For most of the postwar era, support for the Jewish state was one of the few things both American parties treated as settled. That settlement is over, and it did not collapse evenly. Inside the Democratic Party, a faction that once sat on the edge of the caucus now sets the moral vocabulary of the base: Israel as uniquely criminal, Jewish political power as purchased, and the murder of Israeli civilians as an understandable reply to “occupation.” Party leaders still issue statements against hate. They rarely impose a price.
The record is not ambiguous.
In 2012, before she reached Congress, Ilhan Omar wrote that Israel had “hypnotized the world” and asked God to “open the eyes of the people to its evil doings.” She later apologized. In February 2019, as a sitting member, she answered a question about pro-Israel lobbying with “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” then named AIPAC. Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, demanded she reject antisemitism. She apologized and immediately reaffirmed the charge. Weeks later she said advocates for Israel were pushing “allegiance to a foreign country” — the dual-loyalty smear, aimed this time at American Jews and their allies. In 2021 she grouped the United States and Israel with Hamas and the Taliban as perpetrators of “unthinkable atrocities.” A dozen Jewish House Democrats rebuked her. She said she had not meant a moral equivalence. The pattern is the point: the trope, the ritual apology, the restatement.
Rashida Tlaib made the slogan explicit. After Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre — about 1,200 people murdered, more than 200 taken hostage, civilians burned and raped — she amplified “from the river to the sea” and called it “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” The Anti-Defamation League and a long list of Jewish organizations hear that line as a call to erase the Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. So did fellow Democrats. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, called the post cruel. Senator Jacky Rosen said it rejects a two-state outcome and puts Jews in danger. In November 2023 the House censured Tlaib, 234–188. Twenty-two Democrats voted yes. One hundred eighty-four voted no. In April 2024, a resolution declaring the slogan antisemitic drew 43 Democratic no votes, including Omar, Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush.
This is not a dispute about settlements or Netanyahu. It is a dispute about whether a Jewish country is allowed to exist.
The organizational left that feeds the party has been blunter. Chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America responded to October 7 by framing the massacre as resistance. The Salt Lake City chapter said it was “not terrorism or anti-semitism to fight against this injustice.” Pittsburgh’s chapter said violent opposition was inevitable and that the conflict ends only if the “apartheid regime is lifted from the river to the sea.” New York DSA promoted a rally in Times Square the day after the slaughter. In an August 2026 interview with The New Yorker, DSA national co-chair Megan Romer said she “probably would have” gone, called October 7 “largely inevitable,” described Gaza as an “open-air concentration camp,” and said any U.S. defense or economic support for Israel is a “solid red line.” She described the DSA’s end state as a free Palestine with its capital in Jerusalem — a one-state outcome. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman condemned the immediate post-massacre rallies. The machine that endorsed them did not change its line. Ocasio-Cortez later lost the DSA’s endorsement after sitting on an antisemitism panel and backing Iron Dome funding.
The base has followed the activists, not the old foreign-policy hands. Gallup reported in February 2025 that only 33 percent of Democrats viewed Israel favorably and 60 percent viewed it unfavorably — the first time a major-party group had crossed into majority hostility. Republican favorability sat at 83 percent. By early 2025, Gallup also found 59 percent of Democrats sympathizing more with the Palestinians and 21 percent more with the Israelis. A later Quinnipiac reading put the share of Democrats who believed Israel had committed genocide at 77 percent, with only 13 percent sympathizing more with Israelis. Pew has tracked a parallel drop in Democratic favorability toward the Israeli people themselves, not just the government. Treating “the Israeli people” as the object of dislike is not a policy argument. It is collective blame.
Jewish voters have noticed, and most of them have not left. A Jewish Electorate Institute survey found Democrats still leading 71–23 on the generic congressional ballot among Jewish voters, with 69 percent identifying as Democrats. The same voters said antisemitism is increasing inside the Democratic Party — 57 percent overall — and 35 percent of Jewish Democrats said the rise of anti-Israel candidates has made it harder to identify as Democrats. They are staying in a house that keeps telling them the smoke is just criticism of a foreign prime minister.
The street has been less theoretical. The ADL logged 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest total in 46 years of tracking, and 6,274 in 2025 — a one-third drop from the peak, still the third-highest year on record and about five times the level of a decade earlier. Nearly half of the 2025 incidents were tied to Israel or Zionism. Assaults with a deadly weapon rose. In May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Witnesses said he pulled out a keffiyeh and shouted “Free, free Palestine.” He had been associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a far-left group, and a manifesto attributed to him called the murders morally justified as a way to “bring the war home.” A month later, Mohamed Soliman firebombed a Boulder march for Israeli hostages, killing one person. Antisemitic murder had returned to American soil for the first time since 2019.
None of that makes the Democratic Party a terrorist organization. It does describe a permission structure. “Globalize the intifada” was defended in the 2025 New York mayor’s race by Zohran Mamdani, the DSA-aligned Democrat who went on to win, as language a mayor should not police — a “desperate desire for equality,” he said, not a call to export the bus bombings and café massacres of the Second Intifada. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Dan Goldman, both Democrats, rebuked him. The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt called the slogan an explicit call for violence. Mamdani later said he would discourage the phrase. He did not treat it as disqualifying, and the primary electorate did not either. He is now mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country.
Defenders of this turn have a stock answer: anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and the right has bigots too. The second point is true and irrelevant to the first. Marjorie Taylor Greene has trafficked in conspiracy sludge. Groyper accounts and white nationalists still hunt Jews from the other flank. A party does not get a pass because its rival is also dirty. The IHRA working definition, which Omar has voted against endorsing, does not ban criticism of Israeli policy. It flags the moves that keep showing up in Democratic primaries: denying Jews the right of self-determination granted to everyone else, holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel, and recycling the charge that Jewish political participation is bribery or foreign control.
What has changed since October 7 is not the existence of a left anti-Israel current. It is the current’s rank, its immunity, and its body count in rhetoric and, increasingly, in fact. The old Democratic leadership condemned Omar in 2019 and still could not stop her. It could not stop Tlaib’s censure from becoming a party split. It watched the sympathy numbers invert and called the inversion a debate about Gaza. Jewish Democrats are being asked to accept, as the price of coalition, politicians who will not say a Jewish state may exist between the river and the sea, and an activist left that called the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust inevitable.
That is not a messaging problem. It is the rise itself.
Poor Norman
www.poornorman.com
