[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The New York Times poll showing what the paper described as a “major drop in support for Israel” sent shockwaves through the Jewish community. But few drilled down to see what the numbers really showed.
I did.
40% of white voters support Israel. 41% of black voters and 46% of Hispanic voters support the ‘Palestinians’ as part of 41% support for the terrorists among “non-white voters”.
Non-college graduates are more likely to support Israel but 44% of college graduates support the ‘Palestinians’. The group most likely to support Israel are white non-college graduates. The group most likely to support the terrorists at 52% are minority college graduates.
At 39%, the South has the greatest base of support for Israel, followed by the Midwest at 35%, while the Northeast and the West, where most Jews live, offer majority support to the ‘Palestinians’. 63% of Trump voters support Israel. 12% of Kamala Harris voters do.
Too many Jewish organizations have been going on about how Israel ‘lost’ the support of Democrats when today’s Democrats have little in common with yesterday’s Democrats.
The Democrats didn’t stop supporting Israel. Oct 7 did not lead to a backlash. They were replaced by a different party with different demographics whose members never particularly supported Israel and in many cases didn’t particularly like Jews or for that matter America. (A majority of Democrats, also those who are Gen Z also currently say they’re not proud to be Americans, why expect them to like Israel or support it when they hate their own country?)
The disappearance of pro-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party isn’t new.
In May 2023, well before Oct 7, when Israel and Hamas were not prominent in the news, 49% of Democrats sided with the ‘Palestinians’ and only 38% with Israelis. Democrat support for Israel had dropped slowly over time, but a major turning point emerged in 2019 where pro-Israel sentiments fell drastically and support for terrorists dramatically increased.
Oct 7 did not reverse a trend, it accelerated an existing trend. The mass media and social media propaganda didn’t take people who were pro-Israel and make them anti-Israel, it knocked on an ‘open door’ and convinced a party already turning radical to drop its mostly theoretical support.
What happened in 2019? One possibility is that Democrats turned on Israel due to Trump’s strong support for it, and that was certainly a factor, while another was the epidemic of wokeness that climaxed in cancel culture and the BLM riots, while a third is that the level of Democratic Party identification began dropping as the party radicalized.
But there are other figures that are more relevant.
Around the turn of the century, a majority of Democrats identified as moderate, about a third as conservative and another third as ‘liberal’. The conservative contingent has nearly disappeared and by 2019, the party was majority ‘liberal’ and the moderates were a distinct minority.
The shift on Israel began a few years after ‘liberals’ became a majority and moderates a minority, and matched a larger political shift on a large number of other issues.
These numbers are not just a mysterious phenomenon of political radicalization. Around this same time, the Democrats also shifted from a working class party and a majority white party to a party dominated by college graduates, the irreligious and minorities. These were the groups least likely to be favorable to Israel and to varying degrees, Jews.
Before 2019, the majority of Democrats had not graduated from college. By 2021, it was around half and half. The leftward lean of the Democrats was partly attributable to the party’s new base.
In 2013, a majority of Democrats said religion was “very important” to them. By 2019, they had become a minority. Today, 40% of Democrats are religiously unaffiliated and a majority of white Democrats are non-Christian. The party’s remaining religious base now consists of black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics whose churches tend to be the least sympathetic to Israel.
In the New York Times poll and in other polls, younger Democrats show up as being unprecedentedly hostile to Israel. But younger Dems also look nothing like the old party base. A majority of Dems were once white. 60% of Democrats under 29 are minorities, 46% say religion is not important to them, 58% graduated college and 63% are ‘liberal’.
If you wanted a profile of the voter least likely to support Israel, a young leftist irreligious member of a minority group would top the charts for anything outside Dearborn.
And that’s simply the profile of the new generation of Democrat voters.
Jewish organizations agonizing over the New York Times poll and urging more ‘messaging’ don’t understand what it shows. Messaging is an issue, since if you believe the poll, majorities in every group believe that Israel is intentionally killing civilians. But when the public is told that by everyone from CNN to Tucker Carlson, why wouldn’t they believe it? The larger shift is driven by the very things that liberal Jews wanted, more diversity, more politics and higher education.
In recent years, the ADL has avoided breaking down its antisemitism surveys by race, but its 2016 survey admitted that “the steady growth of the U.S. Hispanic population – now at 15 percent of the adult population – means that Hispanics, combined with African Americans (12 percent), now comprise 27 percent of the American population, a number that is sure to grow in the coming years. This population increase of the most anti-Semitic cohorts also means that it will be an ongoing challenge to reduce overall anti-Semitic propensities.”
Rather than respond realistically to these numbers by championing policies that would have helped keep the Jewish community safe, the ADL and other liberal Jewish groups doubled down on diversity. The liberal Jewish groups championing open borders might have considered the impact of the ADL’s survey showing that 31% of Hispanic immigrants had antisemitic views. Instead they chose to pretend that they could fix it with Spanish signs in Holocaust museums.
The New York Times poll and others like it show the actual outcome.
In survey after survey, black respondents had the highest rates of antisemitism of any group, double that of white people, and higher than average rates of support for the ‘Palestinians’ and opposition to Israel going back decades. Other minority groups fell somewhere in between.
‘Diversity’ simply meant that the people who liked Jews the least would become a larger share of the Democratic Party and of the United States, and would occupy more powerful positions. Refusing to take those numbers seriously led to Obama and then Kamala, the two most openly anti-Israel presidential nominees, and to a party whose next generation is dominated by groups that don’t like Israel or Jews. The anti-Israel numbers reflect the ‘diversity’ of the Democrats.
That is the work of liberal Jewish organizations, who championed diversity and higher education, who failed to push back against the leftist takeover of the party, even when the numbers clearly showed where that would lead, and who now blame Netanyahu or how well Israeli spokesmen perform when an NBC News anchor or Piers Morgan are yelling at them, rather than the long term trends they incubated in order to be properly good liberals.
The clock of the past can’t be turned back, but it may not be too late to learn some urgent lessons. And to learn them fast because time really is running out. The diverse liberal urban centers where so many Jews live have once again become places where they can be freely attacked, as was the case back in the seventies, and this time running to the suburbs won’t fix it.
Even staring into the face of the abyss, liberal Jews are still reluctant to rethink their old fealty to diversity, higher education and reflexive leftist politics, they think abandoning Israel will save them. It won’t. This is no more about Israel than the purges of Jews in the USSR were. A radicalized party populated by a base with antisemitic beliefs is an existential threat.
The Left, to echo an old cliche, is bad for the Jews. If Jewish Democrats can’t reclaim their party from the leftist radicals, history says that worse is waiting for them than just bad poll numbers.