THEY WERE USING YOU ALL ALONG: On Israel, Progressive Jews Feel Abandoned by Their Left-Wing Allies.
Progressive Jews who have spent years supporting racial equity, gay and transgender rights, abortion rights and other causes on the American left — including opposing Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank — are suddenly feeling abandoned by those who they long thought of as allies. This wartime shift represents a fundamental break within a liberal coalition that has long powered the Democratic Party.
In Los Angeles, Rabbi Sharon Brous, a well-known progressive activist who regularly criticizes the Israeli government, described from the pulpit her horror and feelings of “existential loneliness,” her voice breaking. “The clear message from many in the world, especially from our world — those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity — is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate.”
In Atlanta, a Jewish mother involved in local politics wrote an open letter lamenting that her child’s progressive private school had not addressed the attacks in Israel with the same kind of empathy it showed after local killings of Asian Americans. “Our people are butchered, and no one speaks to it?” she wrote. “I don’t know if I’m seething or just sad.”
And as the Hamas attacks in Israel were still underway, leaders of the New Israel Fund, which supports progressive Israeli and Palestinian groups, fielded calls from a former American ally on the left demanding that the organization label Israel an “apartheid state” — even as they waited to learn if colleagues in another organization, hiding in Israeli bomb shelters, had been killed.
Many of the most inflammatory comments came on social media, from progressive groups that responded to the immediate aftermath of the massacre of Israeli civilians by skipping even a moment of mourning and instead moving immediately to try to justify the attack.
They are your enemies, they used you, and they had contempt for you, and now it shows. Conduct yourselves accordingly.
Related: Detroit Jews ‘Beyond Disappointed’ with Rashida Tlaib for Refusing to Forcefully Condemn Hamas Terrorism. Really? Really? Disappointed? Why would you ever have expected anything else from her? Time to pay more attention to who your alleged allies really are — and always were. And to treat your enemies as the enemies they are.