NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} he White House has asked Congress for $14.3 billion to support Israel, much of it designated as humanitarian aid funding. Biden has reiterated in Israel and in a speech to Americans that the United States stands behind the Jewish state in its fight with Hamas.
That all seems just and right. But it is the short term. In the long term, U.S. policy — its investments, commitments, and subsidies — is still set to favor Hamas or whatever monsters succeed it.
For the short term, the avowedly pro-Hamas protesters seen at the edges of rallies in our major cities and on our college campuses are a much smaller group than the throngs hoisting Palestinian flags in European capitals. Our policies of chain migration and the immigration system’s total indifference to the cultural and religious commitments of immigrants ensure that that this cohort will grow.
Germany is just a preview of what it looks like. While native German leftists chant, “Free Palestine from German guilt,” Muslim demonstrators connected to the pro-Palestinian group Samidoun circulated propaganda romanticizing the October 7 massacres as an uprising. A few days after the Hamas attack, Henry Kissinger told German TV station Welt, “It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that.”
The government increasingly agrees. German interior minister Nancy Faeser visited Israel after the attacks and then promptly introduced a bill that would speed up deportations, saying, “If we are able to deport Hamas supporters, we must do this.” In a later statement, she added, “Anyone who does not have the right to stay in Germany must leave our country.” German chancellor Olaf Scholz admitted that “too many are coming” and that we “we need to deport more and do it faster.”
Of course it was the foolishness of Angela Merkel’s policies — “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can do this!” — that has led to the largest antisemitic demonstrations in German streets since the Third Reich. History’s sick joke is that Germany now sits at this crossroads: Continue the current policies of nondiscrimination in immigration and allow popular and menacing antisemitism to flourish in its society, or pursue a policy that reduces that antisemitism but amounts to a nonviolent religious and ethnic cleansing of Germany.
In America, immigration alone would increase the pro-Hamas sentiment only slowly. What supercharges it is our habit of spraying more than $200 billion in federal subsidies at American higher education. There is no pendulum-swinging at these institutions, just a ratchet ever turning leftward. America’s professoriat and, worse, the massively growing idiotariat class of administrators are committed to the anti-colonialist ideologies that give status and shape to the support of Hamas.
Moderate Muslims who immigrate to America grateful for the work and opportunity, men such as Nur Omar Mohamed, have kids like Ilhan Omar who are socialized into the American elite by schools that stoke radicalism in them.
This is why we see that support for Israel plummets in Gen Z. Only 34 percent of that cohort believe that Hamas is responsible for the current conflict, according to Reuters/Ipsos surveys; 58 percent of Americans over 40 do. A Daily Mail poll showed that one in ten Americans between 18 and 29 had a positive view of Hamas.
The attempts to use government to address this problem will be as treacherous for Americans as it is for Europeans. Germany’s government can only begin to address the growing prejudices of its society, by instituting a government policy that discriminates based on country of origin and viewpoint. Similarly, governments that want to restore society-wide mores of free speech increasingly find themselves in conflict with universities that are ideologically captured, and that will, over time, produce a leadership class committed to new and punitive forms of censorship.
Until America has a conservative party willing to seriously address the substantive problems of governance and institutional formation, bet on America becoming less pro-Israel and more pro-Hamas over time.