While Dems tear themselves apart about Israel, this seems a useful reminder

Joseph Weber

John Irving, an American who became a Canadian citizen and lives in Toronto, has long had his finger on the pulse of American culture – sometimes in opposition to trends in his native country. In The Cider House Rules he defends the right to abortion. In A Prayer for Owen Meany he slams conservative notions of patriotism.

So, it’s no surprise that Irving’s key themes in his latest novel, Queen Esther, are antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The book, he told one interviewer, sprang in part from the “criticism and disfavor” Zionism has fallen into. His character reminds readers that Israel is a place where Jews haven’t always been safe but, as he put it, you “could defend yourself.”

Irving, 84 and a non-Jew who has long admired and loved Israel, sets his book partly in the country. We meet his protagonist, the child Esther, however, near early 1900s Portland, Maine, where she is left an unadoptable orphan when antisemites kill her mother, an immigrant from Vienna. As Esther grows up, she makes her way to Europe to help Austrian Jews in the late 1930s and then moves to Israel, where she helps build the state through often-covert military actions that stretch into the 1980s.

For many in America today, particularly liberals, Irving’s book would probably seem ill-timed. Rather than defend Israel as it battles enemies on four fronts – Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen – it’s fashionable in many circles to denigrate Zionism, to deride Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and even to deny its right to exist.

“What began as a drop in support for Israel among younger Democrats has become a vertiginous, across-the-board collapse,” The Christian Science Monitor reported. “Today, an overwhelming majority of Democrats view Israel negatively, and AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is itself a target for progressives seeking to purge the party’s pro-Israel ranks.”

The piece based that reporting on a recent poll by The New York Times and the Siena Research Institute. That poll found that 74 percent of Democratic voters opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel,” as the Times of Israel recounted. Only 20 percent of respondents favored continued aid to Israel.

And 60 percent said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 15 percent sympathized more with Israel. The survey also found that 48 percent of Democrats said the party has been “too supportive of Israel,” while 8 percent said the party was not supportive enough, and 34 percent said U.S. backing was “about right.”

Surveys have repeatedly found that Democrats have become increasingly hostile to Israel, the Israeli newspaper noted. Like other recent U.S. polls, the new survey found that younger respondents, in particular, were more opposed to the Jewish state. In a March survey conducted by Pew, 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expressed an unfavorable view of Israel:

Some of the country’s critics are rallying around candidates such as Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in a party primary set for August. “Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed told CNN congressional reporter Manu Raja on the network’s Inside Politics program. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one — Hamas: Evil, Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.”

While El-Sayed seems to straddle the matter by attacking both sides in the Gaza War, the Egyptian American has also allied himself with Hasan Piker, a fellow Muslim and popular streamer who has made repeated antisemitic comments. As the Forward has reported, Piker’s history of his comments includes denying or downplaying rape that took place during the Oct. 7 attacks and comparing Houthi rebels to Anne Frank.

Then there’s Chris Rabb, the Philadelphian poised to become a congressman. He is backed by Piker and another Israel critic, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He supports a complete embargo on arms sales to Israel, as The Times of Israel reported. Rabb recently posted on X that “the Nakba never ended,” and said he would co-sponsor a resolution with Minnesota Rep. Ihlan Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib to “recognize the Nakba and reaffirm Palestinian refugees’ right to return.”

Disappointingly, Rabb is backed by Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the brighter lights in Congress who also happens to be Jewish. Raskin, who co-sponsored the Block the Bombs to Israel Act, sided with the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and other leftist groups, including Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, as well as groups that work to counter AIPAC, such as Track AIPAC and PAL PAC.

While he says he is committed to Israel, Raskin has split with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Gaza War.

“I continue to hear each day from my constituents stories of pain from their families and friends in both Israel and Gaza,” Raskin said in a release last fall marking the Oct. 7^th savagery. “They speak of the mutual descent into cruelty and savage violence and pray for the imperative of peace and reconciliation. All parties to the conflict must finally come to the negotiating table and put an end to the vicious and hopeless cycles of terror, occupation and war in the region and create a path towards lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, for the sake of both these desperate peoples and all the people of the world.”

Far less even-handedly, we have Maureen Galindo, a Democratic House candidate in Texas who said she wanted to turn a local immigrant detention center into a facility to imprison and castrate “American Zionists,” as The Washington Post reported. Galindo, a sex therapist who has never held office, came in first in a four-way party primary in March and will compete in a two-person runoff race wrapping up May 26.

Perhaps surprisingly, Democratic leaders have condemned Galindo. Ocasio-Cortez described Galindo’s comments as “bigoted garbage and antisemitism.” She called for voters to support Johnny Garcia, a former sheriff’s deputy who said Republicans had “no shame” about supporting Galindo’s “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate race in Texas, also backed Garcia and said he would not campaign with Galindo if she won, as the Post reported. So, too, did the Texas Democratic Party and the chairs of the parties in the 35th Congressional District condemn Galindo’s remarks.

Democratic House leader Hakeem Jefferies accused Republicans of secretly supporting Galindo as a way to undercut Democrats’ chances in November, according to The New York Times. Indeed, the GOP seems to be operating underhandedly, with a political action committee with links to Republicans spending nearly $1 million on TV ads and mailers backing Galindo. The PAC dishonestly calls itself Lead Left.

If she prevails, this antisemite wouldn’t be welcomed by all in Congress. Two Jewish members of the House vowed that if Galindo were elected, they would force a daily vote to expel her.

But the tortuous disputes over Israel have made for ugly twists in Democratic politics. For instance, AIPAC opposed the Democratic mayor of Evanston, Ill., Daniel Biss, in the race to succeed retiring U.S. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. Biss, who is Jewish and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, was targeted with negative ads and mailers in a rare instance of AIPAC involving itself in a race with two Jewish candidates, as the Times reported.

Like some others, Biss tries to take a middle ground on Israel, refusing to call Israel’s actions in the war against Hamas a genocide, but saying that he opposes unconditional aid to the country. He defeated a Jewish rival, whom AIPAC supported, who had backed aid without strings. He was supported by Senators Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; the Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul; and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“This is a guy who can’t possibly be considered anti-Israel — he is the quintessential American Jew,” J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami told the Times. “He is at the 50-yard line of Jewish Americans, and AIPAC doesn’t want them anywhere near policy.”

The lobbying group has gotten such a black eye among some Democrats that it has hidden its name behind front outfits in backing or opposing campaigns. As The Washington Post reported, AIPAC cloaked its spending in Illinois in “a trio of innocuously named organizations” — Chicago Progressive Partnership, Affordable Chicago Now and Elect Chicago Women — and ran ads that attacked candidates including Biss for reasons other than his position on Israel.

What’s more, AIPAC, which some progressive Jewish organizations have labeled a Republican front group, shot itself in the foot in some efforts to back more pro-Israel candidates.

In April in New Jersey, for instance, AIPAC funded ads attacking Tom Malinowski, a moderate Democratic House candidate who supported Israel but – like Biss — said that aid should not be unconditional, as the Times reported. Instead of helping a more pro-Israel opponent, Tahesha Way, the attacks turned voters from Malinowski to a pro-Palestinian progressive, Analilia Mejia, who won the race.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, said he “never will” accept money from AIPAC, according to the Times. And Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire who once was a major donor to AIPAC, told the newspaper that he “walked away” from the group around 2015, when it began to veer to the right. “I still believe it is significantly MAGA-influenced,” said Pritzker, who is Jewish and a Democrat.

So, while the GOP under Donald J. Trump has given Netanyahu almost carte blanche to move against Israel’s enemies, Democrats are tearing themselves apart over the Israel-Palestine conflict and risk losing some Jewish support with nuanced stances. The progressives want to rein in the Israeli prime minister – as some in Israel also do – even as Hezbollah, Hamas and other opponents similarly backed by Iran refuse to yield.

Nowadays, moreover, as the longstanding hope for a two-state solution seems like an impossible dream, some Democrats seem bent on relegating Zionism to the political dustbin. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for instance, in effect calls for an end to Israel as a Jewish state. While he has argued that Israel has a right to exist, he contends it should have nothing to do with religion – a repudiation of the state’s founding.

“I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” Mamdani said in one TV interview. “Equality should be enshrined in every country in the world. That’s my belief.”

Never mind that the 21 percent or so of Israel’s population is Arab and is entitled to vote in the country, just as Jews do. It’s true that Arab-majority parties have never held more than 15 seats in the 120-seat Knesset and are now down to about 10, but that may have to do more with low turnout among Arab voters.

After reaching peak in 2020, with 65 percent of Arab citizens of Israel casting ballots, the share fell in 2022 to 53 percent, compared to 71 percent of the total Israeli electorate.

In 2021, Ra’am, a conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, became the first Arab party to join a governing coalition in Israel. And, depending on participation, some in Israel believe Arabs may win as many as 17 seats in upcoming elections. Of course, full representation would mean they would hold at least 24 seats.

But some Democrats would have the Jewish character of the state disappear. Is that not, in essence, antisemitism? Is much of the opposition now to Israel merely a veil for Jew hatred? Or can leaders such as Raskin back the people and the state even as they slam Israel’s current government?

As antisemitism abounds in New York and elsewhere, it is scarcely helpful that Mamdani plans to shun the May 31 Israel Day parade. And slanderous statements the mayor has made, such as in a 2025 release on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7th massacre, do little to move the needle toward peaceful coexistence. “The occupation and apartheid must end,” he wrote then.

Irving’s book doesn’t make such distinctions. The antisemitism that shapes his “Queen Esther” from the time her family flees Vienna, through her times in the U.S. and into her years in Jerusalem turns her into “an uncompromising defender of Jews during a century of violence and oppression against them,” as a New York Times reviewer put it.

In the end, the book is a powerful reminder that Jews – like other peoples in multiethnic states – deserve their own country. Even as they oppose a particular government’s policies, Israel’s critics would do well to heed that. They might find Irving’s latest a useful read.