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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.
I don't think the events we are seeing now change the basic structure of US (or Anglosphere more generally) opinion on Israel-Palestine:
With a Democrat in the White House, the pro-establishment left controls the government. If support for Israel on the pro-establishment left was weakening, we would see a change in government policy. What we actually see is the bog standard pro-establishment line on Israel since before Oslo - give them everything they ask for (modulo aid being blocked in Congress) while gently pointing out that American Jewry would prefer a more secular Israel, and that Israel could provide its allies with political cover by pretending to support a two-state solution at some unspecified future date.
Or it suggests that the pro-establishment left isn't willing to engage in a public intra-left slap-fight in an election year when they can just support Israel quietly.
Conventional wisdom in British politics is that the median voter hates the anti-establishment left sufficiently that a Labour leader can only win an election if he is visibly fighting against his own base. (This is most obvious viz-a-viz Blair, but the conventional wisdom dates back to the Foot era). Every Labour Prime Minister except Atlee is a hate figure on the activist left.
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