Democrats’ pushback on Pramila Jayapal’s condemnation of the Jewish state exposed their worries about antagonizing the majority of American voters.
Democrats’ pushback on Pramila Jayapal’s condemnation of the Jewish state exposed their worries about antagonizing the majority of American voters.
R epresentative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) is not sorry. For a brief moment this week, though, the chairwoman of the House Progressive Caucus pretended to be.
Jayapal released what we described in our editorial as “a half-hearted apology” after she was goaded by anti-Israel protesters at the far-left Netroots Nation conference into insisting that Democrats must “make it clear that Israel is a racist state.” It turns out that she applied even less heart to correcting her remarks than we thought.
On Monday evening, Jayapal excerpted and promoted a piece by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg accusing the progressive congresswoman’s critics of hysteria. “The rush to condemn her offhand remarks is about raising the political price of speaking about Israel forthrightly,” Goldberg wrote. Jayapal spoke to Goldberg for the piece, insisting that Israel’s Americans supporters know deep down “they’ve lost credibility because the Netanyahu government’s policies are so racist, and they want to silence any discussion of any criticism.” With these comments, Jayapal effectively un-corrected the record.
In backtracking off her earlier backtrack, however, she has reaffirmed her support for a sentiment that is anything but controversial among partisan Democrats. By accusing Israel of being a racist state, she is echoing what the base of her party already believes.
Overall, Americans, including majorities of Republicans and independents, have a favorable view toward Israel. But Democrats have soured on the Jewish state in recent years. Today, 38 percent of self-identified Democrats say they have more sympathy for the Palestinians than for the Israelis. What’s interesting about the Jayapal imbroglio isn’t her comments or the grassroots progressive sentiments they reflect. Rather, what’s fascinating is her party’s overwhelmingly hostile and disproportionate response to them.
The progressive congresswoman’s condemnation of Israel occasioned a deluge of pushback from her fellow Democrats. “Israel is not a racist state,” read a statement produced by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and joined by Representatives Katherine Clark, Pete Aguilar, and Ted Lieu. Israel’s right to exist remains “the core position of the Democratic Party,” Representative Jerrold Nadler insisted. Forty-two Democratic lawmakers signed their names to an open letter criticizing Jayapal by name and reminding her that “Israel is the legitimate homeland of the Jewish people, and efforts to delegitimize it and demonize it are not only dangerous and antisemitic, but they also undermine America’s national security.”
In an effort to capitalize on the kerfuffle, the House Republican majority is planning a variety of pro-Israel show votes, but prominent Democrats, including Representatives Greg Landsman and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have said they welcome those votes.
This blitz of Democratic support for Israel might have been inspired by Jayapal’s impolitic remark, but her comments alone do not justify the full-court press to which Democrats appear committed. After all, this isn’t the first time Jayapal has humiliated her conference by ill-advisedly revealing the depths of her ignorance on matters relating to foreign affairs. So, what gives? Politics, of course.
You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, as America’s evangelical Christian voters ably demonstrate. And many Jewish Democrats — among them, for example, Jayapal’s boosters on the New York Times opinion page — would not describe themselves as Zionists. But many of the Democratic Party’s biggest near-term challenges are attributable to shifting attitudes toward Israel within its coalition.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2021 found that 75 percent of Orthodox Jewish voters now self-identify as Republicans. That’s a dramatic increase from 2013, when just 57 percent of the Orthodox community affiliated itself with the GOP. These voters demonstrated their strength in 2022, when they ousted sitting New York Democrats like Sean Patrick Maloney from office and came close to installing Lee Zeldin in the Albany governor’s mansion. This spring, Democrats struggled to find a recruit who could appeal to the Jews in the suburban New York City district once represented by Nita Lowey, and captured in 2022 by Republican Mike Lawler. A similar phenomenon has contributed to the Democratic Party’s declining prospects in South Florida, and Republican candidates are busily capitalizing on their opponents’ unforced errors.
There is no high-minded principle on display from Democrats here. The attack on Jayapal and, by extension, the sentiments that prevail among the most vocal members of the Democratic base, are informed by the party’s instinct toward self-preservation.
Nor can we call the outpouring of Zionist enthusiasm an act of courage. It is no coincidence that Democratic support for Israel fell off a cliff between 2019 and 2020, when a Theory of Everything involving racial disparities became vogue inside the Democratic Party. The same hyper-racial narrative that led Democrats to support defunding police forces now colors the way in which the party’s activist class views the Israeli conflict. While criticizing Israel isn’t inherently invalid or politically suicidal, the worldview that inspired Jayapal’s remarks is particularly toxic.
To reach their preferred conclusion, Jayapal and the activists for whom she spoke apply a distorted framework to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, reducing its complexities into digestible narratives around power dynamics and identity. Their reductive view holds Israelis to be powerful, moneyed, Europeanized aggressors, while Palestinians are a subjugated, colonized, brown monolith. It is seductive to those looking for clear good guys and bad guys in the conflict, and it has the added efficiency of allowing its believers to apply the same language they would in describing domestic conflicts to this entirely foreign one. It might insult anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the region and its dynamics, to say nothing of those who believe in Israel’s fundamental legitimacy, but tidy narratives are sometimes shallow.
It would be nice if Jayapal’s ill-considered decision to read the stage directions aloud produced a change of heart among Democratic lawmakers, but that is unlikely. What it has done is exposed Democrats’ worries about the ways in which they have antagonized the majority of Americans who support Israel. Democrats were more than happy to entertain the absurd post-colonial slanders their progressive supporters deployed against Israel, but only as long as that was a cost-free proposition. Apparently, it’s not cost-free anymore.