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Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism
(JTA) – For days, students and police at Cleveland State University had been trying to figure out who stole a banner belonging to a campus Palestinian rights group.
The banner, which belonged to the student group Palestinian Human Rights Organization, read “CSU Solidarity for Palestinian Rights” and was illustrated with an outline of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip collectively emblazoned in the Palestinian flag. A dove holding an olive branch appeared on top of the image.
Then, on Jan. 19, police charged their top suspect: a local Orthodox rabbi, whose presence on campus had become all too familiar. A few days later the man confessed to the theft on Instagram, announcing that he had stolen the banner from the school’s student center “as an act of civil disobedience.”
“This incitement to annihilation of Israel should have never been permitted at CSU,” Rabbi Alexander Popivker, a 46-year-old Cleveland Heights resident whose neighborhood is six miles from the school, wrote on social media accompanied by a picture of the flag he stole.
It was far from Popivker’s only recent run-in with local university students.
A former Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in Naples, Italy, who now works in the Cleveland area as a handyman and part-time rabbi for a Russian-speaking Jewish community, Popivker has become known around town as a vigilant and omnipresent pro-Israel advocate. He can often be spotted counter-protesting at local pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or putting on displays of his own, with his wife Sarah on hand filming every contentious encounter.
One major theme of his protests, and his worldview, as he explained to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Palestinians and Nazis are the same thing.”
For the last year, Popivker had been making weekly trips to Cleveland State, occasionally accompanied by other students or community members, to give public demonstrations that elaborate on that idea — sometimes with the aid of swastika-emblazoned props. In the early going, the university provided him with police protection and said his visits to campus were protected by free speech laws.
But he also sought out students online and in-person whom he deemed to be “brainwashed” by anti-Zionist messaging. One such online campaign against a law student prompted the student to file an order of protection against Popivker last fall, an order supported by a prominent Jewish dean at the university. Popivker promptly violated the order by returning to campus.
Cleveland State University main campus, Cleveland, Ohio. (Getty Images)
In late January, university authorities had enough. They arrested Popivker and, following a hearing, declared him persona non grata on campus, banning him from the university grounds for at least two years. Popivker has also been banned from nearby Case Western Reserve University, where he had advocated before focusing on Cleveland State.
In the midst of a nationwide university climate in which pro-Israel advocates claim Jewish students face regular antisemitic harassment for their real or perceived Zionist beliefs, here was a documented case of the opposite: a Jew and outspoken Zionist, who has no affiliation with the schools at which he advocates, accused of harassing anyone he perceived as a threat to Israel, including students who had never sought him out directly.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has spoken out numerous times against Popivker and praised university police for arresting him; a petition the group backed, labeled “Stop harassment on campus” and mentioning Popivker by name, has garnered close to 700 signatures.
Jewish groups, including civil rights groups, have been less forthcoming about situation. Hillel International declined to comment for this story, and the directors of Cleveland’s regional American Jewish Committee and Jewish Community Relations Council offices did not return requests for comment. Jewish on Campus, a nationwide university antisemitism watchdog group that tracks what it defines as anti-Zionist social media harassment of Jewish students, also did not return a request for comment.
Jared Isaacson, the executive director of Cleveland Hillel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the center was “not very familiar with this story.” Cleveland Hillel coordinates Jewish student life at a consortium of Jewish universities including Cleveland State and Case Western, where its student center is located, as well as at least one other school where Popivker has made his presence on campus known in some form.
But, Isaacson said, “Cleveland Hillel is deeply committed to countering antisemitism and hate in all forms, and we believe that no student — Jewish or otherwise — should ever feel threatened or intimidated because of their identity.”
Popivker says he has support from the New York-based Lawfare Project, which bills itself as an “international pro-Israel litigation fund.” He told JTA that the organization “is watching over my cases and providing guidance.”
In a statement, the Lawfare Project called Popivker “a Jewish civil rights activist” but did not confirm that it is backing him, saying only that the group is “currently reviewing the matter.”
The group, which frequently files lawsuits on behalf of students who allege antisemitism on their campuses, said in a statement to JTA that the order of protection was a “double standard” that “should be alarming to anyone who cares about the fight against Jew-hatred.”
Lawfar recently settled a multi-year lawsuit with San Francisco State University over student reports of antisemitic harassment on campus stemming from anti-Zionist activists disrupting an event featuring the mayor of Jerusalem. The settlement compelled the university to hire a coordinator of Jewish student life.
Popivker will have his work cut out for him if he fights the charges. He had exhibited “behavior detrimental to the university community” by stealing the Palestinian banner and separately affixing an Israeli flag to university property, Matthew Kibbon, Cleveland State’s associate vice president of facility services, wrote in the university’s decision declaring him persona non grata.
The rabbi “was not banned for the content of his speech, but how he chose to exercise it,” a Cleveland State spokesperson told JTA in a statement. The university also provided JTA a list of recent campus police interactions with him, including the initial Jan. 11 report of the banner’s theft; Popivker’s visit to campus on Jan. 18, during which police advised him that the student’s order of protection did not permit him to be there; and his return visit on Jan. 25, during which he was arrested.
From Popivker’s perspective, he is simply speaking out on Israel’s behalf for a campus that has a large pro-Palestinian activist presence but few Jewish students. (There are fewer than 200 Jewish undergraduates on Cleveland State’s campus out of 11,784 students, according to Hillel International.) His goal is to educate, he says, informed by his status as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union. And he believes he is being targeted by local pro-Palestinian activists, who, he said, have gone after his kippah and Israeli flags.
“I never attacked anyone. I never raised my hand up to anyone,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying that he was motivated by civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. “I’m going to a public university. I’m staying in the free speech zone. And I raise awareness about what’s going on. There’s a bunch of students that have become my friends that come to study with me regularly.”
One of those students, senior Tyler Jarosz, told JTA he became friends with Popivker after seeing him visiting campus to advocate for Israel. Not knowing much about Jews or Israel himself — “I thought Israel was a very peaceful state,” Jarosz said — the student was taken with Popivker’s demonstrations and said he learned a great deal from them.
“He didn’t just lecture me like a teacher would,” Jarosz said. “He was actually very engaging. He asked questions.”
Jarosz said he never witnessed the rabbi harassing anyone on campus, and said he always tried to engage people in peaceful dialogue, despite what he described as harassment directed at him by some Muslim students. He recalled one Popivker visit to campus for Israel’s independence day, when the rabbi was offering falafel to students, and said he witnessed one student throw the falafel back at him and threaten to “rape” him.
Other students tell a different story. One campus paper, the Cauldron, reported that the rabbi has targeted visibly Muslim and Arab students on campus, demanding to know their views on Israel. Popivker “makes me wary of coming into campus,” a student member of the Palestinian Human Rights Organization group told the Cauldron. “I’m forced to be on constant edge and take the longer way to class in order to avoid him.” Another student told a different campus newspaper, “It’s almost as though he deliberately looks for Palestinian individuals just to target them.”
The chair of the law school’s National Lawyers Guild student chapter told the Cleveland Jewish News that their group’s efforts to engage Popivker in reasonable dialogue failed when he began using “racial slurs and insulting language.”
A swastika Alexander Popivker drew on a Palestinian scarf (alleged by some students to be a keffiyeh, or ritual Muslim prayer scarf) while mounting a pro-Israel demonstration on the campus of Cleveland State University. Popivker then shared the image to his Instagram, Feb. 3, 2023. (Screenshot)
In images from one Popivker demonstration, the rabbi can be seen drawing a swastika with a Sharpie marker on what the Cauldron reported was a keffiyeh, a scarf worn by Arabic men, but which Popivker told JTA was a Palestinian scarf with no spiritual significance. He has also yelled phrases including “Palestinians are Nazis” and “Palestinians are the KKK,” and constructed a stage with images further linking Palestinians to Naziism, according to reports. Popivker’s own Instagram videos show him approaching groups of students to argue about Israel as he films them, calling some of them “terrorists” when they go after his flags. One of his video captions mentions “a Middle Eastern looking student.”
Cleveland State increased its safety protocols as a result of Popivker’s activities, locking some additional entrances around campus. But much of his activities have been online, too.
Last fall Popivker trained his attention on a law student who was involved with campus Palestinian rights groups and had made some anti-Israel posts online, including sharing an image of a child whom pro-Palestinian groups claimed had been a victim of an Israeli bombing, and sharing a socialist group’s post quoting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Documents show that Popivker emailed and called the student’s employer and law school seeking to have her disciplined for her beliefs, writing among other things that she was a “mouthpiece of terrorism and racism against Jews.” He also made Instagram posts targeting her. In response, the student filed for and received the order of protection against him, which Popivker later claimed was unwarranted because he had never met the student in person.
In its statement to JTA, the Lawfare Project homed in on this sequence of events, saying that Popivker’s decision to email the student’s school and employer about what he believed to be antisemitic social media posts was “a tool routinely used by civil rights activists to fight discrimination.”
Popivker asked Jarosz to send a letter attesting to his character for the order of protection hearing, which he did. “Alex understands and respects everyone of every background that he comes across,” the student wrote in his letter. “I have personally witnessed the demonization they have done of him.” Speaking to JTA weeks later, Jarosz said the court case was “bogus,” but said he was unaware of the emails, social media records and phone transcripts reviewed by JTA showing that Popivker had contacted the student’s employer and school.
At the order of protection hearing, a transcript of which Popivker sent to JTA, a key witness who advocated for the restriction was law school dean Lee Fisher, a former attorney general and lieutenant governor of Ohio. Fisher is Jewish.
“We share a hatred of antisemitism,” Fisher told Popivker during the hearing, according to the transcript. The dean also identified himself as “pro-Israel, very much so.” But Fisher made clear he was critical of Popivker’s activities on campus. Asked by Popivker about a specific social media post the student had made, Fisher responded, “Even if she made a mistake by posting it, it did not warrant the kind of reaction I believe that you had.”
Fisher had also met with Popivker previously, in a session mediated by a local rabbi who was a friend of Popivker. “I told him that I was concerned for the health and safety of our students,” the dean said during the hearing. He had implored Popivker to stop his campus activities, but the rabbi refused.
It’s the initial order of protection, which Popivker said had already effectively banned him from campus, that the rabbi says he truly opposes. He saw it as evidence that “they were basically working together with Palestinians” to “cover up the fact that they have an antisemitic group that openly propagates a destruction of Israel.” Popivker visited campus several times after receiving the order of protection but was permitted to stay with only a warning from campus police, Jarosz recalled.
This state of affairs lasted until the rabbi stole the Palestinian student group banner to, he said, “shine a light on this antisemitism.” Popivker described to JTA how he entered the student building, walked up to the third floor where he knew the banner was, and used scissors to remove it and take it with him: “Clip, clip, clip.” He was subsequently thrown in jail — his second such stint in Cleveland for pro-Israel activities, he said, criticizing local law enforcement for not providing him with kosher food while he was behind bars.
Outside of campus, Popivker is active in other areas. Last year, he organized a GoFundMe to support the family of a former classmate of his who was killed by an Islamic State supporter in a terrorist attack in Beersheba, Israel. He also applied to fill a January vacancy on the Cleveland Heights city council, but later withdrew his application.
After being barred from Cleveland State University, Rabbi Alex Popivker took to holding his anti-Palestinian protests on a street outside a local casino. (Courtesy Popivker)
While Popivker may preach nonviolence, his social media activity points to more radical ideologies, as well. On Instagram, he has shared an image of the flag of the Jewish Defense League, an extremist Jewish group that advocates violence against enemies of Jews, founded by convicted terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, as well as an image with a logo of Im Tirtzu, a right-wing Israeli group that has in the past been accused of inciting violence against Israeli human rights groups. Popivker told JTA he is not a member of either group, but that “if I think it’s aligned with what I believe in, I’ll share it.”
Popivker says that, for now, he’s done with his brand of “civil disobedience” and won’t be making his weekly visits to Cleveland State’s campus. “I do have five wonderful boys and a loving wife, and as much as Cuyahoga [County’s] jail is an educational experience in life in many ways, I do not want to go there every week,” he said.
Instead, days after his arrest and campus ban, Popivker posted a photo of himself with an Israeli flag to social media — this time outside a casino a mile away from campus.
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The post Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jews cared more about Israel and antisemitism this election – but it didn’t change their votes much, exit poll shows
Jewish voters overwhelmingly backed Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, even as concerns about Israel and antisemitism played a growing role in their political decisions, according to a new exit poll published on Thursday.
The GBAO Strategies survey of 800 Jewish voters found that 72% of Jewish respondents supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 24% who voted Republican. The poll, sponsored by J Street, a progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group, was conducted via text message from Oct. 28 to Nov. 3 and had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The Democratic share was slightly lower than in previous midterm elections, when Democrats received 74% of the Jewish vote in 2022 and 76% in 2018. In the 2020 presidential election, 77% of Jewish voters backed Joe Biden, according to GBAO’s polling. These findings differ from a national NBC News exit poll, which found that 68% of Jewish voters supported Democrats this year and 31% backed Republicans, compared with 78% who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. (The national surveys used different methods, making it harder to say how preferences actually changed.)
Jim Gerstein, GBAO’s pollster and a Democratic campaign consultant, cautioned against reading too much into the change over time. “You’d have to squint really hard to try and see that that is a shift or anything really meaningful,” Gerstein told the Forward during a press briefing. He noted that Republican support also fell, from 25% in the 2022 midterms to 24% this year. Gerstein suggested that strong opposition to President Donald Trump during his first term, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, may help explain the higher Democratic numbers in 2018 and 2020.
He also noted that campaigns and outside groups have spent significantly more money targeting Jewish voters in the past two election cycles. “These are really negligible, and we don’t look at this as much shifting,” he said.
Even as Democrats regained control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans did appear to make gains among Jewish voters in some closely watched races amid a divide over U.S. support for Israel. Several outspoken critics of Israel won seats in the House, including five members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine, two new senators who made criticism of Israel a major part of their campaigns, also won highly contested races.
The exit poll suggests that disagreements over Israel have not fundamentally changed how American Jews vote.
The future of American democracy remained the top concern for Jewish voters, with 44% naming it as one of the two most important issues influencing their vote, followed by 34% who said the cost of living was among their leading concerns. But Israel and antisemitism became more important than in previous elections. Twenty-one percent named antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel ranked sixth, cited by 14% of voters, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Compared to previous elections, Israel and antisemitism moved up the list of priorities — 21% identified antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel was ranked six with 14%, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Gerstein argued that rising antisemitism and the debates over support for Israel serve as a basic test for candidates rather than the deciding factor in most elections. “I think we see candidates in both parties passing that threshold quite easily,” Gerstein said.
Asked which positions expressed by candidates during the campaign they agreed with most, 30% chose unconditional support for Israel, while 39% favored support tied to Israel’s compliance with American interests and values. Another 31%, including 60% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34, agreed with the statement that Israel has committed genocide and should no longer receive U.S. aid.
Orthodox voters, representing 9% of the sample, voted Republican by a 63-34 margin.
A Jewish split on Israel
The survey also found a Jewish electorate that itself is becoming more divided over Israel.
Thirty-nine percent said their sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were primarily with Israelis, compared with 23% who sided with Palestinians. Another 38% sided with both. Among younger Jews, 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians, compared with 20% who sided with Israelis.
A majority — 51% — said it supported continuing $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance to Israel, while 49% opposed it. However, 44% also said arms sales should be conditioned on compliance with U.S. law.
Jewish voters showed greater agreement on how criticism of Israel should be treated and whether Israel’s policies directly impact them.
Sixty percent said Jewish organizations that label harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitic are using concerns about antisemitism to defend unpopular Israeli policies. About two-thirds said AIPAC’s spending against candidates critical of Israel increases antisemitism in the United States, while 80% said Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank contribute to antisemitism. An overwhelming majority of 76% support sanctions against violent Israeli settlers.
The survey also found that 39% of Jewish voters, including 63% of those under 35, said that spending by AIPAC to defeat Israel critics this election cycle made them less likely to support candidates backed by the pro-Israel group.
Mamdani scores high
One of the more striking findings was that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was more popular among Jewish voters nationwide than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his criticism of Israel and strained relationship with some Jewish organizations.
The poll found that 49% of respondents viewed Mamdani favorably, compared with 43% who viewed him unfavorably. Netanyahu received a favorable rating of just 20%, while 72% viewed him unfavorably. That marks a 12% decline in two years for the Israeli leader, who is struggling to form a government after the last Israeli election ended in deadlock.
In an interview with CNN Wednesday night, Mamdani pointed to his approach to governing as an example of how elected officials can represent Jewish voters even when they disagree with them on Israel.
“I represent the most Jewish city in the United States of America, and I know that there are some Jewish New Yorkers, for example, that may have a different set of opinions on Israel and Palestine as I do, and that doesn’t mean that I work any less hard to deliver for them across the board,” Mamdani said. “I think that’s the same truth for anyone who was elected last night.”
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Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’
I was walking to get a coffee on Election Day when a man screamed at me as he nearly ran me over with his bicycle. “Democratic Socialists aren’t Democrats!” he yelled.
After I regained my balance, I looked up. He turned back and called out to me a second time.
“It’s true, you know!” he said.
I scurried away. But his words — “true” and the assured “you know” — made me think about how language around American politics has come down to “truth” or “lies,” which leaves out a lot.
Maybe the simplicity of that thinking helped create a landslide.
Once it became clear that Democrats had triumphed, opinion writers frequently relied on the word “lie” to explain voters’ sudden seismic shift.
“Trump claims he kept more promises to American voters than he made. Like so many things he has said, that’s a lie, and voters punished him and his party for it,” Josh Barro wrote in The New York Times.
The problem with the theory that voters punished Trump for lying is that the man has been lying for decades, most famously about winning the 2020 election — which, of course, he lost.
He entered politics by lying about Barack Obama. So the real question is why Trump’s lies bothered people now.
Maybe a clue was in the language during the leadup to this election, and how it changed as the watershed results came in.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help noticing that Israel was a hot topic that somehow disappeared on election night as journalists marveled that Mississippi was in play for a Senate seat while every kind of Democrat won — moderate, far-left, young, old.
But it didn’t seem that would happen a mere five days ago, in that other lifetime when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, during a discussion with podcaster Donny Deutsch, categorized debate over Israel as a fight between ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
Back then, Michigan felt crucial, not one in a pile of Democratic wins. It was news that the elegant former speaker used the word ‘wrong.’
“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” Deutsch said, in reference to statements made by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and then-Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“It’s more than concerning,” Pelosi responded. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States.”
I flashed back to that one-syllable word — “wrong” — early Wednesday morning when, with El-Sayed’s victory, it seemed that, contrary to what Pelosi said, objecting to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was apparently no longer viewed as categorically “wrong.”
Wrong vs. right
If objecting to Israel’s existence was “wrong,” then what was “right”?
Some Jewish politicians — like Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — told Jews to put their own concerns aside for the “needs of the world.”
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” Nessel said, acknowledging that Jews faced a “stark choice” due to some of the comments made by Democrats.
After the election, anti-Israel commentators mocked Jewish politicians — and journalists.
Mehdi Hassan, founder of media company Zeteo, taunted Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with CNN anchor Dana Bash, all Jewish. “He won,” Hasan said, calling El-Sayed a “left-wing Muslim anti-Zionist.”
“And so for all of you, I have two words — two words — cry more.”
The dismissiveness is the point
What got me about Hasan’s comments wasn’t just the hatred; it was the dismissiveness — as if all the existential worry within the Jewish community didn’t matter at all.
As if Nessel, who tried to find the “right” thing to do in a time when lies from the leader of the free world — not to mention violence against immigrants, humiliating comments toward and threats against brave Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and fleecing the United States in one of the biggest cons in history — meant asking her fellow Jewish Democrats who worried about Israel and attacks on their own local synagogues to ignore their own inner voice.
In its post-midterms statement, the Anti-Defamation League used the word “dismissed” with regard to Jewish Americans’ concerns — on a night when some candidates proved that ignoring Jews’ worries is not a barrier to electoral victory.
“Antisemitic rhetoric and scapegoating fuels hatred and can lead to harassment, threats and violence. In too many places, Jewish Americans’ concerns about this were overshadowed by competing priorities or dismissed outright,” the statement read.
Hmmm, I thought thinking about what that bicyclist had yelled at me: “You know it’s true.”
But I can’t help thinking that I don’t know what’s true; none of us know yet why so many voters finally dumped Trump.
I do, however, think that the framing given by the bicyclist, so convinced he knew what was and wasn’t true, and the dismissiveness problem, are related. That’s because the easiest way to dismiss another person’s thought process is to say “that’s a lie.”
I don’t know what’s worse — to be called a liar, or to be ignored — but amid all the celebration, I fear many in the Jewish community may soon find out.
In the months ahead, I’ll be listening for dismissiveness. I’ll be watching the distance between truth, lies, right, wrong, and “cry more.”
And I’ll notice when anyone — whether they’re a screaming bicyclist, journalist, or a politician — tells me I should already know what the truth is.
The post Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’ appeared first on The Forward.
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I’m glad El-Sayed won – but I wish he’d lost
The election of Abdul El-Sayed is my least favorite dream to come true.
I’m glad he won the race for senator because, along with a clear majority of Americans, I believed it was time to elect a Congress and Senate that would serve as a check on the presidency and put forth policies to repair our struggling country.
If I lived in Michigan, I would have voted for him for that reason. But as Election Night wore on and it became clear Democrats and independents had won a comfortable majority in the Senate, I hoped El-Sayed would lose.
Judging by the post-election surveys, I’m not the only Jew who felt this way. El-Sayed won about 60% of the Jewish vote. But he ran about 20 points behind Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor, with those same voters.
They didn’t flee the Democratic party, but they did show less enthusiasm for El-Sayed. In my case it had nothing to do with the fearmongering over his religion or family. (The Republican Jewish Coalition called El-Sayed, “the most antisemitic U.S. Senate candidate in America.”).
My problem was that El-Sayed too often mirrored the toxic politics of his opponents. He aligned himself with Hasan Piker then offered tepid, tardy disavowals of the popular streamer’s extremism. I criticized President Donald Trump for doing the same with the Proud Boys, David Duke, QAnon and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
And, like Trump, El-Sayed lied, constantly telling Michiganders that their schools and hospitals were underfunded because the government sent the money to Israel instead. He’s a smart man who knows that aid money amounts to .05% of the federal budget, is mostly spent in America and is hardly the reason for underfunded education.
But he repeated the lie in his victory speech Tuesday night. “We want our taxes spent here,” he said, “for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here. We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war.”
Sound familiar? “This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last year.
How is a Democratic candidate who scapegoats the Jewish state for the ills of Flint any different than a Republican who blames crime on Haitians, fraud on Somalis and bad schools on Mexican immigrants? Both invite hate and divert attention from real solutions. When El-Sayed points at Israel as the cause of Michigan’s problems, the blame falls on American Jews, Haile Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, pointed out during the race.
The least surprising twist in the dramatic campaign was when Tucker Carlson endorsed El-Sayed — both men push a simple theory of who’s to blame for America’s ills.
But as much as I would have preferred to win without El-Sayed, his election is far from the nightmare many American Jews fear.
He is one senator out of 100, and one Democratic senator out of 54, or 56, depending on the Mississippi and Alaska races.
El-Sayed will soon learn that accomplishing the things that are most important to Democratic voters — universal health care, campaign finance reform and affordability — has nothing to do with Israel.
Trump, on Election Day morning, helped politicians in both parties by announcing an end to U.S. aid to Israel. It’s unclear how that putative end will look in fact, but what’s certain is that as the U.S. and Israel redefine their relationship, El-Sayed and others in both parties who have been fervent critics of that aid will have to say what they’re for, not just what they oppose.
In a pre-election interview with the New Yorker, and elsewhere since his victory, El-Sayed said he wants a process that offers peace and self-determination to Palestinians and the “Jewish Israeli people.”
That’s a promise that the 40% of Jewish voters who didn’t back him — and the majority who did — should hold him to, and work beside him to help make happen. The Jews who stuck with El-Sayed have especially earned that right.
“Political coalitions that grow and endure can only be built when we join with those with whom we have real – even profound – disagreements,” wrote Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, following the election.
On the campaign trail, El-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric clearly resonated with some core constituencies. Inside the Senate, where moderate Democrats are a majority, El-Sayed will find a constituency for pragmatic steps to moving Israelis and Palestinians in that direction.
And that would indeed be a dream come true.
The post I’m glad El-Sayed won – but I wish he’d lost appeared first on The Forward.
