In the week since New York City’s primaries—when three democratic socialist, staunchly anti-Israel candidates swept to victory—we’ve published a series of stories examining what the results mean for the country, and in particular, for Democrats, some of whom say they don’t recognize their own party any more.
This weekend brought a visceral illustration of the new mood we’ve been trying to capture. On Friday evening, California state senator Scott Wiener was on his way to a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in San Francisco—an event he’s joined for 22 years. At the entrance, protesters surrounded him, screaming: “We fucking hate you.” “You do not belong here.” And: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Wiener is a Jewish, openly gay man.
His offense? His stance on Israel—specifically, his refusal at a campaign event to declare that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” He later reversed course, but no matter. The damage was done.
If you haven’t seen the video, we encourage you to watch it. It’s a stark example of something increasingly difficult to deny on parts of the left: No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
How, exactly, did we get here? According to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, the DSA-style antisemitism now permeating large parts of the Democratic Party did not emerge overnight. Rather, it was cultivated over decades, tolerated and emboldened by leaders who declined to confront it. And if we ever hope to understand it, Podhoretz writes, we must go back to the very beginning. —The Editors
The political story of the year isn’t just the emergence of open and unabashed anti-Zionism among successful insurgent Democratic primary candidates for the House of Representatives in New York and New Jersey. It’s that the ideological prior they all have in common, the idea that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state, was not an impediment to their victories, but rather, their secret sauce. Over the next five weeks, two more states will host primaries that will show whether this attitude has the same kind of appeal to Democratic voters elsewhere in the nation.
Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary pits two relatively conventional Senate candidates (both mildly to severely critical of Israel) against the Muslim radical Abdul El-Sayed, a former public-health official in the state. Trained as a doctor, El-Sayed deployed his professional credential to excuse away the monstrous crime of the Hezbollah-inspired Lebanese immigrant who drove a truck into a Michigan synagogue last year. He released a video explaining that his time on a psychiatry rotation had taught El-Sayed how “hurt people hurt people.”
Asked about the difference between Hamas and Israel, El-Sayed told CNN, “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas evil, Israeli government evil. You can say both.” He appeared alongside Hasan Piker, the social-media firebrand who has said Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel,” and responded to criticism of his friendly and unchallenging posture toward Piker by declaring that “my understanding of America is, it’s a place where we have freedom of speech.”
El-Sayed is favored to win the primary on August 4.
