Ancient prejudices meet opportunistic mouthpieces.
I still count it as one of the most astonishing — and depressing — facts of history that on October 7, 2023, terrorists broadcast themselves gleefully committing barbaric and demonic acts of murder and rapine on men, women, children, the elderly, and even pets, and that the principal consequence of this boastful slaughter is a worldwide rise in antisemitism that includes many of the West’s mainstream political parties and both of the American ones, along with a spike in violence targeting Jews inspired by Hamas.
There’s really nothing else to conclude here but that October 7, at least as an act of political terrorism, if not as an attempt to destabilize the Israeli state, worked.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow, but how else do you make sense of the fact that on this anniversary, the darling of the Left, New York’s mayor, found it easy to release a statement insinuating Israel brought this on itself and spent much more time dwelling on the vibe-fueled, bald-faced lie of the Gaza “genocide”? Or, that on the same day, the intellectual engine of the MAGA movement held a conference in Jerusalem in which a number of its luminaries advocated distancing the United States from Israel and decrying charges of antisemitism as the real problem?
I don’t think there’s much point taking on Mamdani on substance. On the NatCons in Jerusalem, I’ll yield that I agree almost trivially with one speaker that Israel should be viewed by U.S. policymakers as “an ordinary country with whom we must evaluate our relationship according to a realist foreign-policy lens.” The problem is the familiar one with the way “realism” is invoked in these debates: it begs nearly every question it’s supposed to exist to answer, and functions mainly as a serious-sounding theoretical label applied to reasoning backward from conclusions the person invoking it has already drawn.
To cite just one way this happens: the idea that Israel should be assessed as “an ordinary country” is trivially true, but it almost always smuggles in a rubric of assessment that excludes shared values, ways of life, religious traditions, and cultural ties from weighing in its favor. Now I happen to think that Israel’s value as an ally emerges straightforwardly from an analysis of the strategic and material equities, and that you don’t need the values bit to carry the day. But I also think weighing the soft stuff is rational in determining foreign policy and alliance structure. Even Bismarck understood German nationality as a fact bearing on Prussia’s interests and its relationship with other German powers. It seems true from Thermopylae on down that fellow Greeks, as it were, make good allies against Persians in part because they are fellow Greeks. Common identity is no guarantee of common interests, but it can help constitute them, and can certainly make for more durable alliances. The self-styled “realists” rarely bother furnishing an argument to the contrary, or explaining why bonds of affection should have no bearing on a rational calculus of interests.
But in a way all this is beside the point, because while antisemitism is more ancient than Realpolitik, I suspect much of its present resurgence owes not to any actual change in the equities that make Israel a valuable U.S. ally but to a poisoned information environment in which ancient prejudices meet opportunistic mouthpieces.