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What American Jews fight about when they fight about Israel
(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.
“I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and said to the rabbi, ‘I don’t get it, if the Jews could have a state, why can’t the Palestinians?’ And I was like, ‘How dare you?’”
Alterman would go on to attend Cornell University, where he wrote his honors thesis on Israel, Vietnam and neoconservatism; spend a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University; study Israeli military history while earning his master’s degree in international relations at Yale, and research a dissertation on American liberalism and the founding of Israel as a doctoral student at Stanford.
Although he frequently writes about Israel as a contributing writer at the Nation and the American Prospect, Alterman is best known for his liberal analysis of the media and U.S. politics. He’s written 11 previous books, including one on Bruce Springsteen.
Yet he never stopped thinking about the widening gap between the idealized Israel of his youth and the reality of its relations with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the West. Even when Israel’s revisionist historians were uncovering evidence of massacres and forced expulsions of Palestinians during the War of Independence, and Israeli politicians and intellectuals began asking why, indeed, the Palestinians didn’t deserve a state of their own, he saw that such discussions were considered blasphemous in most American Jewish circles.
Alterman, now a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, explores that gap in his latest book, “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.” The book surveys U.S.-Israel relations, but with a focus on the ways defending Israel have shaped public discourse. It’s a book about arguments: within the administrations of 14 presidents, between Washington and Jerusalem, and mostly among Jews themselves.
Earlier this month we spoke about how the pro-Isael lobby became a powerful political force, the Jewish organizations and pundits who fight to limit the range of debate over Israel, and what he thinks is the high price American Jews have paid for tying their identities so closely to Israel.
“I try to take on shibboleths that in the past have shut down conversation and take them apart and sympathetically show the complexity of the actual situation that lies beneath — so that [criticism and disagreement] over Israel can be understood rather than whisked away by changing the subject, or what-aboutism, or by demonizing the person who is raising them,” said Alterman.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me start by congratulating you: It’s the first book about U.S.-Israel relations with a chapter named after a Bruce Springsteen album: “Working on a Dream.”
Eric Alterman: Nobody else has caught that. But it’s not about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s the first book about the debate over Israel in the United States. There’s a million books on U.S.-Israel relations.
So let’s define that more narrowly. The title reminds me of the United Jewish Appeal slogan over the years, “We Are One,” which was about American Jewish solidarity. So who is the “we” in your title, “We Are Not One”?
There are three or four different meanings. The “we” in this book are obviously the United States and Israel. An awful lot of people argue that the United States and Israel have identical interests in the world and that’s crazy, because Israel is this tiny little country in the Middle East and we’re a global superpower thousands of miles away. So obviously, we’re going to have differences. Number two, American Jews and Israeli Jews are very different people. They have very different life experiences. And they see things quite differently as evidenced by the political split between them. The title also refers specifically just to Americans, because we can’t even discuss most things anymore. The pro-Israel community, such as it ever was, is enormously split and it’s split in angry ways.
Much of your book is about what happens to American Jews when the idealized portrait of Israel’s founding and its presumed blamelessness in its actions toward the Palestinians comes up against reality. In that context, tell me a little about your choice to devote a chapter to the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” an extremely sanitized version of Israel’s founding, and the 1960 movie based on it.
The influence of “Exodus” is something I didn’t understand until I wrote the book. It’s crazy, because Leon Uris was this egomaniac who wrote kind of a shitty book and said that he wanted to add a new chapter to the Bible, and he kind of succeeded. I was born in 1960. When I was growing up in suburban New York, every single family had “Exodus” on their shelves. When the movie came out Israelis understood this. They said, “We can just shut down our public relations office now.” And from the standpoint of reality the movie is worse than the book because it has Nazis — the Arabs in the book are working with Nazism. Uris didn’t have the nerve to do that. So the book created this idealized Israel and this idea of [Palestinians as] evil, subhuman Nazis.
What most Americans don’t understand, or choose not to understand, is that before the 1940s most Jews were anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist. This changed in the 1940s, when, as a result in part of the Holocaust, and the reaction to that, and the triumph of Zionists, they became intensely pro-Zionist, leading up to the creation of Israel. But after that, they kind of forgot about Israel. One might have given their children JNF boxes to carry on Halloween instead of UNICEF boxes, or maybe they paid to plant trees. But Israel doesn’t show up in the American Jewish Committee’s 1966 annual report until page 35 or 36, and Nathan Glazer’s 1957 book “American Judaism” says that the creation of the Jewish state has had “remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”
With the events of 1967, Uris’ idealized notion of Israel came together with this terrible fear of a second Holocaust, and the terror and shame and frightening nature of that combined to transform American Judaism overnight to an enormous degree.
You are referring to Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War, which even non-religious Jews saw as a kind of miracle, and redemption two decades after the Holocaust. And that transformation, you argue, put defense of Israel, combined with Holocaust consciousness, at the center of Jewish identity.
More than just the center: It basically comprised almost all of it, for many secular Jews. I quote the neoconservative Irving Kristol in the book saying in 1976 that “the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel” was 100% of what Judaism means.
Which in turn led to a the tremendous pro-Israel lobbying efforts, political activism and punditry.
The budgets of American Jewish organizations overnight went from social services and liberal social justice causes to defense of Israel. And rabbis were replaced at the center of public discourse by the heads of these organizations — most of whom had no religious training or knowledge of history or Judaism.
Joe Biden, then vice president, speaks at the AIPAC 2016 Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 20, 2016.
(Molly Riley/AFP via Getty Images)
One distinction you repeatedly make is between what most Jews believe compared to the Jewish organizations that claim to represent them. Surveys show the rank and file is consistently more liberal on Israel and less hawkish than the big organizations — a gap that showed up markedly around the Iraq War and the Iran nuclear deal.
Right. The big mistake that so many in the media make is that they go to the heads of these organizations who pretend to speak for American Jews when they don’t speak for American Jews. They speak for their boards and their donors.
The shift to Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel coincides with an era in which there is seldom daylight between what Israel wants and what the United States wants or agrees to — often to the frustration of presidents. You are critical of those who exaggerate the pro-Israel lobby’s influence — folks like Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of the 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” — but, at the same time, you write, referring to the Israel debate in America, about “the continued stranglehold that money, power, organizational structure, and clearly defined paths to personal career advancement continue to hold over the shape of foreign policy.” How will you respond to critics who will say your book is trafficking in the myth of Jewish power and its conspiracy-minded hold over American policy?
The short answer is, that’s why I wrote a 500-page book — basically, for two reasons: One, everything is incredibly complicated. And some of those complications are consistent with antisemitic myths, and therefore they have to be teased out and broken down in such a way that you’re telling the truth rather than portraying the myth.
If you say things without context, they sound antisemitic. I say that yes, Jews are very powerful in the media and many use that power on or about Israel. But I think if you lay out the examples that I use, if you look at them and examine them, I don’t see how you can conclude otherwise. The people I describe often say that about themselves — how much power and influence they yield.
Secondly, I’ve always found it just about impossible to discuss Israel with anyone, because you have to share exactly the same assumptions with that person. And if you don’t, then they take it personally, or you’re an antisemite, or, at best, you’re insufficiently sensitive to how important antisemitism is. And if you describe ways in which American Jews act in ways that are consistent with antisemitic myth, it has a way of shutting down the conversation.
Undoubtedly there’s some criticism of Israel that is motivated by antisemitism, but there’s an awful lot of reasons to be critical of Israel, particularly if you are a Palestinian or care about Palestinians. This accusation [antisemitism] has shut down the discourse and part of my hopes in demonstrating the complexities of this history is to open this up.
So let me ask about your own stake in this. Your educational background and relationship to Israel are similar in many ways to the writers and thinkers in your book who tolerate no criticism of Israel. I don’t know if you call yourself a Zionist, but you have some connection to Israel, and you’re also willing to tolerate critiques of Israel. What’s the difference between you and some of the other people who went on the same journey?
For the longest time I was comfortable with the words “liberal Zionist,” but I don’t think they have any meaning anymore. I don’t think it’s possible to be a liberal Zionist — you have to choose. Israel is the only putatively democratic country that prefers Trump to either Obama or Biden, and it’s not even close. And young Israelis are moving further in that direction and young American Jews are moving further in the opposite direction.
So you ask me if I am a liberal Zionist. I don’t think the word “Zionist” is useful at all anymore, because Israel is a country and it’s not going anywhere. I sometimes call myself an anti-anti-Zionist, because anti-Zionism is dumb. I’m very anti-BDS. If I thought [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] could end occupation, I would support it, even though the idea of boycotting Jews puts a bad taste in my mouth. But the theory behind BDS apparently, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this, is that the world will force Israel to give up its identity and turn the country over to its enemies. It’s inconceivable that Israel would do that and inconceivable the United States would pressure them to do that. So BDS is entirely performative. It’s more of a political fashion statement than anything else.
And to me, it speaks to the failure of Palestinian politics throughout history. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and their bad politics because it’s based on two problems. One is that they have never been able to see the future very well. So they should have agreed in 1921 and 1937, or whenever they would have had the majority and they were being given a country by the British. They should have taken the lousy offer from Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000. I kind of get it because they have so many competing constituencies, and it’s impossible to satisfy all of them at the same time. I understand that. It’s hard to imagine a Palestinian politician who could say yes, and if you look at Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in both cases, it’s hard to imagine making peace with them.
I read that in your book, and my first thought was, well, isn’t that basically just confirming what the pro-Israel right has always said — that Israel has no partner for peace? So maybe the best it can do is maintain a status quo that assures some security for Israel and a workable something for the Palestinians.
Well, number one I hold Israel significantly responsible for the conditions under which that has developed and that they can change those. And number two, that’s no excuse for the way Palestinians are treated, either in the occupation or in Israel. So yes, I agree. There’s no one to make peace with today, but there are many steps Israel could take that could vastly improve the lives of the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel. And there are a lot of steps they could take that could build confidence for a future that could weaken Hamas, that could strengthen the Palestinian Authority, so that one day peace would be possible. But they do the opposite.
An Israel supporter at a New York rally to tell the United Nations “no more anti-Israel documents or resolutions,” Jan. 12, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
You talk about funding of Israel studies and Jewish studies departments as a reaction against fears of a pro-Palestinian takeover of academia. At the same time, you write how Palestinian supporters “succeeded in colonizing Middle East studies departments, student faculty organizations, and far-left political organizations.” Why does that matter in the long run if, as you also write, nothing’s really going to change American policy on Israel?
I gave a talk before the book came out at Tel Aviv University and someone asked me that question. I said, You care about these transformations for two reasons. One, you really will be all alone in the world. You’ll have the support of conservative [Evangelical] Christians who are in many respects antisemitic and are using you for their own purposes. So if you lose American Jews, you will be existentially alone in a way you’re not now and that strikes me as very unpleasant.
I do think that the quote-unquote pro-Israel community has a stranglehold on American politics that I can’t see changing anytime soon, and I think the change in the Democratic Party [that it will turn more pro-Palestinian] is very much exaggerated by both sides for their own reasons.
That being said, the people who are being trained now to be in the State Department and the National Security Council and the Defense Department and the think tanks and the places where the intellectual foundation of U.S. policy is made are learning something very different from what you and I learned in college. Right now, there’s no such thing as an influential Palestinian lobby in this country. There’s no pushing back. There’s no percentage for anyone opposing Israel who has a career interest in the future. That will change, and the whole shaping of the discourse will change and that will change the relationship between the United States and Israel. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it’s definitely going to happen.
As Jews in this country have remained largely liberal, Israel appears to be getting more illiberal, as we’ve seen with a new government that is more right-wing than any previously. And Israel has become more of a divisive element among Jews than a unifying force. As this gap appears to be widening, do you have any real hope for changing the discourse?
No, I don’t have any hopes for that. I don’t have anything optimistic to say about Israel. I think, politically speaking, from the standpoint of American Jews, everything is going in the wrong direction. But by demonstrating just how different Israeli Jews are than American Jews, and how little Israeli Jews care what American Jews think, I do think that it presents an opportunity for American Jews to think about what it means to be an American Jew in the Diaspora. Roughly half of the Jews in the world live in the United States. And since 1967 American Jews have defined themselves vicariously through Israeli Jews and taking pride in Israel. They expressed their identities by defending Israel and attacking the media when the media didn’t defend Israel.
Meanwhile, American Jews hardly ever go to synagogue. According to Pew, 20% of American Jews regularly attend synagogue and half of them are Orthodox, who are 10% of the community. What brought me back into Judaism was studying Torah. And hardly any American Jews are ever exposed to that.
So I think there’s an opportunity to reimagine Diaspora Jewry now that the Israel story doesn’t work, and it’s clear that it doesn’t work. Young American Jews are leaving or voting with their feet. They’re walking away. Israel-centric Judaism is in part responsible, although it’s not the whole story. Intermarriage is a big part of the story. The de-religionization of all groups is part of the story. But personally, I don’t see what a liberal American Jew would see in a Judaism that defines itself as it has for the past 50 years as defending Israel and remembering the Holocaust.
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Ed Sheeran urged to toss Macklemore from tour after criticizing Israel onstage
(JTA) — The Israeli-American Council is calling for the rapper Macklemore to be dropped from the opening slot on pop star Ed Sheeran’s U.S. tour for chanting “Free Palestine” and accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide during his performances at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on Friday and Saturday nights.
Known for such hits as “Thrift Shop” and “Same Love,” the rapper’s anti-Israel monologue at the performances preceded his 2024 song, “Hind’s Hall,” referring to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, which pro-Palestinian protesters occupied and unofficially renamed for Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed during the war in Gaza.
“I had wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart, ‘Free Palestine’,” he said at the show he opened for Ed Sheeran Saturday night, according to videos posted from the concerts. “I want those words to be loud and clear so the people from Gaza all the way to the occupied West Bank know that we have their back and that we have not forgotten them.”
He went on to dedicate the song to “the bravery of Columbia University students, the encampment movement that mobilized the entire world.”
“Ed Sheeran – do not allow your stage to be used to divide people or spread one-sided political propaganda,” IAC said, circulating a petition demanding Macklemore be taken off the bill for his remaining nine dates of the tour.
Messages left for representatives of Macklemore, Ed Sheeran and the concert promoters AEG and the Messina Group were not returned.
Macklemore addressed the Jewish community directly during his appearances, saying, “To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is criticism of you. My message is for peace, love and for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect and equality.”
The reactions to Macklemore’s remarks were far from unanimous. Some fans took to social media to praise him.
Macklemore has been speaking out against Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza since late October 2023. He was one of the first of 55 performers to sign the Artists4CeaseFire open letter to then-President Joe Biden calling for a permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages and the delivery of lifesaving aid to civilians in Gaza.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Ed Sheeran urged to toss Macklemore from tour after criticizing Israel onstage appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli ministers unveil plans to encourage voluntary Palestinian emigration from Gaza
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — The Oct. 27 elections have brought the concept of Palestinian emigration from Gaza to the forefront of Israeli political discourse. The once-taboo topic has become an increasingly popular position among right-wing politicians, even as it repels many in the American Jewish community and elicits condemnation from world leaders.
Several prominent politicians on the Israeli right, including some who currently hold key government positions, have raised the idea in recent weeks and pledged to advance it if they sit in the next coalition. Most starkly, ultra-nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unveiled a seven-year plan Thursday to encourage Palestinians in Gaza “voluntarily” leave the embattled enclave where the IDF and Hamas have been fighting for almost three years.
“This is a free choice; we are not forcing anyone to leave, but there is encouragement for this,” Ben-Gvir said in a statement to the media after he announced his program during a virtual press conference in Lod, a working-class city southeast of Tel Aviv that was the scene of mass displacement of Arab residents during the 1948 War of Independence.
The American liberal pro-Israel group J Street was among those to condemn the proposal, stating on Friday that “It should horrify us to see a state, built in the aftermath of Jewish death and destruction, entertaining the ethnic cleansing of another people.”
The organization urged people not to dismiss Ben-Gvir’s plan as “fantasy or fringe,” adding, “this vision is now in the political mainstream, and that must be unequivocally rejected.”
Indeed, while few Israeli political observers expect such a plan to become government policy even if Israel continues to be ruled by a right-wing government, critics worry that the promotion of such measures throughout the election are already normalizing the concept in Israeli society and harming Israel’s international standing. Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing “Democratim” party, has previously described government calls to encourage the “voluntary emigration” of Gazans as “unacceptable.”
On Thursday, Ben-Gvir was careful to underscore that any departure of Palestinians from Gaza would be voluntary under his plan, which he has dubbed “Disengagement 710.” The name refers to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 known as “disengagement” that included the forced evacuation of around 8,000 Israeli settlers and the demolition of their 21 settlements in the enclave. The number “710” refers to the day and month of the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.
Under Ben-Gvir’s proposal, a government ministry with a dedicated minister would be established to oversee Palestinian emigration efforts. Incentives would be offered to Gazans who agreed to emigrate, and those countries that receive them would receive monetary benefits as well.
The program has a target goal of 250,000 Gazans leaving in the first year of the program and 1.86 million within seven years — nearly the entire 2.1 million population of the strip, Ben-Gvir said. There would be an absorption plan in another country for every Palestinian that left, according to Ben-Gvir, who maintained that there are countries willing to take in Palestinians in exchange for financial incentives.
Ben-Gvir sits on the far right of the Israeli political map, but earlier in the week, a leader in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mainstream Likud Party endorsed a plan for Palestinian relocation from the coastal strip as well. Defense Minister Israel Katz said that “there is no real solution for Gaza without emigration.”
Already in February 2025, Katz announced the establishment of an agency tasked with encouraging emigration from Gaza, and said this week that it was “fully prepared” for the moment when conditions would allow Israel to encourage Gazans to leave.
In a public interview at a conference on Wednesday sponsored by the Hebrew media group Ynet and the think tank the Israel Democracy Institute, Katz said that President Donald Trump had “frozen” the initiative under pressure from Arab countries. Katz stressed, however, that the initiative had not been canceled and that discussions on the issue were ongoing.
In response to Katz’s statement, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland on Wednesday called to end complicity with Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. ”After our trip to the Gaza-Egypt border last year, Senator Jeff Merkle & I released a report entitled, ‘The Netanyahu Government is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians’. Now the Israeli Min of Defense confirmed that’s the goal,” Van Hollen wrote on X.
But days later, on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told reporters that “nobody is suggesting that there will be forced displacement – the Israelis are not, the Americans are certainly not, I know of no one who supports that.”
In January 2025, just days after taking office, President Donald Trump himself first floated the idea of Palestinians emigrating from Gaza as a possible solution to the conflict between Israel and Hamas and a way for them to escape the devastation surrounding them in the wake of the war.
There were some signs at that time that the idea of a pathway to voluntary emigration was not anathema to Palestinians who live in Gaza. A poll by the British-based Gallup International in March of 2025 showed that 52% of those in Gaza would leave for another country if given the choice, out of which 38% wanted a temporary exit and another 14% wanted a permanent one.
The idea was strongly condemned by international figures, however, particularly America’s Arab allies. Ultimately it was abandoned by the president and superseded by his 20-point plan to end the war, which specifically stated that there would be no encouragement of Gazans to leave.
But many on Israel’s right took the statement by Trump as encouragement to publicly advocate for a measure that had long been considered off-limits. Netanyahu himself expressed support for the idea soon after Trump broached the topic in early 2025, saying: “The door has also been opened to the vision of President Trump for Gazans to leave Gaza of their own free will. I think this is a very important idea. We are working on it continuously with the Americans, and I tell you that it is possible.”
Weeks later, in March 2025, a poll by The Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem found that 52% of Jewish Israelis supported the relocation of Palestinians in Gaza along the outlines of Trump’s plan. The idea of voluntary emigration has also received support from some figures in Israel’s opposition. In 2025, opposition leader Yair Lapid said Israel should “develop a long-term plan to eliminate Hamas and encourage voluntary emigration.” The major parties in the opposition bloc, however, did not publicly endorse Ben Gvir’s proposal or put forward their own plans to encourage emigration.
More recently, some Israeli political figures have gone so far as to float scenarios in which the departure of Gazans would not be voluntary. A senior member of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionist Party, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has spoken of forced migration.
Last month, before joining the party, right-wing firebrand Moshe Feiglin said, “We need, in one way or another, to make sure that there will be no Gazan left there,” including forcing them to leave “by any means possible.”
Retired Brig.-Gen. Ofer Winter, a new political candidate whose right-wing party Amcha Yisrael has been gaining momentum, said at the party’s launch conference in August that “the solution for Gaza is one — emigration,” later stressing that “these are not just slogans.”
But despite the wave of support on the right, there is no indication that such a scenario is in the offing. A senior Israeli official told reporters this week that no countries have agreed to accept Gazans, while Defense Minister Katz said that potential receiving countries want U.S. support. In the past, countries including Somaliland, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have reportedly been floated in internal discussion in Israel as possible destinations for Gazans.
Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza first published in September 2025, to which Israel has committed itself, explicitly contradicts the possibility of encouraging emigration from the strip, however. Article 12 of the plan states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza,” and that “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”
Trump had originally raised the idea of relocating Gazans in part because of the dire circumstances they faced. “I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it,” Trump said in the first weeks of his second presidential term, adding, “I don’t know how they could want to stay.”
The war’s devastation has left most of the Palestinian population internally displaced within Gaza, according to United Nations data, with 60% of homes destroyed. The U.N. has warned that reconstruction could cost $71.4 billion and take years.
But U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that plans to relocate Gazans were tantamount to ethnic cleansing, a charge repeated by Palestinians and critics of Israel in the international community.
International opposition has been particularly fierce from Palestinian officials, Arab countries and key American allies in the West. Germany’s foreign minister said in 2025 that “the Gaza Strip belongs to the Palestinians. Expelling them would be unacceptable and contrary to international law.”
The United Arab Emirates along with foreign ministers from seven other countries — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt — issued a statement Sunday condemning the proposals by Ben-Gvir and Katz. They urged the international community including the United Nations Security Council, to halt any attempt to change the demographic reality in the Palestinian territories including Gaza.
“Such inflammatory statements and proposals flagrantly violate principles of international law, including international humanitarian law, and pose a direct threat to the legitimate and inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” they stated.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli ministers unveil plans to encourage voluntary Palestinian emigration from Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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AfD is predicted to win 40% in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Should Jews be worried?
(JTA) — BERLIN – Why are so many Germans wringing their hands over Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt?
After all, what impact could 1.7 million registered voters in this former East German state have on a nation with 16 Laender (federal states) and some 60 million voters?
Here’s why Sunday’s election matters:
As it turns out, German voters in Saxony-Anhalt could give the right-wing extremist political party — the Alternative for Germany, or AfD — its most significant achievement since its founding in 2013.
Although the AfD is predicted to win only 40 percent of the vote, that would be enough to affect upcoming general local elections in Lower Saxony on Sept. 13, and elections in the state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania and the city-state of Berlin on Sept. 20.
There is also an outside chance it could open the door to an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt, a first for the far right since the end of World War II. Although that is considered unlikely, the party’s state website proclaims: “Everything is possible.”
Voters in this economically depressed state are, pundits say, drawn to the AfD’s anti-immigrant and anti-European Union rhetoric; its promise to expel non-citizens; its focus on German national pride rather than on the dark side of its past; and its ambition to repair relations with Putin’s Russia. Their drumbeat resonates particularly in former east German states, which have suffered since unification with the closing of factories and flight of younger workers to western states.
The AfD has also done well in elections in other former east German states, and increasingly in western ones. Last March, for example, it earned 19% of the popular vote in elections in Baden-Wuerttemburg, nearly doubling its previous tally there. In the 2025 federal election, it leapt to second place next to the conservative Christian Democratic Union led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005-2021. Opinion polls show the AfD is the leading party, if there were to be federal elections today.
While some observers note that the party’s agenda on national issues could not be implemented, they are troubled by the party’s goals on the state level.
Stephan Kramer, president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency in the state of Thuringia, and former general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the JTA that the main concern is with the power the party could wield “over the interior ministry, police, the state intelligence service, education, appointments and the handling of sensitive information.”
“For the first time, the party could use the machinery of a state government and thereby gain substantially greater political and institutional influence at the federal level,” he said.
Banning the AfD would be a painstaking process, thanks to post-war protections of free speech. Former West Germany banned only two political parties: a neo-Nazi one in 1952, and a far-left Communist party in 1956. Later attempts to ban neo-Nazi parties stumbled on legal hurdles, and many politicians fear to try again, lest the AfD make hay of a failure.
Support for the AfD fits right in with trends on the European and UK level: According to the latest survey of European far-left, far-right and populist parties published by the PopuList research group, nearly a quarter of European and UK voters back far-right parties today, up from 5% in 1995. According to the Guardian newspaper, the biggest surge in support came in national elections in France and the UK in 2024, and Germany in 2025.
Here’s why AfD votes might not matter, yet:
A key difference from U.S. state elections is that “voters do not directly elect the equivalent of a governor,” Paulina Fröhlich, senior expert for democracy at the Gütersloh-based Bertelsmann Foundation, told the JTA. “Instead, the state parliament elects a state premier after the parties have built a coalition or secured enough support. So, the party that wins the most votes does not necessarily lead the government.”
In 1980, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), won 44.5% of the vote, but the Social Democratic Party (SPD) with 42.9% and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) with 10.6% support built a coalition government.
Two years ago in the state of Thuringia, the AfD became the first far-right party to get the most votes in a state election since World War II, but was blocked from forming a coalition.
Similarly, the likely outcome of Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election will be a coalition of minority parties that together exceed 50% of the vote; the AfD, despite a significant electoral achievement, will not be able to pull together the needed majority to take power.
It can take days, weeks, even months before a state or federal government is formed, including appointment of the minister-president or chancellor, and ministers dealing with education, policing and culture (and foreign policy, on the federal level). After the CDU and CSU won Germany’s federal election in February 2025 with only 28.5 percent of the vote, it took until early April for them to form a government with the SPD, as they argued over policy differences. But neither party would work with the AfD, which actually came in second
Most Germans still reject the AfD’s message. Several states have classified the party as right-wing extremist, a designation that its leaders have opposed in court. And there are calls to ban the party, including by prominent Jews such as Charlotte Knobloch, 93-year-old former chairwoman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.
There has been much media buzz over an interview that Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust in hiding with a German Christian family, gave to Stern magazine. “Even the Nazi Party started small and tried out what was possible,” and now AfD politicians “are testing the limits of what is acceptable,” said Knobloch, arguing for a ban: “Everything that could help should be tried.”
Unlike in the United States, German elections include many political parties – from the large, mainstream ones to those on the fringes, which usually fail to meet the 5% vote threshold required to have seats in the parliament.
Even if the AfD receives a plurality this time, it is highly unlikely that it will rule the state. That’s because virtually no one else will work with them. Mainstream democratic parties have set up a “firewall” to that end. So the probable outcome will be a government built through a coalition of the remaining parties.
But this year, even some of the previous top parties are teetering on the edge of the 5% threshold, polls say.
Should the past winners – the CDU, and possibly the center-left Social Democratic Party, the center-right Free Democratic Party, and the progressive Green Party – make it past the threshold, they are expected to build that minority coalition, even holding their noses to do so: The CDU is even expected to seek informal support from the communist Left Party.
Thus the procedure in Saxony-Anhalt is likely to echo what happened in the neighboring state of Thuringia two years ago. While the AfD got the biggest piece of the electoral pie, it did not gain a majority of seats in the parliament. So the mainstream democratic parties were able to form a coalition government.
What do the AfD stand for? Why are they so popular?
Its appeal “comes from a mixture of protest, distrust of established parties, concerns about migration and social change, and a sense among some voters that [AfD] articulates grievances others avoid,” said Kramer of Thuringia’s domestic intelligence agency.
“The AfD officially presents itself as supportive of Jewish life and Israel,” he added. But the platform “explicitly demands a complete ban on ritual slaughter without exception, which would directly affect Jewish religious practice. AfD leaders also use world conspiracy arguments and antisemitic language, we should not forget.”
It’s illegal in Germany to celebrate the crimes of National Socialism, to repeat Nazi slogans and other propaganda. But AfD leaders “do not always stay on the safe side of the law,” Kramer added. For example, Björn Höcke, who heads the party’s parliamentary faction in the neighboring state of Thuringia, “was convicted for repeating the banned Nazi stormtrooper slogan ‘Alles für Deutschland’ [everything for Germany], and the Federal Court of Justice rejected his appeal in August 2025, making that conviction final.”
Höcke “is a certified history teacher, so he knows what he is doing,” Kramer added. “I would not describe the AfD simply as a party that carefully stays legal. Rather, parts of it repeatedly test those boundaries, and in some cases demonstrably cross them, [moving the] boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public and what is not.”
In Saxony-Anhalt, the party is “classified as definitely right-wing extremist” and is under observation by the domestic intelligence service, Maik Reichel, director of Saxony-Anhalt’s State Agency for Civic Education, told JTA. “And I think we also have the most extreme AfD state branch.”
The party wants to “restrict state-sponsored [school] trips to memorial sites, which they say turn young people into ‘memorial zombies,’ ” Reichel added.
“Our mission is to provide pluralistic civic education” and the AfD is against diversity, Reichel said. The AfD also takes a nationalist perspective, “which means we leave out important dictatorial, anti-democratic periods that were truly terrible in Germany,” he explained.
The main architect of the AfD’s platform in Saxony-Anhalt, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, is known for wanting “more Bismarck, less Hitler.” Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), who served as Germany’s first chancellor from 1871-1890, is seen as a hero by some German nationalists.
Despite such concerns, the AfD gained in the polls. At the EU parliament level, the AfD has 15 members, the largest contingent in the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations group.
Should the AfD win an absolute majority on Sunday, they would most certainly appoint their state party leader Ulrich Siegmund, age 35, as minister president. He is described as personable, even affable.
But his messages are not so friendly, critics say. Siegmund says his “100-day immediate action plan” includes a promise to “deport from minute one” many foreign nationals, including professional specialists; to cut funding to pro-democracy NGOs; to crack down on diversity programs in the state; and to cut taxes that support such programs.
Whatever the final tally, the lead-up to tomorrow’s election has made it clear: A ballot cast for the AfD is no longer dismissible as a “protest vote.” Other mainstream parties are taking a plunge, while the AfD’s star continues to rise.
Ultimately, the other parties have to regain the people’s trust, said Reichel. In Saxony-Anhalt that means “solving the problems that concern people in a way that they actually notice a difference.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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