Israel is on the Ballot

 It astonishes me every day that Haley is our ultimate bulwark for Israel. Like, right now, two things astonish me. The first is that tomorrow is my father's first yahrzeit. He's been dead for a year. The fact that he dropped dead is devastating, but we all have to pass over at some point. What I could not predict is that my friend, this Michigan WASP of pancake vowels, is fighting a fight that may definitively turn the tide of whether or not the relationship to Israel continues, and consequently...

If we lose the connection to Israel, we lose America. It may not be forever, but it will be for a while, and it will destabilize America to the tune of more casualties than you can count. We either win the Senate or we don't. Most things aren't simple. This is simple.

What do people really think will happen if Sayed wins? Do you really think he would get enough support to win the general?

Bernie voters always say they can put together a working class coalition of right wing voters who would be siphoned over to the left because of their candidates' populism. You might be able to win over working class voters, but do you really think they would ever come over to the left when his main talking point is Israel, Israel, Israel... Most of the voters he's trying to convince are devout Christians, they love Israel more than Jews do! And there's also that unfortunate point about what so many Christians think of... I can't say it, their views on Muslims are beneath contempt, but the world is what it is.

It's astonishing that el-Sayed's done as well as he has. There is clearly a Tea Party like movement on the left. It takes no genius to figure out why: nobody can afford coffee, nobody can afford gas, nobody can afford insurance, nobody can afford beef. Every person middle class and beneath is leaking funds like a sieve. They're justifiably pissed off and they're willing to support a candidate who will articulate their anger even if the target of the candidate's anger has nothing to do with their problems.

But they have to share their quotient of pissed off voters with the pissed off Republicans. Gary Peters has to retire because he's not pissed off enough for anybody's tastes in the age of Trump, and if a Republican wins, he's replaced with a loyal firebreather to Trump, Mike Rogers. Who's going to articulate working class anger better? The firebreather who talks about working class resentments, or the academic who embodies them?

Haley may well lose against Rogers, but she has a far better chance than el-Sayed. The new left has made argument that they can win working class voters: that argument was articulated by Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Jean-Luc Melonchon in France: they both lost in blowouts that so vastly underperformed by how center-left candidates did: and rather than turn the left into pragmatism, it just devastated them and turned millions of them nihilistic rather than more socially committed.

We are so overdue for proper Muslim representation in the Democratic party, but until Israel is no longer their main concern, the entire Democratic party is on opposite sides and there is no stopping a right wing united by a demagogue with dictatorial ambitions even in his dotage.

Israel is now the most volatile issue in America: beyond abortion, beyond trans rights, beyond even resentment of elites! Until this issue calms down, it will break the Democratic party and Republicans will have free reign to let the Israeli right demolish the whole Middle East into a giant truck lot.

Until the Democratic party comes back to the Israeli left, starts advocating again for a two-state solution, even donating to liberal Israeli candidates, there is no Middle East to fight for. You cannot expect to affect the government of a country whose right to exist you deny. How do you think Israel went so right wing? Was it really in isolation? Israel did not used to be a right-wing country, and it arguably wasn't before 2000. A critical mass of Israelis heard exactly the way you hate them and felt backed into a corner. They will fight for their rights and dignity no less than Muslims will, and the more you back them into that corner, the more lethal the fighting gets.

The problem is that issues of Jews have always been on the exact faultline of Western issues. Treatment of Jews was the determinant between which countries went authoritarian in the 1930s, it was the determinant of which countries prospered in the 'long 19th century'. If you dont' like it? Well, get an American majority to take the other side of this issue and see if you have any standard of living in another 30 years...

You may think Zionism and Judaism are separate issues, but face reality finally. More than 1/3rd of the world's Jews live there. Nearly 2/3rds of the world's other Jews support it to the point that they're willing to break friendships over it, and regard anti-Zionist Jews as little different than Jews for Jesus. If you don't understand the Jewish connection to Israel, it's not our problem. We will fight you until we win in every way we know how, and you will either be convinced we're right, you will agree not to bring it up, or we will make your social lives absolutely miserable for you.

This is war, a war not just for the soul of Israel, but a war for the soul of America. All throughout history, country after country is torn apart by ideological polarization that does not recognize the right of the other side to believe what they believe. Until recently, the Democratic party was SO MUCH BETTER than Republicans on this issue. But until this issue is over, there is no adult in the room: it's just two molotov cocktails facing each other while the world burns.

I've asked myself the issue for decades: why do so many people hate Israel so much? I'm always exasperated by Israel in a hundred different ways, never moreso than when I lived there, but your hatred is clearly beyond exasperation. This is the basic denial of the reality Jews face, and the basic denial of Jewish rights. But the reason still didn't quite occur to me. I think I finally have the answer:

Israel hatred is not a war about their policies or any genoc*de or ethnic cleansing that may one day occur, has occurred, or is occurring.

It's not antisemitism, at least not for the vast majority of Americans and Westerners. It's goes far deeper into the human psyche. It's a war on reality. People believe a world is possible without the necessity of defense, without the necessity of soldiery and weaponry, without the necessity of doing what you need to survive. People think we can survive without doing anything necessary for survival. It is the ultimate entitlement and the ultimate refusal to concede that the world is what it is, what it always was, and probably will always be. Historical period after period, they sacrifice Jews to the idea that there's a one-percent chance to make the world into what they think would make it better, but if there's a reason Jews exist at all, it is to show the world that there is no better way. You simply take the world as it is, and as it comes, and figure out practical accommodations to every problem. Ideology is a poison: for Gentile and Jew alike. If they are necessary, you take the amount that's absolutely necessary and combine it with the flexibility of pragmatism: feminism, capitalism, antiracism, queer activism, socialism, militarism, pacifism, pragmatism and Zionism: all necessary, but the moment your 'ism' dictates how you see the world is the moment you become an impediment to the world.

If Haley wins, we may get a Democratic majority. If el-Sayed wins, we won't. Israel is on the ballot tomorrow. America is on the ballot tomorrow. Democracy is on the ballot tomorrow.

For both.