Supporters of the “democratic socialists” who won three congressional primaries in New York on anti-Israel platforms have pushed back on claims that the campaigns were antisemitic. 

After all, they note, one of the victorious candidates, Brad Lander, is Jewish himself. 

So, why should Jews feel threatened — as many do? Lander is a critic of Israel, but, they say, it’s absurd to think he hates Jews.

While there is nothing wrong with criticizing Israel, what makes the current wave of criticism unique is this: Israel is not the aggressor in the war with Iran and its terrorist proxies that started three years ago when Hamas guerrillas infiltrated Israel and murdered some 1,200 people. 

Israel has, by far, the strongest military, but it did not start the war.

The current wave of criticism, in other words, inverts the victim and the aggressor. Worse, at least one of the candidates who won in New York openly backed Hamas. 

Her problem is not war, as such; her problem is that Hamas did not win, and that Israel is still there. She shares the genocidal intent of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, which is to destroy the Jewish state and murder its inhabitants.

Ironically, it is she, Lander and the other candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani that accuse Israel of “genocide.” 

This is where truly irrational hatred enters the picture. The term “genocide” was invented to describe the attempted extermination of Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Israelis have no such intent toward Palestinians, even if Israeli tactics in the war, or the heated rhetoric of some Israeli politicians, are open for debate.

Again: Israel did not start the war. It also allowed aid to flow in large quantities to Palestinians in the war zone — a fact totally at odds with claims of genocidal intent. 

Yes, much of Gaza was destroyed, but that was also due to the fact that Hamas chose to attack Israel from civilian areas (a war crime), rather than meeting the Israeli military in the open. Despite all of that, most of the casualties were Hamas combatants, and account for a fraction of Gaza’s population.

To accuse Israel of “genocide” is therefore not just wrong, but, as George Orwell once wrote: A claim “which [does] not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.” 

It mistakes the victim for the aggressor, and does so using an emotive term with deep resonance in recent Jewish suffering. 

Indeed, the term “genocide” seems calculated to negate the memory of the Holocaust and whatever moral claims that allows Israel to make.

Once Israel has been accused of genocide, then anyone who supports Israel, even vaguely — as most Jews do, since it is the geographic center of the Jewish faith — is implicated. 

That is why a café owner in Brooklyn felt justified in refusing to serve Jewish Rep. Dan Goldman, the Democratic incumbent Lander defeated. It is also why, closer to home, activists in LA have besieged synagogues, or Jewish schools, or Israeli-owned cafés, or even Jewish patrons at restaurants. 

Once Jews become “Nazis,” it is permissible to hunt them.

Lander contributes to that incendiary climate by repeating the “genocide” accusation — as does Scott Wiener, the California Democrat vying to fill Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat in San Francisco. Wiener pushed back on “genocide” until he faced left-wing criticism in the primary. 

He then flipped — the latest example in an ignominious history of the left pressuring Jews to turn against other Jews, which was a cruel feature of Soviet domination, for example.

Mamdani did not condemn Goldman’s exclusion from the café. He also referred to AIPAC — a mainstream pro-Israel lobby — as “monsters.” 

This sort of dehumanizing language is also characteristic of antisemitic hatred, and not ordinary criticism. AIPAC was a major issue in the campaign without anyone trying to explaining why. It supports Israel — but then, so do most Jews and many Americans. It was used as a scapegoat, to evoke hatred and provoke action.

So — why should we care? Antisemitic attacks are up in New York, LA and elsewhere, but that was true before the election. 

Writer Bethany Mandel said it best: “This kind of derangement is not simply a threat to Jews. … It is a threat to the country’s ability to think clearly about its allies, its enemies, and its own interests.” 

Antisemitism is also a sign of a society in trouble: When Jews start losing their civil rights, they are never the last. Everyone’s rights are in danger.

A personal story from California may help to explain. 

In April 2024, I was briefly granted access to the pro-Palestinian “encampment” at UCLA. I intended to film it for a minute or two and then leave. I was wearing my press credentials; though I normally wear a yarmulke, I had a baseball hat on, and was not visibly Jewish. But soon, a mob of activists physically shoved me out of the enclosure. 

The incident was recognized internationally as a violation of press freedom.

I was not attacked because I was Jewish. But because the encampment targeted the Jewish state, and eventually Jewish students as well, it created a climate in which no one’s civil rights were safe. 

UCLA refused to call in law enforcement until a group of vigilantes from surrounding areas — which include several heavily Jewish neighborhoods — attacked the encampment, leading to clashes that eventually forced the university to turn to state and local police officers.

California is different from New York. But the same anti-Israel forces are at work. 

In LA, socialist mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has echoed the “genocide” rhetoric against Israel. And note that the accusation does nothing constructive for Palestinians. 

Instead, it encourages them — the aggressors, albeit the losers, in this conflict — to see themselves as victims. That simply guarantees that the conflict will continue. Some find gratification in that. But we should not.

Jews wonder how New York went from the most important Jewish capital outside of Israel to the epicenter of antisemitism in America. California does not have to go down that road. 

But the “democratic socialists” who feel they have momentum within the Democratic Party want to keep pushing in that direction. Now is the time to demand that our candidates — including the socialists — plan to counter Mandami’s hateful slate in Congress. After November is too late. 

Joel Pollak is the Opinion editor of The California Post.

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