For far too long, the Jewish vote being cast overwhelmingly for the Democrat Party has been as predictable as the sun rising. I posed the question a little over a year ago — why? A party that has increasingly shown itself to be anti-Israel at its core is a strange party for Jews to support. Indeed, a party that embraced Obama’s cold stances toward Israel throughout his presidency while empowering its archenemy Iran with a path to nuclear weapons cannot possibly be the natural party for Jews.
The Democrat Party’s relationship to Israel has only gotten worse in recent months. When I asked the question last year, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were not public figures. Now, they are arguably the faces of the party.
We’ve seen Ocasio-Cortez casually talking with British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, possibly the most anti-Semitic politician in the West. We’ve seen Tlaib putting a post-it note with “Palestine” written on it over Israel on the map in her office. Omar has been the worst, from tweeting “It’s all about the Benjamins,” suggesting Jews bribe American politicians in exchange for supporting Israel, to accusing Jews of having “dual loyalties” to both countries, a horrible slur going back to the book of Esther, where the antagonist Haman used this accusation as a rationale to convince the Persian king Achashverosh to let him exterminate the Jews.
But worst of all, while these three radicals may be dismissed as a fringe element of the party, there truly is something wrong with that party’s leadership having to begrudgingly even pretend to condemn anti-Semitism by releasing a whitewashed resolution. This resolution would not even call out the perpetrators by name or explicitly mention anti-Semitism, instead lumping it in with all kinds of hateful ideologies and minimizing the main issue.
It’s pretty safe to say that the Democrat Party and the Left are not our friends, to say the least. Yet, the vast majority of my co-religionists still crawl back to the people who bite that hand that feeds them.
Hopefully that trend may finally start to change.
A new group has cropped up to make the case for Jews to leave the Left once and for all. The Exodus Movement, whose mission you can read about here, consists of a group of Jewish millennials who “reject the hypocrisy, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism of the rising far-left.”
This era in history is the perfect time to shine light on the stark differences between the American Leftist and the American conservative in regard to Jews and Israel. On the heels of an administration that abstained while Israel was condemned at the United Nations, we now have one in the administration of President Trump that never hesitates to defend the lone Jewish state. In contrast to a party that shamelessly waves Palestinian flags at its convention, we now have a president that unequivocally recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the holy city of Jerusalem and the strategic Golan Heights, both vital to Israel’s existence. One party has to drag its heels, figuratively kicking and screaming, to give a lukewarm condemnation of anti-Semitism, while the other goes out of its way to stand with the Jews and Israel whenever the opportunity arises.
We American Jews must recognize, once and for all, that the Left and the Democrat Party hate us. They may not have always shown it, but it’s as clear as it ever was now. And the Exodus Movement is the perfect vessel for more of us to wake up and finally walk away for good.