisting, “This was not unprovoked.”

That response revealed something. For part of the modern Left, the Jew can still be a victim — but only under very specific conditions. The Jew may be mourned if he is powerless. The Jew may be protected if he is defenseless. The Jew may be included if he is sufficiently embarrassed by Jewish power. The Jew may be welcomed if he describes Jewish sovereignty as someone else’s oppression.

But the Jew who fights back? The Jew who builds an army? The Jew who draws a border? The Jew who says that after Babylon, Rome, expulsions, pogroms, inquisitions, massacres and the Holocaust, perhaps Jewish survival should no longer depend entirely upon the kindness of other nations?

That Jew suddenly becomes ideologically harmful.

And nowhere was that contradiction more surreal than in Michigan this past week.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — herself Jewish and a Democrat — spoke to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus about the dilemma Jewish Democrats now face. She told the Jewish audience: “We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.”

Why are Jews being asked to negotiate with their own survival in the first place? Why is that even in the equation?

We would recoil at telling almost any other minority group that protecting the future of its people was an unfortunate form of “self-interest.” Imagine telling Black Americans that their physical security must occasionally be sacrificed for the greater political coalition. Imagine telling gay Americans that their safety should take second place to more important electoral objectives. Imagine telling Muslim Americans that preserving their community is less important than saving the rest of humanity.

The language would be recognized immediately for what it was.

But Jews? Jews have spent 2,000 years being told to make themselves useful to other people’s civilizations. Be good citizens. Be quiet. Assimilate. Do not make trouble. Do not be too Jewish. Do not ask for too much. Do not make your neighbors uncomfortable. Prove your loyalty.

And now there is a new version: Be Jewish. Celebrate Hanukkah. Eat the bagels. Quote tikkun olam. March for everybody else’s grievances. Just do not take Jewish liberation too seriously — because apparently Jewish particularism is suspicious while everyone else’s particularism is liberation.

That is the leftist trap, and I refuse it.

There is nothing wrong with caring about Jews. There is nothing wrong with believing Jews deserve sovereignty. There is nothing reactionary about recognizing that a people repeatedly persecuted across continents might have a legitimate interest in possessing one country in which their safety does not depend entirely upon whether the political majority happens to like them at any given moment.

In fact, that used to sound remarkably progressive: national liberation, indigenous return, reviving an ancient language, refugees rebuilding their homeland, women participating in political life, a parliamentary democracy, trade unions, universal healthcare, immigrants from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union creating one society, a people scattered around the world returning to the land from which their civilization emerged.

If you removed the word Jewish from the story, leftists would probably make a documentary about it. Put the word Jewish back in, and suddenly we are discussing “apartheid,” “white supremacy,” “oppression,” “occupation,” and “settler colonialism.”

This contradiction being peddled among the Left is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and it brings me back to the obsession with Israel. It has become a symbol — a symbol onto which an entire worldview can be projected.

Once that happens, facts become almost secondary.

The conflict is no longer about Israelis and Palestinians. It becomes Good and Evil. And once Israel has been assigned the role of Evil, anyone defending Israel becomes morally contaminated. Including Jews, and especially Jews.

That is how we reached the bizarre political environment in which Western Jews can spend their entire lives advocating for civil rights, immigrants, reproductive rights, minority rights, and social programs — and then suddenly be informed that they are insufficiently “progressive” because they believe Tel Aviv should continue to exist inside a Jewish state.

One issue erases the résumé. One country becomes the test. One national movement becomes the sin. And I am tired of pretending this is normal.

None of this requires Jews to become staunch conservatives. I still hold many liberal beliefs on many issues, but growing parts of the Left are no longer concerned with issues. They are obsessed with ideology.

This is not an argument for switching teams. It is an argument for Jews finally refusing to subordinate themselves to teams at all. I will criticize the Right when it deserves criticism, and I will criticize the Left when the Left starts treating the continued existence of the world’s only Jewish state as a moral problem. What I will not do is accept a political bargain in which every people’s dignity is sacred except my own.

I will not apologize for believing Jewish survival matters. I will not apologize for believing Jewish sovereignty matters. I will not apologize for believing Israel should exist. And I certainly will not accept the grotesque suggestion that sacrificing those things somehow makes me a better Jew.

Queen Esther was invoked in Dana Nessel’s speech. Perhaps we should remember what the Book of Esther actually teaches. Esther did not save Persia by sacrificing the Jews. She risked her position to save her people. That is the Jewish lesson. We contribute to the societies in which we live. We care about humanity. We fight injustice. We care about strangers because the Torah commands us to remember what it was like to be strangers ourselves.

But nowhere does Judaism command Jews to disappear. There is no virtue in communal suicide. There is no morality in teaching Jews that everybody else’s survival is humanism while our own survival is selfishness.

For much of my life, I thought the Left understood that. Now, I do not recognize the movements claiming to represent it. A political movement that demands solidarity with everyone but treats solidarity with Jews as suspicious has lost something important. A movement that celebrates nearly every form of national liberation except Jewish national liberation has some explaining to do. A movement in which candidates can be required to pass an anti-Zionist purity test has moved far beyond criticism of Israeli policy.

And a movement in which Jewish politicians find themselves telling Jewish audiences to place even their own survival behind the needs of the political coalition should terrify Jews regardless of which party they vote for.

I do not know where the Left goes from here, but I do know where Jews should go. We tried powerlessness for centuries. It did not end well. I will not apologize for that lesson. I will not unlearn it. And I will not sacrifice Jewish survival to prove that I am one of the “good Jews.”

If that makes me unwelcome in parts of today’s Left, then the problem is not that I have abandoned the Left. The Left abandoned me.

---