Whose words should make American Jews feel safer? Joseph Biden's or Abdul El-Sayed's?
What makes American Jews safe?
I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes.
This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated:
To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.
Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it to any one of the following statements that former President Joseph Biden has made over the course of his career.
In 2014, nine months before Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency, Vice President Biden told a group of Jewish leaders:
You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States…there’s really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel.
On October 12, 2023, five days after the Hamas attacks upon Israel, President Biden declared, “Were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee.”
At a Hanukkah party in 2023, three months after the October 7 attacks, President Biden reiterated that “were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe. I make no bones about it.”
Even with all the passions and prejudices that attach to our beliefs about Israel and Palestine, I find it hard to believe that any reasonable Jewish person would feel safer listening to Biden— who is telling them that no matter what they do in the United States, the Jews will never be safe here, that they need Israel to be safe—versus El-Sayed’s saying that he sees the safety of the Jews as intimately bound with the safety of every other person in the United States, including that of his daughters.
I understand that you might not believe El-Sayed, but again, purely at the level of the rhetoric, you damn well should believe that El-Sayed is saying the right thing and Biden—and everyone he speaks for in the Democratic establishment—is saying the wrong thing. And when you hear the Bidens of this world saying what they say, you should be a lot more concerned than you are or may be when El-Sayed says whatever he says that is critical of Israel.
This is such a generational thing. In the trauma of the Holocaust and the struggle for some sense of safety in the face of US betrayals during the war, those of Biden’s generation (and my own) hesitate in making the US a guarantor of anyone’s safety. The current regime ought to be a strong reminder of the recurrent fallibility of US pluralism. Should Israelis want a pluralist state? I don’t know and am in no position to recommend in either direction. I feel personally like building the muscles to make pluralism realistic has to start here before we can run around preaching it to other states.
This is however a different question than how much armament of what kinds and at what prices we should make available to this current Israeli government. And taking the position that its battles with Iran and its surrogate groups throughout the middle east are by definition always in our national interest is not respecting our own priorities NOR advancing any conceivable peace plan short of exterminating “the other” as a prerequisite for “peace” (and for both sides).
We despise one exterminationist view of “the other” but tend to overlook (if not support) the reverse perspective. That’s getting us neither peace accords nor safety in practice for anyone. If the rule is, the one who can kill the most is the “winner” (as DJT apparently believes) of the conflict, nobody will ever be safe in the Middle East ever. Treating Israel as a proxy for our interests in killing our way to control in Iran actually hands the real control to Netanyahu who is happy to treat us as HIS proxies.
So I am not frighted by El-Sayed, nor do I see him, Mamdani, Laib or any other Arab heritage speaker as necessarily taking a position threatening to Jews in Israel or here. I do see the enormous investments of AIPAC in our elections and elites as a threat to sensible policy on Israel, just as Russian money and propaganda bots are a threat to our own. I don’t want US policy made with reference to deep pockets of cash, be these in the Russian, Chinese, Taiwanese, etc “influencers.”