Israel Moderates Are Losing the Democratic Party

Hasan Piker has attracted millions of followers across multiple social-media platforms, making him one of the most popular left-wing streamers. He has been the subject of several flattering magazine profiles that have lingered over what they describe as his handsome looks and bodybuilder physique. Some progressives see him as their long-sought entry point into alternative media that can reach a young, mainly male, audience.

But he is most important as a stand-in for a fight over whether the Democratic Party should be open to, or even dominated by, militant anti-Zionism. Although he allowed, after October 7, 2023, that “the Palestinian resistance is not perfect”—who hasn’t raped, kidnapped and massacred 1,200 civilians from time to time?—he defends Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler-colonial apartheid state.” He has likened the leaders of Hezbollah, a terrorist arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to Nelson Mandela.

A debate over American policy toward Israel is likely to divide the party in the next presidential-primary cycle even more clearly than Medicare for All divided it in 2020—even as many voters aren’t invested in the debate at all. The Democrats’ establishment opposes terrorism and backs a two-state solution; Piker and his allies want to cast that position as de facto support for the status quo, which is a single state controlled by Israel.

If the establishment has any hope of holding on to the party, rather than surrendering it to the Piker wing, it will need to defy that characterization by recognizing that facts on the ground have changed. Political morals and public opinion are pushing in the same direction: ending American financial support for Israel.

For decades, the Democratic Party’s consensus on Israel has combined diplomatic, military, and economic support, including several billion dollars in annual aid, and a friendly push for a two-state solution. In theory, Democrats have supported the national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians while giving themselves room to condemn Palestinian terrorism along with the excesses of Israel’s occupation and West Bank settlement project.

[Read: An end to U.S. military aid to Israel may be closer than you think]

The theoretical case for a two-state solution remains as sound as ever. The trouble is that the Palestinian side has rejected repeated attempts by Democratic presidents to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state, and that Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing coalition do everything they can to subvert such a solution. At some point, supporters of the two-state solution have to take “no” for an answer. The United States is effectively supporting a one-state solution whose entire strategy rests on an endless cycle of responding to terrorism with military force (a process of periodic attacks that Israel calls “mowing the lawn”) in place of any diplomatic path.

Netanyahu represents a parliamentary majority that has run the country for two decades. He has undermined diplomacy repeatedly by, among many other acts, lobbying against the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, propping up Hamas in Gaza before October 7 (to ensure that Palestinians didn’t have leaders he might be expected to negotiate with), and proposing that the Trump administration go to war with Iran.

At the same time, Israel’s standing with the American public has cratered. In four years, its favorability in one Pew Research Center survey plunged from 55 percent to 37 percent. The trend is reflected in other polls, and it has a steep age gradient. Young people in both parties now feel overwhelmingly negative toward it.

Sentiment within the Democratic Party is far harsher than among the general public. Rahm Emanuel is now saying that Israel can buy American weapons but should no longer get them for free. Say what you will about Emanuel, but he can read a poll.

If moderate Democrats continue to support giving Israel (which is getting more unpopular) military aid (which is broadly unpopular), they will sentence themselves to obsolescence. Social-media accounts such as AIPAC Tracker—which defines AIPAC as including organizations such as J Street, a liberal group that now favors ending aid to Israel and is bitterly opposed to AIPAC—have gained wide circulation. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who is not backed by AIPAC, recently was accused by a student at a public event of accepting support from “pro-Israel lobbies.” More and more, pro-Palestine activists treat acceptance of Israel’s existence in any form as genocidal.

The most essential task for liberal Zionists is to separate their ambitions from the stubborn realities of Israel’s government. Liberal Zionists can say that they oppose the status quo and favor two independent states, but as Israel’s willingness to trade land for peace recedes further into historical memory, those pleas sound detached from reality. The traditional Democratic posture is becoming outright impossible as long as the party continues to support sending billions of dollars to Israel every year.

By 2028, two consecutive presidencies are likely to have incinerated political capital attempting to leverage the American alliance with Israel. If a Democratic president is going to succeed Donald Trump, not only must he or she emerge from a primary electorate that is likely to be highly skeptical of Israel, but the candidate must also win over a November electorate that is highly skeptical of foreign aid of any kind.

The winning alternative to embracing uncompromising Palestinian nationalism will not be reviving the American partnership with Netanyahu, or one of his would-be successors (the most plausible of whom, Naftali Bennett, opposes any Palestinian state). It will be pulling up stakes from the Middle East and letting Israelis and Palestinians figure it out for themselves.

Renouncing unconditional aid to Israel may seem like a full-scale surrender to the Piker wing of the Democratic Party. But Israel can survive without American assistance—even Netanyahu has proposed weaning his country off American aid in a decade or so. More important, to equate the withdrawal of the American subsidy with the left-wing position misconstrues just how radical the latter has grown.

Anti-Israel activists such as Piker are calling for more than an end to aid for Israel. They are demanding an arms embargo, which would prevent Israel from even purchasing defensive weaponry from the United States, and cultural and economic boycotts of Israel (but not any other human-rights violator).

The anti-Zionist left sees Israel not merely as a recalcitrant and overly aggressive power but as a fundamentally illegitimate state that is a source of unique evil in the world. Piker’s reference to Israel as a “settler-colonial apartheid state” reflects a fashionable ideology that imagines Israel as an alien Western power that must be expunged so that the land can be turned over to its natural inhabitants.

That ideology propels activist groups that are pushing the party leftward. Every major pro-Palestinian activist group refuses to criticize Hamas, and either endorsed or justified the October 7 attacks. Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella group organizing campus protests, called the October 7 attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” over “the facade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The Palestinian Youth Movement asserted, “We have a right to resist on our own land.” Within Our Lifetime stated, “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.”

Among the leaders of the protests against the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 2024 was Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. On October 7, 2023, Abudayyeh wrote on behalf of USPCN, “Palestinians have an internationally-recognized right to resist illegal military occupation, and today’s attacks from the Palestinian Resistance should be understood as a legitimate response to unending violence from Israel’s extreme right-wing, racist, white supremacist, zionist government and settler movement.”

Revealingly, the movement is focused on Gaza, to the point where Gaza is often used as shorthand for its goals. Although Gaza has seen the worst carnage, it was also the staging ground for horrific mass attacks on civilians. Pogroms by Israeli settlers in the West Bank have no defensive rationale, yet they have received a fraction of the attention bestowed on Gaza. The most convincing explanation for this selective attention is that Gaza, but not the West Bank, is controlled by Hamas, and the pro-Palestinian activist network in the U.S. is in solidarity with Hamas.

The anti-Zionist left is pursuing what activists call an “entryist” strategy, in which members of a faction try to move into an existing party and convert it to their ideology. It’s having some success.

Earlier this month, Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate in Michigan’s Senate primary, invited Piker to speak at a rally. El-Sayed’s two Democratic opponents criticized him for campaigning with Piker, but fellow Democrats such as Summer Lee and Rashida Tlaib joined the event. Matt Duss, who has advised Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on foreign policy, leaped to Piker’s defense, as did The New Republic’s Aaron Regunberg and The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, among other progressives.

Piker was not even the most radical anti-Zionist to appear at El-Sayed’s rally. Standing next to Piker was Amir Makled, a lawyer who has represented Michigan’s student protesters, who is running for regent in the state. Makled has written and shared numerous posts praising Hezbollah and Iran’s leadership, and has used Jew as a slur.

El-Sayed and his allies have defended his rally with Piker as the equivalent of appearing on controversial shows such as Joe Rogan’s, logic endorsed by commenters such as Ezra Klein—as if doing an interview with a podcaster is the same thing as accepting their endorsement at a campaign rally.

The anti-Zionist left understands that Piker’s views—which also run toward broad sympathy for China, Cuba, Russia, and authoritarianism in general—are repugnant to the majority of voters, even in a Democratic presidential primary. The main defense of Piker’s appearance at El-Sayed’s rally is that he is insignificant. Sunkara, enumerating a series of world crises, observed sarcastically in The Guardian, “So naturally, the Democratic Party has found something truly urgent to focus on: a Twitch streamer.” El-Sayed himself made the same argument. “Our president is waging a genocidal, illegal, unjustifiable war with Iran that is torching our tax dollars to the tune of $1.5 billion a day,” he said at his rally, and yet, “apparently the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were gonna campaign with Hasan.”

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]

If El-Sayed doesn’t think that people should discuss his rally with Piker, why would he hold a rally with Piker? The answer, of course, is that he believes Democrats should discuss Piker, but only to agree with him.

This sort of deflection is a common move for political activists when their ally has done something too embarrassing for them to openly defend, but that they do not wish to condemn. They are recognizing the unpopularity of the views they want to mainstream.

But those views can prevail within the party only if the alternative is equally unpopular. At the moment, it is. Israel has alienated public opinion, a shift that began even before Israel encouraged and joined in a potentially disastrous war in Iran. Instead of meeting pro-Palestine activism with defiance, the more intelligent strategy for moderate Democrats would be to sever their political liabilities and compromise with public opinion.

Liberal Zionists can win an intra-Democratic argument against anti-Zionist radicals, but they can’t win it while burdened with support for subsidizing settlements and a strategy of endless conflict. The most extreme anti-Zionist activists won’t be satisfied with anything short of committing the Democratic Party to Israel’s demise. But the most left-wing position in recent Democratic primaries—on Iraq in 2004, on health care in 2016—has rarely been adopted by the candidate who emerges as the party’s eventual nominee.

The decisive bloc of Democrats includes those who are disgusted with Israel’s policies and ready to wash their hands of American support for its maximalist strategy, but wary of going full Piker. Either mainstream Democrats will give up any illusions they have about the ugly nature of Israel’s current government, or they will no longer occupy the mainstream of their party.