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A few days ago, a Jewish event at UC Berkeley was violently shut down and now an upcoming event with Tzipi Livni at UCLA is being moved online for fear of violent disruptions. Worth noting that Ms. Livni is a liberal secularist with a history of arguing for the necessity of negotiations and a path to peace.
How representative are these of a broader shift against Israel within the left? The polls are mixed. On the one hand, the US public appears to be overwhelmingly favoring Israel over Hamas (>80%), but I am not sure if this means as much as Israel's supporters claim. I've seen many pro-Palestinians and anti-Zionists denounce Hamas for other reasons and I got the sense that not all of them were for sake of optics. And even many who refuse to condemn Hamas do so out of a "an oppressed people has a right to resist" framework rather than a genuine sympathy for the group.
It's worth recalling that even before Oct 7th, the sympathies for Israel among democrats in America were collapsing. My sense is that this trend was halted - and perhaps even reversed somewhat - in the immediate aftermath of the attack but soon began to resume its plunge. It now appears to be very difficult for even liberal Zionists to get a fair hearing among only Jewish audiences on progressive campuses, let alone to a wider public.
While it is true that the core groups making these interruptions are small and heavily concentrated among muslim and "POC" demographics, along with a few white leftists, what's remarkable to me is the wider silence among the broader progressive coalition. Many Jews have remarked upon this, that sympathy seems to be muted or even absent. There is an unwillingness to police these radicals among the wider liberal public, which seems to suggest a hidden reserve of silent sympathy which is not being publicly expressed.
The former AIPAC president Steve Rosen once said that the Israel lobby is like a nightflower: it best operates in the shade. That is now becoming impossible as progressives with a national profile such as AOC are publicly likening them to NRA. Another very important principle has been bipartisan support. Israel needs Western backing and among all Western countries, the US stands heat and shoulder above the rest. America was unique among Western countries that Israel had broad support among both the left and right for so long, whereas in Europe the left gave up on Israel early. The UK Labour party's Keir Starmer may try to resurrect matters after the Corbyn years, but one gets the sense he is fighting against his own base which is usually not ending well for leaders in the long run.
But this exceptionalism now appears to coming to a close as well. Support for Israel among the right-wing is as strong as ever, but being a Zionist is now increasingly a right-coded statement. It was remarkable to see Biden in his latest interview with Seth Myers to state publicly that he is a Zionist. It's an uncontroversial statement for a man of Biden's age, but I suspect it will be a toxic statement for liberals under the age of 40, at least among non-Jewish liberals. I think Israel becoming a bipartisan football is ultimately bad for the country, but I don't see how it ends any other way. And given how liberals dominate elite institutions in America, I'd argue that this does not augur well in the long run. If Biden loses in 2024 because of Michigan, then a narrative will be set that you cannot be too pro-Israel as a democrat anymore.
Is Israel responsible young vs old
Is Israel going to far Young vs old
The big rift is young vs old, with boomer republicans being much more pro Israel than young conservatives. The conservative zionist partnership is strained by AIPAC/ADL being highly anti right on social media. Israel has in no way delivered for the right. Israel with the lobby has pushed migrants into Europe, promoted censorship and cost hundreds of billions. With Israel ethnically cleansing christian Palestinians and mistreating Christians in Jerusalem, it is hard to see what the right gets out of the support. Putting MAGA and ADL in the same tent is as hard as getting the leftist coalition together. Right-wingers are supposed to like Israel, while Israel's lobby wants right-wingers banned off twitter.
The big split is most likely between those who get their information from oligarch owned media and those who get their information from more distributed sources.
A big problem for Israel is the diaspora demographics. Europe's jewish population is in a state of collapse, with especially Eastern European jews moving to Israel. Russia only has 10% as many jews as they had 50 years ago.
American jews are older than the average American and non orthodox american jews have low birth rates.
Source The jewish number is propped up by orthodox jews. Non Israeli jews are trending toward either Haredi jews or secularized liberals with few children and lower levels of ethnocentrism.
In other words the US has a population that is rapidly rising while the number of jews is in decline. There are enough jews to staff high positions but this means that there simply aren't enough jews to keep a presence in broad sectors of society.
Pew Polls and some other pollsters mail a questionnaire to a home address, which I really think slants their findings against the most technologically-addicted young people who also happen to be the most liberal.
There was a recent case of brilliant demogaphic wizardry which showed that at home Yiddish speakers have a birth rate of 7. The Haredi will be pushing well above their weight in staffing high positions. For example the head of our cybersecurity directorate is a devout Haredi Jew, Anne Neuberger; she is the one who will be deciding whether a hack comes from Iran, so quite the important position. She got her position shortly after her family fund donated to AIPAC; Anne’s husband works at AIPAC. Her parents were once hostages that were saved by Israel (actually Netanyahu’s brother) during the Entebbe raid. Her father George Karfunkel is one of the richest Americans — somehow he was able to invest in Kodak at the same time the Trump admin gave them a government contract during COVID. (Kushner’s family is a big haredi donor, perhaps he learned through that channel?). He then transferred his 180 million kodak stock into an inactive, newly created haredi school just for tax deductions. This comes as Haredi schools in NYC were found to be stealing billions in school funds, ignoring requirements like teaching English…
No, the Haredi will not adapt to broader society. But they actually don’t need to! They can better maintain a strong influence on society while retaining maximal tribalism.
Aren't they also the most conservative? I'd expect to see the very online youth that are getting news and memes from non-traditional sources represented on both sides.
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