Robert Rosenthal, a vocal member of Jewish Voice for Peace, writer on Substack - has 26,000 Facebook followers and persistently publishes egregious anti-Zionist commentary, repeatedly invoking his “as a Jew” credentials to lend it authority. By responding I risk violating two cardinal rules: do not amplify what deserves no larger audience, and do not endlessly repeat hateful distortions, because repetition itself can spread them, or confer a legitimacy they have not earned.

Robert Rosenthal’ s Facebook Post under discussion:

So, do I sit back and watch it continue, or do I expose it for what it is?

Ultimately, I concluded that silence carries its own risk. We cannot effectively counter this rhetoric if we are unwilling to examine the mechanism beneath it: how one Jew establishes his moral standing by putting other Jews on trial; how Zionism is transformed into a sinful ideology from which Jews must publicly cleanse themselves; and how renunciation is rewarded with acceptance and belonging.

Rosenthal is not alone. He represents a broader phenomenon worth exposing and discussing. He is a symptom of something… exposure and conversation may lead somewhere… So, with considerable reluctance, here goes.

Robert Rosenthal begins his denunciation of Zionism by establishing his credentials: “I was a Zionist for more than half my life. I’ve been in the Jewish community my entire life.”

This is not incidental biography. It is the foundation of the authority he claims over other Jews. Even his formulation is curious: “I’ve been in the Jewish community my entire life.” He does not simply say, “I am a Jew.” To be in a community describes proximity, participation and accumulated standing; it does not necessarily describe identity. Perhaps he intends only to emphasize his communal involvement. Yet here the phrase functions almost as a credential: I have spent my life among these people, and therefore I am qualified to diagnose their moral failure.

Later, he refers to Jews as “members of my faith,” reducing Judaism to religious affiliation while leaving aside Jewish peoplehood, history and collective memory. That narrowing is useful to his argument. Once Judaism is separated from Jewish peoplehood, Zionism can be recast, not as the modern political expression of an ancient people’s entitlement to its ancestral homeland , its indigeneity, and its right to self-determination, but as an alien and sinful ideology from which the properly enlightened Jew must cleanse himself.

He is not merely saying, I changed my mind. He is saying: I once believed what you believe. I escaped it. Therefore, I understand you better than you understand yourselves and I am now qualified to condemn and judge you.

What follows is less a political argument than a conversion testimony: Zionism is declared “racist, dishonest, selfish” and “violent.” Israel is pronounced genocidal. Jews who remain Zionists are described as biased, misguided, dishonest, hard-hearted and complicit in catastrophic harm. Rosenthal makes no distinction between Zionism’s foundational proposition, that the Jewish people are entitled to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, and the actions of the state created in pursuit and defense of that right. Instead, he takes every policy, military action and alleged wrongdoing he attributes to Israel, across governments and across decades, and folds it into his definition of Zionism itself. Under that formulation, affirming Israel’s right to exist becomes indistinguishable from endorsing everything ever done in its name. No room is left for the Zionist who opposes settlements, condemns settler violence, supports Palestinian statehood, despises Netanyahu and grieves for Palestinian children. Every expression of Zionism, however critical, humane or committed to coexistence, is compressed into one irredeemable moral offense.

This is a purification ritual. First comes confession: I, too, was once a Zionist. Then revelation: I discovered that Zionism was evil. Then denunciation: Those who remain Zionists are morally corrupted. Then the demand for repentance: Abandon it. And finally, absolution and the promise of admission: “Palestinians and allies will welcome you with open arms.”

There, perhaps, is the most revealing bargain of all: renounce Zionism and you will be welcomed. Disavow the central expression of Jewish peoplehood held by most Jews, and you may enter a new community purified of the stigma now attached to Jewish collective identity.

Rosenthal tells Zionists that if they feel ashamed, that shame proves something is wrong with Zionism. But shame manufactured through relentless public vilification proves nothing about the truth of the thing being vilified.

Gay people were once told that their shame proved homosexuality was immoral. Women were taught that the shame surrounding sexual violence belonged to the victim rather than the perpetrator. Immigrants were made ashamed of their accents, names and customs, and that discomfort was then treated as proof that assimilation required self-erasure. Indigenous peoples were punished for speaking their languages and later told that the disappearance of those languages demonstrated their inferiority or irrelevance. Jews were pressured to conceal their names, practices and particularity, and their concealment was then taken as evidence that Jewishness was something properly kept out of sight. Shame manufactured by social punishment does not establish the moral defect of an identity. It reveals the power of those who imposed the shame.

Yet Rosenthal explicitly urges Jews to examine “the damage” Zionism is doing to their reputations. This is an extraordinary moral proposition: Jews should reconsider an essential component of their identity because its continued expression may make them unpopular.

For centuries, Jews have been instructed to become more acceptable to the societies around them. Be less visible. Be less particular. Abandon the practices, attachments and loyalties that make others suspicious. Rosenthal gives that ancient demand a contemporary progressive vocabulary: relinquish Zionism, confess your complicity, and the righteous will welcome you.

A great tragedy is that he presents this conditional acceptance as liberation.

Criticism of Israel is entirely compatible with Zionism, but rejecting Zionism is not a neutral political choice when it requires repudiating the Jewish people’s ancient history and religious and cultural expression, embedded throughout Torah, prayer, history and collective memory.

Rosenthal is not simply describing his own departure from Zionism. He is turning that departure into a hierarchy of Jewish moral worth. He is the awakened Jew while Zionists are anything but -He possesses “the awful reality” and Zionists are deceived. He supports equal rights and Zionists support racism. He has recovered authentic Judaism and Zionists have allowed their Judaism to become perverted. He is compassionate and Zionists have hardened their hearts.

This binary performs an important psychological and social function. It moves the anti-Zionist Jew out of the dock and places other Jews there instead. In political spaces where Zionism has been transformed into a synonym for racism, colonialism and genocide, the Jewish anti-Zionist can secure belonging by announcing: I am not one of those Jews.

Here we reach the core of the mechanism: belonging is offered through the prosecution of other Jews’ identity, while that act of renunciation is celebrated as moral courage.

In this moral economy, the Jew who publicly renounces Zionism is celebrated because his Jewishness can be used to validate conclusions others already hold. “As a Jew” becomes a credential, but only when followed by the approved indictment. Jewish identity is welcomed when offered as testimony against the Jewish collective; it becomes unwelcome when invoked to explain Jewish history, exile, vulnerability, peoplehood or attachment to Israel. This is not acceptance of Jews in their full diversity. It is the selective instrumentalization of Jews whose politics serve the prevailing narrative.

Rosenthal also treats “genocide” as though repeatedly pronouncing the word resolves the legal and factual controversy. It does not. The case before the International Court of Justice remains pending. The Court has not delivered a final judgment finding that Israel committed genocide. The International Criminal Court proceeding is entirely separate: it concerns individual criminal responsibility, and the warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu alleges war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide. An arrest warrant is not a conviction, and the ICC proceeding did not emerge from the ICJ case.

Rosenthal’s ignorance, or willful misrepresentation, lies in his rhetorical bundling of separate courts, proceedings and legal questions to create the appearance of cumulative judicial condemnation.

When I challenged him, he made a stunning admission: he justified presenting “genocide” as an established fact by saying that waiting until 2030 for the ICJ to rule would simply be too long. In other words, because due process takes longer than he is willing to tolerate, he feels entitled to pronounce his own verdict in advance. Imagine arguing that, because a murder trial may take years, the public is justified in declaring the accused guilty while the case is still pending. The ICJ proceeding is not a criminal prosecution, so the analogy is not exact, but the underlying abandonment of justice is the same: allegation becomes verdict, impatience displaces adjudication, his rhetoric treats the responding party’s opportunity to answer the allegation as irrelevant. When predetermined guilt replaces legal process, justice has not merely been hurried—it has been discarded. That is not progressive reasoning; it is authoritarian logic, and, as I told him, it is precisely the road by which fascism enters.

He then asked, “How else do we show our conscience?” But conscience is not jurisdiction, and moral concern does not require us to counterfeit a legal verdict. We can grieve Palestinian deaths, condemn conduct we believe unlawful or morally indefensible, demand humanitarian relief, call for investigations and insist upon accountability without declaring that a still-pending allegation has already been proved. Rosenthal turns the word “genocide” into a compulsory certificate of compassion: unless one adopts his legal conclusion, one has supposedly failed to demonstrate a conscience. That is absurd. Conscience should compel us to confront suffering; it does not entitle us to dispense with evidence, due process or the distinction between accusation and adjudication. Indeed, if our compassion requires us to abandon the principles of justice, then it is not justice we are practicing, it is a theatrical attempt at morality.

Indeed, the ease with which Rosenthal pronounces collective moral judgment is striking. He accuses Zionists of dehumanizing Palestinians while describing an enormously diverse Jewish populace who identify as Zionist as uniformly racist, selfish and violent.

He does not engage with why a people shaped by expulsions, pogroms, statelessness and genocide might believe Jewish self-determination is necessary. He reduces that history to irrational fear and instructs Jews to obtain “quality information” so they may determine whether their fears are rational, as if centuries of persecution require his psychological validation.

Judaism and our identity as a people does not belong to antizionists who appoint themselves its moral gatekeepers. No faction may declare that its politics constitute authentic Judaism while branding the beliefs of other Jews “immoral” or “un-Jewish.” Nor can allegiance to a political slogan serve as the measure of anyone’s conscience or standing as a Jew before Hashem, wherever that person may stand on the spectrum of Jewish identity, belief or observance.

If a Jew rejects Zionism for his own reasons, that does not give him locus standi to redefine Zionism entirely for other Jews, strip it of its history and diversity, pronounce it a moral disease, and then portray those who refuse his prescription as enemies of justice.

Rosenthal describes his transformation as an awakening. Yet his rhetoric reproduces an ancient and exhausted demand: the Jew may be accepted, but first the Jew must surrender something essential to Jewish identity.

And when a Jew finds belonging by placing other Jews on trial, we are entitled to ask whether he has truly escaped a system of prejudice or merely secured for himself a more comfortable position within it.

Author’s Note: I cannot know Robert Rosenthal’s private motives, and this essay does not pretend to diagnose them. It examines what his rhetoric does. When Jewish identity is stigmatized through its association with Zionism, repudiating Zionism can offer more than acceptance: it can provide attempts at moral purification, personal status and escape from collective accusation. The Jew moves from the dock to the prosecution table, from being among those judged to acquiring authority by judging them. Social psychologists describe a related phenomenon as self-group distancing: separating oneself from a stigmatized group may improve one’s individual standing while reinforcing the very system that imposed the stigma. My hope is that the risk I have taken in writing this piece pays off, that it equips others to recognize and call out this mechanism clearly whenever they encounter it.

More on the aspect of Adjudicating Genocide and use of the slogan - here.

“Seeing massive security outside Synagogues in New York City is a terrifying reality check. As we approach our High Holidays I note that at no time and especially from October 8 to today, have I seen Jews blocking mosques. I have not seen New York City needing to station 400 police officers outside a mosque to protect worshippers. I am asking the broader Muslim community to stand with your Jewish neighbors and speak out against those who violate our shared right to worship freely, safely and without intimidation in every city. Please make your voices public, loud and clear in your communities and in your mosques. Show us that you reject the intimidation and targeting of Jews and that you explicitly denounce calls for a “global intifada.” Let us hear your solidarity and let us see it in action. This cannot be done quietly - it must be louder than the voices who seem to be asserting the terror in all your names. After all the quiet responses or silence impute complicit.”

I confess, however, that it was not only the sight of this massive security presence that prompted my post. There was another impetus:

A man, apparently Jewish, who boasts his antizionism, posted the accompanying image on his Facebook timeline.

The photograph* shows heavily armed police officers standing outside Central Synagogue in New York City, mere weeks after an attacker broke into Shabbat services. Above it he wrote:

“Israel’s occupation and apartheid system make the IOF a pervasive presence in Palestine-Israel. Today, in America, many synagogues have armed guards. Israeli oppression makes Jews everywhere less safe.”

The use of “IOF” rather than IDF is, I think, revealing enough.

I was incensed by the post.

Here were Jewish worshippers requiring armed protection outside a synagogue, after an attack, and somehow the responsibility for that danger was being shifted back onto Jews themselves. The people needing protection had become the explanation for why they needed protection. Whatever one’s politics concerning Israel, that inversion should trouble anyone capable of recognizing the most basic form of victim-blaming. Worse still, anyone who understands how prejudice escalates should recognize the danger in this kind of rhetoric: when responsibility for threats or violence is assigned to the people being targeted, especially during a period of rampant antisemitism, hostility is excused and rationalized. And once intimidation is rationalized, the distance between rhetoric and actual violence is so dangerously shortened that it becomes a direct and active nexus.

My first instinct was to call him out publicly - by name- and shame him and the argument for what it was. Then I stopped. With more than 25,000 followers already hearing his voice, why would I help amplify it?

And that is when something else occurred to me.

Perhaps the answer is not always to shout more loudly at the people spreading this kind of hate and harm. Perhaps the more important question is whether we should hear, with equal force, from those whose communities may be unfairly implicated by the extremists doing the intimidating. To squash this abhorrent rhetoric that may only spread and encourage more of it.

That is the reason for my appeal.

I do not believe Muslims are collectively responsible for antisemitism, Islamist extremism, anti-Israel activism or the behavior of protesters outside synagogues. They are not. I reject collective guilt precisely because I know where that road leads.

And that said, there comes a moment when public disassociation matters.

When people invoke religion, community or liberation while intimidating Jews, those who reject that conduct should not leave the repudiation to Jews alone. Silence does not automatically make someone complicit. Prolonged silence has consequences that we cannot ignore. It leaves space for the loudest voices to create the appearance of consensus. It allows extremists to behave as though they speak in the name of people who may, in fact, want nothing to do with them.

So I am asking to hear those other voices: Whispered privately or offered only in reassuring conversations between friends is worthless at this point.

Publicly. Clearly. In community organizations, from elected officials, from Muslim leaders and, yes, from mosque pulpits. On panels. In press statements. Before Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur is perfect timing.

If the act of people showing up outside Jewish places of worship to hinder, intimidate or frighten Jews does not speak for you, tell us. You can defend the right to protest while still insisting that there are places where exercising that right becomes morally indefensible. A synagogue, mosque, church or other house of worship should never be turned into a site of intimidation. The plea here is to speak clearly about what your moral judgment tells you is wrong.

And let your voices be louder than theirs.

If we - the Jews - make this appeal openly and repeatedly and are met only with crickets, then at least we will know something important. There will be less room for comforting assumptions about what people privately believe. We will know who was willing to stand publicly for the shared right of every Jew, every Muslim, every Christian and every person of faith, to enter a house of worship without intimidation.

While indeed a Jewish demand at these times, in essence it is an American one.

Author’s Note:
* I redacted people’s names from the B’Nai Mtzvah signage, for online safety purposes.

It is not so much an escape as a wrestling: with my conscience, my inadequacies, my helplessness, and my frustration with a world in which the attempt at justice is man-made and not the order of nature.

And then nature is not in order — or is it?

I spend so much of my life inside systems created to manufacture justice: laws, courts, treaties, conventions, rights. Living inside them. Working them.

Through Moses, justice was revealed in Torah and covenant; Justinian sought justice through man’s laws; Grotius through natural law; and Africa through the communal truth embodied in Ubuntu: that our humanity exists in relation to one another. Yet none of it guarantees justice. Floods bury villages. People persecute one another. Children become self-defending asylum seekers. Hatred flourishes. Good people suffer, and the most innocent are demonized while demons are eulogized as freedom’s martyrs. The universe does not convene a court to put any of it right.

Perhaps that is what happens on my canvas.

All that order I spend my life searching for is allowed to faint. A momentary coma, where a face can have three eyes, a mouth can become another creature, a human being can dissolve into a bird, a line, a pattern, another human being. Grief can be funny. Beauty can be grotesque. Nothing has to obey.

And somehow, when the canvas makes no sense at all, I find the clarity to re-enter a world ordered by systems I still have to believe can matter.

The post reads:

“My sisters! All of us testified at LAUSD today to urge the board to keep Israel proxies out of our schools, where the Brandeis Center wants to train teachers to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Left to right (all left really), Marcy Winograd (I know her), Angelica Duenas, brilliant congressional candidate in the east SFV, Lauren (JVP), Estee Chandler, co-founder JVP-LA, and Leah Yananton, CODEPINK nuclear abolitionist taking on Elon Musk and his militarization and rocket mania on the Central Coast. Others joined us, too, so shout out to Rick Chertoff (JVP), Basha Jamil (CAIR), David Klein, CODEPINK and others, too. Angelica Dueñas Estee Chandler Leah Yananton”

Even before examining the organizations and activists being celebrated in this Facebook post, the wording should stop us in our tracks.

What precisely is an “Israel proxy” in an American public school, and who is being described that way?

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law is an American Jewish civil-rights organization. Together with StandWithUs, it filed litigation against California education authorities on behalf of Jewish parents whose children allegedly experienced antisemitic harassment, discriminatory treatment and hostile classroom environments. Incidents alleged in the case involve several California districts, including LAUSD. The plaintiffs are seeking remedies that include monitoring, removal of antisemitic curricular content, enforcement of nondiscrimination protections and antisemitism training for educators and administrators.

One may examine those allegations critically, oppose particular remedies, question a proposed definition or demand protections for legitimate classroom discussion. Litigation is adversarial; no complaint proves itself merely by being filed. But the Facebook post does none of that. It does not quote a proposed lesson, identify a training module or point to language declaring that criticism of an Israeli government is antisemitic. It simply announces that the Brandeis Center wants teachers trained “to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.”

That is not evidence. It is a conclusion disguised as a fact. It minimizes, redirects, invalidates and most unfortunately spreads through social media to our young minded

Nor have I found evidence that LAUSD has decided it “wants the Brandeis Center to train teachers.” The publicly described demand is for court-ordered antisemitism training as part of broader statewide relief. The post transforms a remedy sought in contested litigation into an established LAUSD program, then assigns that imagined program an equally imagined purpose. Two unsupported propositions are fused into one alarming sentence. Maybe I have this wrong – if I do – please – sincerely - show me!

There is an obvious and necessary distinction here. Criticism of Israel is not automatically antisemitic. Criticism can, however, become antisemitic when it holds Jews collectively responsible for Israel; employs inherited anti-Jewish conspiracies; demands that Jewish students renounce Zionism as the price of participation; treats Jewish institutions as agents of a foreign power; or denies Jews alone a right to national self-determination that is freely asserted for others. Teaching educators to recognize that boundary is not inherently “conflation.” Whether a particular program crosses the boundary can be judged only by examining its actual content.

The post offers no content because “conflation” is doing political work that evidence otherwise would have to do. Shame on any one brainless enough to buy this!

The insidious inversion

The most dangerous phrase is not even “conflate.” It is “Israel proxies.”

Jewish parents approach public institutions saying that their children are frightened, isolated or treated differently. Jewish organizations bring claims on their behalf. The response is to recast those organizations, not as American civil-rights advocates whose arguments may be accepted or contested, but as proxies for Israel attempting to penetrate American schools.

That is an old suspicion in contemporary clothing with the propaganda: ‘Jews and Jewish institutions are not acting from their own experiences or exercising their own citizenship; they are serving a foreign power.’

The inversion is particularly insidious because it enters the very discourse in which Jewish families are seeking protection. Their request for understanding becomes evidence of manipulation. Their effort to describe antisemitism is touted as an attempt to silence Palestine. Their advocates become “proxies.” The more urgently they speak, the more readily their urgency is offered as proof of a Zionist campaign, with Zionist expressed in a manner assuming a shameful designation to the label.

This is exactly how a hostile environment protects itself from scrutiny. It does not need evidence – because.it does not need to disprove the Jewish experiences. It merely assigns those experiences a foreign political motive.

LAUSD should be able to hear competing views. It should also insist upon precise, responsible language, especially from people addressing the Board about the protection of children. “Keep Israel proxies out of our schools” is neither precise nor responsible. It must be called out for what it is.

In an already combustible climate, it imports hostility toward Zionists and Jewish institutions directly into a proceeding concerning whether Jewish students are safe.

The roll call is not incidental

The author does not merely report who attended. She celebrates an ideological formation: “Left to right (all left really).” Each name operates as a credential, and the organizations represented help explain the framing of the post.

Marcy Winograd is not a detached observer raising a narrow concern about poorly designed training. CODEPINK identifies her as the coordinator of CODEPINK Congress, a local CODEPINK leader, coordinator of its “Drop the ADL” campaign, and chair of Jewish & Allied Educators 4 Palestine. She has also served with JVP Action. Her own published work routinely describes mainstream Jewish advocacy as the “Israel lobby,” and she has promoted a CODEPINK program advertised as challenging “Zionist brainwashing in our schools.” None of that disqualifies her from speaking. It does mean that “Israel proxies” and “conflate” should be understood as language emerging from an established anti-Zionist campaign, not as neutral findings about the litigation.

Angélica Dueñas is a congressional candidate, praised in the post as “brilliant.” Her current political promotion foregrounds opposition to AIPAC, rejection of what supporters call “Israel lobby money,” and the unadjudicated assertion that Israel is committing genocide. Again, opposition to AIPAC or military aid is not, by itself, antisemitism. But her presence is presented as political validation for a campaign whose premise is that Jewish civil-rights organizations are Israeli proxies. A candidate for Congress should be expected to distinguish criticism of lobbying and government policy from language that casts American Jewish advocacy as foreign infiltration.

Estee Chandler founded the Los Angeles chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. This matters because JVP does not merely criticize Netanyahu, settlements or the conduct of a war. JVP explicitly identifies itself as anti-Zionist. Its published explanation characterizes Zionism as a colonial project and draws upon an anti-Zionist tradition. Its public vision does not affirm two states, Israel and Palestine, living alongside one another; Israel’s continuing existence as the nation-state of the Jewish people is conspicuously absent from what it proposes.

That absence should not be airbrushed into ordinary criticism of Israel. There is a profound difference between opposing a government and opposing the political legitimacy of the country itself. A movement may choose the latter position, but it may not then pretend that objections arise only because critics cannot tolerate discussion of Israeli policy.

JVP’s broader alliances and choices are also relevant. It publicly affirms an ongoing partnership with American Muslims for Palestine, chaired by Hatem Bazian, who founded Students for Justice in Palestine. JVP’s own FAQ acknowledges that Bazian is a supporter, while denying claims that he secretly runs the organization. In 2017, JVP announced that it was “honored” to feature Rasmea Odeh at its national meeting. Odeh had been convicted in Israel in the 1969 terrorist bombing that killed two students and injured others – she had been sentenced to life in prison – and released in a prisoner swap after serving ten years, to face immigration fraud in the U.S. – she documented on her immigration forms that she had never been convicted of a crime; JVP presented her as a deeply respected organizer and defended the invitation.

The timing of post–October 7 activism also matters. As the scale of Hamas’s massacre was still becoming known, “resistance” demonstrations were called for October 8. JVP’s subsequent organizing overwhelmingly redirected attention toward Israel and rapidly folded the massacre into its pre-existing anti-Zionist framework. This does not make every JVP member responsible for every placard or chant.

Leah Yananton is identified in the post through CODEPINK, and CODEPINK has not hidden its project. It works with JVP on BDS and other campaigns and has advertised educational programming with the words “challenge Zionist brainwashing in our schools.” CODEPINK also defended JVP’s decision to host Rasmea Odeh. When an organization with that record demands that Jewish civil-rights advocates be kept out as “Israel proxies,” the issue is plainly larger than protecting ordinary criticism of Israeli policy.

Basha Jamil is a policy manager for CAIR-LA and has publicly advocated the inclusion of Palestine in ethnic-studies curricula, describing opposition as erasure and referring to “Zionist violence.” CAIR is a Muslim civil-rights organization that performs important work against anti-Muslim discrimination. While CAIR acknowledged that it has condemned the targeting and killing of Israeli civilians, CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, later said he was “happy” to see people “break through the siege on October 7,” while insisting that he was not celebrating violence against civilians. The White House condemned the remarks, and CAIR subsequently reaffirmed its condemnation of the attacks on Israeli civilians. That sequence illustrates the concern: condemnation of civilian killing coexisted with rhetoric romanticizing the event through the language of liberation. In my private conversations with CAIR’s California leadership the sincerity in condemning OCT 07, became questionable. Maybe I should publish those shocking communications.

Rick Chertoff is publicly identified as a co-founder of L.A. Jews for Peace and a founding steering-committee member of JVP-LA. “Lauren” is identified only as JVP, and the post does not provide enough information to attribute any individual record beyond that affiliation. David Klein is named without sufficient identification to establish which person is meant.

To examine the organizations the author chose to showcase and the collective political message for which the group appeared provides clarity and motive.

What this intervention is really doing

The litigation will do what it should do…. That is not the issue.

For me one issue is whether an anti-Zionist coalition must be seen for who they are - and their motivation must feature. It pre-emptively defines antisemitism education as Israeli interference, describes Jewish civil-rights advocates as “proxies,” and then presents itself as merely protecting open inquiry.

Another issue is the exploitation of a platform for an insidiously harmful agenda – one that enters through a door intended to safeguard our Jewish children, with no regard for the safety and best interests of our Jewish children.

The social media post of Madam Winograd gives the game away: It does not ask LAUSD to ensure that training distinguishes protected political speech from antisemitic discrimination. It demands that designated “Israel proxies” be kept out. It does not invite scrutiny of actual materials. It supplies a verdict without producing them. And it does not approach the fears of Jewish families with even minimal curiosity. Instead, it places those fears inside a pre-written story about Zionist power, censorship and infiltration, while smashing the pie of political agenda in the face of the LAUSD.

Do not be fooled. This is not simply a principled effort to preserve criticism of an Israeli government. It is an effort by activists with established anti-Zionist agendas to use a forum concerning Jewish safety to advance those agenda, and to discredit Jewish advocates before they can even be heard.

Jewish parents are seeking protection for their children during one of the most hostile antisemitic climates in recent American history. They should not have to prove, as the price of admission, that they are sufficiently detached from Israel, sufficiently opposed to Zionism or sufficiently acceptable to the likes of JVP, CAIR or CODEPINK. Their children’s safety is not foreign interference. Their civil rights are not “Zionist lawfare.” And their request to be understood must not be turned into another weapon against them.

READ MORE ON JVP

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Pic: Loud and Clear -

Dolly did not transcend politics because she lacked convictions. She transcended partisanship because she expressed her convictions as love made practical. And we can each be our part…

Dolly leaves behind an extraordinary legacy: the music, the quiet yet fiery wit, the staggering creativity and the singular character she presented to the world, all bearing the authoritative seal of rhinestone. Beyond that, there is something almost mysterious about the place Dolly occupied in our culture. People who agreed on almost nothing agreed on Dolly Parton.

That is especially remarkable in an age in which every public figure is expected to declare a side on every controversy, pass endless litmus tests, and have every move examined, categorized, denounced or embraced accordingly. How did she accomplish that? What was her special sauce? And is there something the rest of us can learn from it?

It would be an easy explanation to simply say that Dolly stayed out of politics. But that would not be true. It was how she did politics that made you think she stayed out of it.

She supported same-sex marriage and defended LGBTQ and transgender people. She affirmed that Black lives matter. When she understood the Confederate associations and hurt attached to the word “Dixie,” she removed it from the name of her dinner attraction. 9 to 5 was a joyful, infectious song and film, but it was also an unmistakable indictment of workplace inequality, sexual harassment and the exploitation of women. Through her Imagination Library, she placed hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children. She funded scholarships, disaster relief, healthcare and medical research.

These were not politically empty choices. Made quietly, they spoke loudly because of the enormity of her stature.

What Dolly did not do was turn moral conviction into a partisan identity. She did not tell people whom to vote for. She did not make contempt for one group the price of belonging to another. She did not transform every act of compassion into a public performance of her own righteousness. Dolly did not stand above people to preach goodness. She stood beside them and demonstrated it.

Her generosity did not say, “Look how enlightened I am.” It said, “Here is a book for your child.” That may be the first ingredient in her special sauce: moral conviction without moral vanity.

Much of contemporary public life operates through denunciation. People establish their goodness by identifying those they regard as bad and prove their membership in one community by displaying sufficient contempt for another. The performance of outrage can become more important than the person on whose behalf it is supposedly expressed.

Dolly did not appear to need enemies to establish her goodness. She showed us who she was through what she loved and what she did for others.

She made justice personal rather than ideological. Literacy was not an abstract policy platform to her. Her father could not read or write, so she created a program that sent books directly to children. Poverty was not a fashionable cause; it was the world from which she came. LGBTQ equality was not a culture-war manifesto to her. It was about people she knew and loved, and the heartbreak she witnessed when they were treated cruelly. Dolly was real. She could strip an issue of its political packaging and return it to its human core. That made her values extraordinarily difficult to reject.

Dolly also acted far more than she advertised. Celebrities can issue statements of support or defiance, with lip service becoming a performance in itself. That was not Dolly’s beat. She built things. She sent books, created scholarships, assisted families after wildfires, supported hospitals and medical research, and built businesses that generated employment in the community from which she came.

Hers was a morality with infrastructure. A child did not have to know Dolly’s politics to open a book she had sent. A family receiving disaster assistance did not have to pass an ideological test. There was neither caveat nor condition to Dolly. She gave and gave and gave—and I have no doubt she will continue giving from beyond.

Another part of her authenticity was that she never severed herself from her roots. Dolly became enormously wealthy and globally famous while continuing to embrace the poor, rural, religious Southern community that produced her. She never developed the boastfulness or distancing we so often see in those who acquire wealth.

She could correct something without humiliating people who had not yet understood. When she recognized the harm carried by the word “Dixie,” she removed it from the name of her dinner attraction. Her response was essentially: now that we know better, we should fix it. She did not demand public self-flagellation or divide the world permanently between the enlightened and the irredeemable. She left room for people to learn.

Dolly allowed people to change without first requiring them to confess that they were terrible.

Then there was her humor. The hair, the breasts, the sequins, the impossible heels and the jokes demonstrated that she understood perfectly how some may see her. She was always the first person to laugh at Dolly Parton. A video released only weeks before her death offered one final, glorious dose of it.

That self-deprecation was not insecurity. It was her armor and it was sheer brilliance. Nobody could successfully expose her pretensions because she had already dispensed with them. She could be glamorous without asking to be mistaken for solemn. She could be brilliant without announcing her brilliance. She knew the difference between taking her work seriously and taking herself too seriously.

But there remains a more difficult question that some aging activists, still clamoring for world peace and universal human rights, cannot ignore:

Was Dolly’s broad moral authority partly purchased through silence? In a country losing its democracy and sliding through corruption into authoritarianism, and in a world of escalating cruelty, is remaining outside the political fray always an ethical choice?

The answer is not uncomplicated. There are times when the silence of an immensely influential person helps preserve the very injustice that person privately opposes. Love can become evasive when it is unwilling to name cruelty. Kindness toward everyone can become an excuse for failing to defend someone being harmed. Universal language may comfort us, but injustice is almost always specific: somebody is doing something to somebody else.

Refusing to take a side does not always place a person above the conflict. Sometimes it leaves that person standing with the status quo. That judgment applies to many public figures today, but not, I believe, to Dolly. She registered her noise through a veil of silence.

Dolly’s life was not one of silence. It was speech by example. When she spoke directly, she bypassed the partisan machinery and went to the moral center. Her gentleness should not be mistaken for ambiguity. “I want everybody to be treated good” may sound simple, but when a government singles out one group for mistreatment, it becomes a clear moral position, rich in its simplicity.

Still, it would be a mistake to turn Dolly’s method into the Eleventh Commandment. The world also needs people who name perpetrators, expose systems, document abuses and make others uncomfortable. A human-rights advocate cannot answer persecution merely by asking everyone to love one another. Someone must identify the law, the police, the government and the harm, who is being injured, by whom and how.

The Epstein files. There, I said it.

For me, silence in many circumstances would be abandonment.

AND there is an ecosystem. Dolly occupied one vital place within it, one that also makes room for voices like mine. She was a bridge, and bridges require people willing to confront what lies on either side. Her example does not teach us to stop speaking in whatever way our place requires, nor that every injustice can be overcome through niceness.

Her example asks us to examine the spirit and intention with which we enter the struggle. Are we trying to effect change or merely to defeat and humiliate? Have we done something tangible, or only announced our position? Can we defend someone under attack without declaring everyone else permanently irredeemable? Does our advocacy arise from love or from the intoxicating pleasure of condemnation? Are we building something that will remain after the argument is over?

Dolly’s extraordinary achievement was not that she believed in nothing controversial. It was that people encountered her values before they encountered a label telling them whether they were supposed to reject those values. Her special sauce was conviction without self-righteousness; courage without belligerence; wealth without estrangement; glamour without pretension; and love translated into things people could actually hold, a song, a paycheck, a scholarship, a vaccine, a book addressed to their child.

What would it mean if the world were Dolly:

It would not be a world without disagreement or political struggle. It would not be a world in which we remained silent in the face of injustice. It would be a world in which we remembered that the purpose of advocacy is not simply to identify the wrong, but to make something more right. It would be a world in which we tried to leave people less hungry, less frightened, less lonely, less ignorant, less hateful than we found them.

It would be a world in which we understood the ecology and did our part. In a forest, every living thing performs a different function: trees shelter, roots hold the earth together, bees pollinate, and fungi nourish and connect. The forest flourishes because each occupies its place and does its work. We, too, have our place in the human ecosystem. Dolly tells us to recognize it, inhabit it authentically and use it.

Dolly Parton did not avoid politics by standing for nothing. She made her values harder to hate by turning them into love and made that love impossible to dismiss by turning it into action. We should take that lesson from her. But we should take another one too: love should determine how we enter the fray. It must never become our reason for staying out of it.

Dedicated to Dolly Parton - May her memory be a blessing.

Authors Note:

I have no doubt that disrupters and haters will seek to erase Dolly’s message and it would not surprise me that the scapegoat du jour will be the Jews. If you see any such event - do not breathe life into it. Ignore it. And let them rot in hell, while Dolly ascends.

Hasan Piker has said something appalling about American Jews. The essential reflection, however, is about more than what Piker said, as horrific as that is as a standalone issue. It is about who helped transform an antisemitic provocateur into an accepted Democratic political partner, and about insisting on an accounting, and more, from El-Sayed, who now hopes to walk away from that association with impunity and votes!

During his August 20 Twitch livestream, while displaying an image of Michigan State Senator Jeremy Moss, Piker invoked a barely veiled call to violence: “Eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

He went on to blame Jews themselves for the antisemitism directed against them, suggesting that Jews who closely associate their identities with Israel are “making antisemitism worse.” He described Israel as “Jewish ISIS.”

There is much to say about Piker’s words. But this essay is not primarily about Hasan Piker. He is the abscess that has finally ruptured, foul, poisonous and impossible to conceal. My concern is the political infection beneath it: who fed it, who protected it and who helped it spread.

This is about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Let us apply clarity to this part of El-Sayed’s electoral story: Hasan Piker did not arrive at this moment as an isolated internet crank spewing antisemitism from the political margins. He arrived carrying a newly minted legitimacy that Abdul El-Sayed helped confer upon him.

El-Sayed did not merely accept an unsolicited endorsement from some distant online antisemitic provocateur. He knew Piker’s reach. In his pursuit of votes, he welcomed Piker onto his campaign trail and placed him before college audiences to mobilize young progressives.

El-Sayed cannot divorce himself from the political bargain he made. He harnessed Piker’s considerable influence by campaigning alongside him, knowing that an El-Sayed victory would further elevate both Piker and the rhetoric he represents.

Not only did El-Sayed help bring Hasan Piker, and his antisemitism, into the orbit of Democratic electoral politics, but his win emboldened the Piker franchise! The more likely than not outcome a license to spew more hate against Jews and take it to the next level – in my opinion this could be construed as tantamount to a call for an intifada!

This was not a parasitic relationship; it was a symbiotic one. Each got the payday from the other. That is a done deal! When that happens one cannot separate from the other. Piker’s rhetoric has become impossible to sanitize, and El-Sayed’s attempt to put distance between them cannot be allowed to happen on our watch.

El-Sayed must now be held accountable. If Democratic leaders will not insist upon it, we still can. Even if it goes nowhere - we should not fail to see the opportunity to call for it - instead of sitting in the upset and pain - let us call for the change.

We Jews will not go quietly into the night. And there is only one way out for El-Sayed: on foot. We will not permit the helicoptered political evacuation he is attempting through “distancing.” We will insist that he take the more arduous path of accountability.

Before I describe that route – let us be clear -

You Cannot Pocket the Benefit and Disown the Consequence:

After Piker’s remarks, El-Sayed released a statement condemning antisemitism and insisting that no one speaks for his campaign except El-Sayed and his official spokespeople. At best, he has misread the moment. The issue is not whether Piker possessed an official campaign title. The issue is that El-Sayed voluntarily appeared with him, accepted his political support and helped present him to Democratic voters as someone whose voice belonged inside the party’s political coalition.

A candidate cannot borrow an ‘influencer’s’ celebrity and audience during a primary and then describe him as merely “a Twitch streamer” who happened to be there - when that association becomes a general-election liability. He did so while knowing exactly who and what Piker was.

Now El-Sayed is attempting to separate himself from Piker without confronting the political choices that brought them together. He wants the public to believe that Piker’s latest remarks simply happened somewhere outside his campaign, as though the relationship had no history and El-Sayed played no role in enhancing Piker’s Democratic legitimacy.

Indeed, El-Sayed did not write Piker’s words. He is not personally responsible for every statement Piker makes. But he is responsible for his own decision to embrace and politically elevate a man whose record was already available for anyone willing to examine it.

Let me remind readers that, before those campaign appearances, Piker had already expressed grotesque views about Jews, Zionism, Israel, Hamas and political violence. The latest spew did not suddenly appear on August 20. It was a buildup. What changed was that the rhetoric became explicit, and so personally directed toward a Jewish Michigan elected official.

Now this threatens El-Sayed’s own already at-risk political future. That is precisely why “distancing” will not work.

El-Sayed’s embrace of Piker is one aspect that has led to a movement for Democrats to support the Untenable:

El-Sayed’s embrace of Piker is one factor driving some Jewish Democrats toward the previously unthinkable: supporting Republican Mike Rogers simply to keep El-Sayed out of the Senate. Whether this movement arose organically among frightened Democrats or is being encouraged and exploited by Republican operatives remains an open question and MAGA is certainly seizing upon it. But the fear itself is real. Jewish voters may not be correct in perceiving El-Sayed as aligned with a politics that ultimately seeks the eradication of Jewish statehood, but that is the lived Jewish experience his rhetoric, associations and refusal to draw clear boundaries have produced. The jarring reality is that lifelong Democrats are contemplating risking continued MAGA control rather than electing El-Sayed and not only because they fear El-Sayed himself, but because his victory could give the green light for more candidates like him, with the same exclusionary litmus tests and political alliances, to follow.

What El-Sayed Now Owes Jewish Democrats is not pretense but bold introspection leading to a dramatic turn around:

Jewish Democrats are not asking El-Sayed for another generic statement declaring antisemitism a scourge. Oy - are we exhausted by those! We already know those statements are prepackaged and ready for the rinse-wash-repeat cycle. They condemn hatred in the abstract. That in this context of exploitation and abuse is mere lip service. We are not fooled.

El-Sayed owes Jewish Democrats something far more difficult: deep introspection, a full accounting and a public, transparent process.

- He needs to apologize directly and profusely to Jeremy Moss and to Michigan’s Jewish community, not simply for Piker’s remarks, which are Piker’s responsibility, but for El-Sayed’s own role in legitimizing Piker as a Democratic political voice

-He needs to say clearly that he was wrong to campaign with Hasan Piker.

- He needs to acknowledge that Piker’s record was already sufficiently disturbing and that political convenience caused him to disregard warnings from Jews and others who recognized the danger.

- He needs to state unequivocally that Piker will never again campaign with him, appear at his events, act as a surrogate or be used to promote his candidacy.

And then El-Sayed needs to do something larger.

He must use the very political capital he built on the progressive left to call upon that left to end the anti-Israel litmus test being imposed on Jewish Democrats. That would be genuine accountability.

El-Sayed benefited from that political culture. Now he must confront how his embrace of Piker helped legitimize a voice that has invoked violence against American Jews. He must help dismantle what he helped empower.

He should call on progressive candidates and organizations to reject rhetoric that transforms Zionism into an accusation against Jews. He should reject the idea that Jewish attachment to Israel makes American Jews responsible for every act of an Israeli government. He should insist that pro-Palestinian advocacy be conducted without collective blame, exclusion, terrorist apologism or threats disguised as predictions. He needs to say this loudly, clearly and unequivocally.

El-Sayed must call for the Litmus Test to End, and Specifically Make Clear:

- Supporting Palestinian rights cannot require Jews to renounce Zionism.

- Criticizing the Israeli government cannot require denying Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

- Developing policies to protect Palestinian civilians cannot depend upon excluding Jews who affirm their indigeneity or maintain emotional, familial, religious or national connections to Israel.

- Progressive leaders must reject slogans and rhetoric that demonize Jews, whether they come from the DSA, Democratic operatives or Democratic voters.

- Declaring an unadjudicated war to be “genocide” cannot become a prerequisite for participation in Democratic politics. That is neither policy nor productive discourse; it breeds hostility and forecloses serious debate.

The left may continue to debate Israeli policy. It may advocate for Palestinian statehood, humanitarian needs, restrictions on weapons or changes in American foreign policy. Jewish Democrats themselves hold widely differing views on all of those subjects. But policy disagreement is not the problem.

The problem is the political culture in which Jews must pass an ideological examination about Israel before their fear of antisemitism is considered legitimate. And El-Sayed can play a massive role in changing that – and it may just get him some votes. It may also cause some of those contemplating crossing over to Rogers to reconsider their position.

This Is El-Sayed’s Leadership Test:

This is El-Sayed’s opportunity to demonstrate what leadership actually means. Leadership is not quietly distancing oneself when an alliance becomes politically toxic. It is turning toward the harm, acknowledging one’s part in enabling it and using one’s influence to change the political culture that produced it.

This might begin to restore the trust of Jewish Democrats now contemplating the previously unthinkable: voting for Mike Rogers despite everything MAGA represents. More importantly, it would demonstrate that El-Sayed understands why those voters have reached this point, and that he intends to change the conditions that drove them there, while owning his part in it.

Piker’s invocation of violence has handed El-Sayed a defining choice. He can continue treating Piker as an inconvenient association from which he must tactically retreat, with the smile of yet another disingenuous politician, or he can confront the antisemitic political culture his alliance helped legitimize, as a decent human being seeking truth and reconciliation.

Regardless of what El-Sayed chooses, the Democratic Party must act too. It must separate itself forcefully from Piker and the politics he represents, establish unmistakable boundaries against antisemitic rhetoric, scrutinize whom its candidates elevate and recruit better candidates wherever those boundaries are rejected.

Whatever happens, we cannot permit Abdul El-Sayed to behave as though Hasan Piker wandered uninvited into his campaign. We will continue reminding him, whether his path leads to the Senate or, as the case may be, to political obscurity.

Let us call on hime to decide whether he has the courage to choose accountability and to lead his political allies away from the hatred he helped usher into Democratic campaign politics.

Dr. El-Sayed and anyone in a leadership role must understand that one does not repair the legitimization of antisemitism by distancing oneself from its consequences. It can only be repaired by admitting one’s part in empowering it and then leading the movement that ensures it is never politically rewarded again.

Yesterday’s Post:

Dear DNC Chair Ken Martin: Jewish Democrats Are Asking You to Lead

Dear Chair Martin,

I am writing to you not merely as an individual Jewish Democrat, but from a vantage point that I hope the Democratic National Committee will take seriously…..

…… I am not asking Democrats to become less progressive - nor anything different. I am not asking for any special treatment. I am asking Democratic leadership to lead more decisively - boldly- according to the values that define our Party and those that we share. Poor leadership leaves vacuums, and vacuums are filled by the loudest voices, the best-organized factions and, eventually, bad actors acting in bad faith assume the lead. That weakens a party and can cause it, almost without noticing, to abandon the very principles that made people loyal to it in the first place.

Read more here

My August 8th Post following the primary win by El-Sayed

DEAR DEMOCRATIC PARTY - HEAR US - THE JEWS

“Dear Democratic Party,

I know the dangers of a shallow-end dive. One can break a neck—and paralysis can follow. Let me preface this by saying that I have so much more to share than this shallow dive. I am aware of the risks in speaking before every thought is fully developed. Perhaps there will be time for the deep dive later—if we survive. For now, just this.

If you want Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to win the general election, listen. Just listen…..

Read more here.

Yes, the letter reflects deep concern, anger, and the very real alienation many Jewish Democrats are experiencing. That said, I write it precisely because I am a loyal Democrat who cares profoundly about this party and what it represents. I believe Chair Ken Martin, the DNC and Democrats generally are who they say they are: People committed to inclusion, civil rights, LGBTQI+ equality, racial justice, immigrant communities, Muslims, Jews and every constituency that should find a political home here. My complaint is not that Democrats do not care about Jews.

My complaint is that leadership has too often failed to demonstrate that care with sufficient clarity, courage and immediacy when it matters most.

There will always be people within a large political coalition who scapegoat, impose ideological litmus tests, traffic in antisemitism, exploit for their own agendas, or demand that someone else surrender part of their identity as the price of belonging. They may sometimes be the loudest or most organized voices in the room. That does not make it acceptable.

That makes leadership more important, not less. Basic leadership means drawing lines before they are crossed; resisting the temptation to exchange principle for political expediency; and refusing to sacrifice justice, accuracy or inclusion because confronting a faction, an activist organization or even a bloc of voters may carry a political cost. Courage sometimes means being willing to lose a vote, even many votes, rather than allow the values integral to a coalition to become negotiable.

That is the spirit in which I sent this letter to Chair Martin, which I know he received today.

I am not asking Democrats to become less progressive - nor anything different. I am not asking for any special treatment. I am asking Democratic leadership to lead more decisively - boldly- according to the values that define our Party and those that we share. Poor leadership leaves vacuums, and vacuums are filled by the loudest voices, the best-organized factions and, eventually, bad actors acting in bad faith assume the lead. That weakens a party and can cause it, almost without noticing, to abandon the very principles that made people loyal to it in the first place.

My hope is that those who read this will make their voices heard, insist upon the leadership our loyalty has earned and our values demand, and fight for our place in this party rather than capitulate to those who would push us from it.

Here is the letter

Melanie Nathan
A Democrat
commissionermnathan@gmail.com

DNC CHAIR KEN MARTIN
Per E-Mail Delivery

August 20, 2026.

Dear Chair Martin,

I am writing to you not merely as an individual Jewish Democrat, but from a vantage point that I hope the Democratic National Committee will take seriously:

I am a co-founder and co-administrator of JWORI, formerly Jewish Women for Kamala Harris, a national community of more than 30,000 Jewish women. We span a wide spectrum of Jewish religious observance, geography, age, background, and intersecting identities. We are not ideologically monolithic. Many of us identify as Progressives and many as Progressive Zionists. What unites us politically is that we are Democrats, deeply alarmed by MAGA and committed to protecting democracy, civil rights, reproductive freedom, LGBTQI+ equality, immigrant communities and the other values we have long understood the Democratic Party to represent.

For decades, Jewish Americans, and Jewish women in particular, have been among the Democratic Party’s most dependable voters, donors, organizers, volunteers and advocates. We have marched, knocked on doors, raised money, made calls, hosted events, defended Democratic candidates around dinner tables and on social media, and stood with other communities when their civil rights were under attack. We have fought for Democratic victories even when we disagreed with individual candidates or policies because we believed in the larger coalition and the values holding it together.

In 2024, when democracy itself seemed to many of us to be on the ballot, Jewish women showed up overwhelmingly for VP. Kamala Harris. Our group partnered with a Jewish Democratic organization in a virtual event that raised significant campaign funding for the Kamala Harris campaign. According to the CNN/Edison exit poll, 88 percent of Jewish women voted for her, placing Jewish women among the most strongly Democratic constituencies in the country, alongside Black women. When a constituency that impactful and that loyal begins telling you it feels politically homeless, the appropriate response is not to question its loyalty. It is to ask what has happened to make that loyalty so difficult to sustain.

Since October 07, 2023, something profoundly startling is happening among Jewish Democrats, and I am not convinced the leadership of our party understands its depth or how to lead us through it.

If I attempted to catalogue every source of alienation Jewish Democrats are experiencing right now, this letter would become a thesis. There are political litmus tests surrounding Israel and Zionism; rhetoric that many Jews experience not merely as criticism of Israeli policy but as hostility toward Jewish collective identity; accusations and libels repeated with little concern for their accuracy; and increasing exclusion from progressive spaces many of us once led, and many regarded as our natural political home, including those as essential allies in the fight against MAGA.

The cumulative effect is enormous.

I hear from lifelong Democrats who say they have left or are considering leaving the party. Others say they will remain Democrats but will no longer contribute financially as they once did. Still others intend to vote Democratic selectively rather than reflexively. Michigan has become an especially troubling case study. Following Abdul El-Sayed’s extraordinarily narrow primary victory, Jewish Democrats, leaders and donors have publicly discussed voting for Republican Mike Rogers, leaving the Senate line blank, or withholding the support they would ordinarily give a Democratic nominee.

What is so significantly jarring is that Democrats who have spent their adult lives fighting Republicans are now seriously considering crossing party lines because they believe their own party no longer understands what threatens them.

When a Jewish voter hears a Democratic candidate refuse to condemn language such as “Globalize the Intifada,” that voter is not hearing an academic discussion about Palestinian liberation. That voter is hearing the invocation of a period remembered for suicide bombings, murdered civilians and attacks on Jews. Whatever a politician intends by refusing to condemn such language, Democratic leadership needs to understand what many Jewish voters experience is fear.

The same is true when political leaders associate comfortably with people who celebrated October 7, described it as legitimate “resistance,” or trafficked in rhetoric that Jews experience as celebrating or rationalizing violence against them.

Yes, antisemitism is rising across the political spectrum. We know perfectly well that the threat exists on the right, and nobody needs to explain MAGA’s extremists to Jewish Democrats who have spent years opposing them.

But that does not absolve our own party. Increasingly, Jewish Democrats feel that Democratic leaders speak solemnly about antisemitism in prepared statements while tolerating rhetoric and associations within our own coalition that would never be treated so casually if another minority community were the target.

Condemning antisemitism after the fact is not enough. Leadership means understanding the red lines, and establishing boundaries before the damage is done. We do not see that happening.

And that brings me to one word that has become emblematic of the problem:

“Genocide.”

People are absolutely entitled to believe that Israel has committed genocide. The Justices of the ICJ have ruled that the Palestinians have a “plausible right.” But they have not ruled that genocide is a plausible outcome in the case before it. They have made that clear. Scholars may argue it. Activists may allege it. Journalists may investigate it. Citizens may protest about it. Israelis themselves may debate it. None of that is my objection.

My objection is the conversion of an allegation of the gravest crime in international law into an established political fact before the tribunal charged with adjudicating the case has adjudicated it.

The International Court of Justice has not issued a final judgment finding that Israel committed genocide. The South Africa v. Israel case remains underway. Yet Democratic politicians increasingly state “Israel committed genocide“ or “the genocide in Gaza“ as though a legal judgment already exists.

That distinction matters enormously to me. As a former human rights lawyer, and the director of a global human rights organization, I have spent my professional life around law, human rights and the consequences of accusations of grave wrongdoing. Justice requires evidence, counter-evidence, legal standards, jurisdiction, procedure and adjudication. We would never permit a prosecutor’s allegation to become a murder conviction simply because enough respected people repeated it. Genocide should not receive a lesser standard of justice because the accused state is Israel. Belief is not judgment. Repetition is not proof. And political consensus is not adjudication.

And yet Rep. Ro Khanna, a prominent Democratic congressman with a significant national platform, has repeatedly described Israel’s conduct as genocide as an established fact. That is neither truthful and nor is it responsible.

A member of Congress carries authority. Words spoken on national television, at Democratic gatherings and through DNC platforms carry institutional weight. The public reasonably assumes that people wielding that authority understand the distinction between an accusation and an adjudicated legal conclusion. What if the ICJ rendered a not guilty verdict. And all the while Democratic members of Congress and a silent DNC had declared it fact! It ultimately reflects on the DNC!

Which brings me directly to your leadership.

I am informed about the live-streamed DNC meeting at which Rep. Khanna launched into accusations of genocide.* The reaction in the room - including members walking out - speaks volumes. It was a visceral illustration of exactly the exclusion, discomfort and growing sense of political homelessness I am describing.

What troubled me almost as much as what Rep. Khanna said was what Democratic leadership did not say. That moment reminded me of an extraordinary opportunity for courageous leadership such as when presidential candidate McCain stood up for presidential candidate Obama.

You are the Chair. There was an opportunity in that moment to say something both principled and remarkably simple:

Democrats may vigorously debate Israeli policy and the conduct of this war. They may condemn civilian suffering and demand accountability. But allegations of genocide remain before the International Court of Justice, and the Democratic Party does not present an un-adjudicated legal allegation as though a court has already rendered judgment.

That would not have censored Ro Khanna. It would not have silenced Palestinians. It would not have endorsed Netanyahu. It would simply have defended accuracy, due process and the rule of law.

You did not do it.

And I find myself asking a question I suspect many Jewish Democrats are asking in different forms:

Why?

Were you afraid of the political consequences of challenging him? Did you not have the tools or information necessary to respond in the moment? Did you believe the statement was acceptable? Or did you underestimate how profoundly such moments are being experienced by Jewish Democrats watching their own party?

I worry that Democrats have waited too long to alter the current paradigm. It may already be difficult to recover some of what has been lost before these midterms.

I am also concerned that extremist politics and ideological purity tests on Israel risk not only alienating Jewish Democrats, but costing the party moderates, independents, and others who otherwise share its domestic agenda.

We know what the Republican Party has become. That is precisely why it should alarm you that Democrats who understand that danger are nevertheless contemplating voting Republican.

The answer cannot simply be to tell frightened Jewish Democrats that Republicans are worse. I do not believe the answer is for the Democratic Party to abandon progressivism. Quite the opposite. There is an enormous opportunity here.

The DNC possesses organizing capacity, political talent, communications expertise and candidate-development machinery on a scale that activist organizations can only dream of.

Find and cultivate compelling young Democratic leaders who can speak passionately about economic justice, healthcare, reproductive freedom, racial justice, LGBTQI+ equality, climate, immigration, workers’ rights and human rights, without requiring them to adopt an anti-Israel worldview as the entrance fee to progressive politics. You can make that stand. Develop candidates with every ounce of the energy, charisma and conviction that attracts young people to DSA-backed candidates, but who understand that progressive politics should not include litmus tests designed for Jews.

And understand what is happening on campuses.

I recently wrote about the extraordinary sophistication of the political machinery influencing young students around Israel and Zionism. Students arrive on campus and encounter an already assembled vocabulary - genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, resistance, intifada - reinforced through organizations with agendas, demonstrations, social-media ecosystems and institutions that lend those ideas an appearance of settled moral authority.

My response is not to blame students. It is to recognize successful political organizing when I see it.

If movements hostile to Israel can build an apparatus capable of persuading, recruiting and organizing an entire generation, then the Democratic Party can certainly build an equally sophisticated apparatus for a genuinely inclusive progressivism, one capable of attracting young voters without requiring hostility toward Israel or alienating American Jews.

I am asking for a plan.

First, hear Jewish Democrats directly. Engage beyond the established institutional voices. Meet with grassroots Jewish Democrats, the women, organizers, donors, activists, students and longtime party loyalists who are telling you that something has changed. Hear what we are experiencing before more of us quietly withdraw our money, our labor, our enthusiasm, or ultimately our votes.

Second, prepare the party for the political season ahead. Do not wait for the next convention, DNC meeting, candidate forum or televised appearance to discover in real time that someone has crossed a line. Decide now what the Democratic Party regards as legitimate policy disagreement and what requires immediate challenge. Equip chairs, moderators, surrogates and party leaders with the facts and language to respond when political violence is romanticized, antisemitic tropes appear, Jews are subjected to ideological loyalty tests, or unresolved allegations are presented from Democratic platforms as established fact.

Third, develop a genuine strategy for political belonging. Recruit, cultivate and support progressive candidates who can energize young voters without making hostility to Israel, Zionism or Jewish collective identity - the price of admission. The Democratic Party should be capable of advancing Palestinian dignity and rights while simultaneously making unmistakably clear that Jewish dignity, safety and self-determination belong inside the same progressive framework.

Fourth, set standards and enforce them consistently. Leadership cannot mean discovering a boundary only after somebody has crossed it. The party needs to know in advance what it will defend, what it will challenge, and what it will not normalize simply because confronting it may be politically uncomfortable.

And finally, come to the grassroots before the grassroots give up on coming to you.

Please listen to us. Engage us. Build the plan. Prepare your leadership before the next transgression rather than apologizing after it. Develop candidates who can unite rather than fracture the coalition. And make unmistakably clear that Jewish Democrats do not have to surrender any essential part of ourselves in order to remain at home in the Democratic Party.

The writing is on the wall. The question is whether Democratic leadership will read it in time. I am asking you to lead before this becomes a postmortem.

Many thanks for your kind attention to this.

Sincerely,

Melanie Nathan
Co-Founder and Co-Administrator, JWORI
Formerly Jewish Women for Kamala Harris
cc. Dr. Carol Goldman , Co-Founder JWORI

I am linking three essays because they elaborate on what cannot possibly fit into this letter:

“Dear Democratic Party” — on what the Michigan Senate race and Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy reveal about the growing alienation of Jewish Democrats. https://substack.com/@melnathan/p-210078836

Genocide: The word genocide was not incidental to the political vocabulary surrounding his candidacy. It carried enormous moral force, was easily repeated, readily amplified, and increasingly functioned as a politically expedient slogan.
https://substack.com/@melnathan/p-211333159

My back-to-school essay on Jewish Voice for Peace and campus organizing — not merely as a critique of one organization, but as a case study in how effectively political narratives are being constructed and delivered to young people. https://substack.com/@melnathan/p-211867855

*Meeting took place Aug 2026.

Both Wiener and Chan are progressive San Francisco Democrats, and on many domestic priorities they overlap substantially. Both support expanded health coverage, immigrant protections and affordable housing, and both have opposed further U.S. military spending for Israel.

Their differences are often more about emphasis and governing style: Wiener has built a reputation as a prolific state legislator, especially on housing production and LGBTQ rights, while Chan emphasizes labor, neighborhood politics, affordable housing, and more progressive taxation. In the 2026 congressional race, Chan has positioned herself more explicitly against corporate influence, while Wiener often argues for legislative pragmatism and policies he believes can actually pass. Over the years, some members of San Francisco’s LGBTQI+ community have criticized Wiener for what they view as overly close ties to corporate interests.

On Israel, however, the distinction is more revealing than the usual left-versus-moderate shorthand. Wiener’s current campaign platform is explicit: he strongly supports Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland, supports a Palestinian state alongside it, opposes Hamas and the global BDS movement, and describes a two-state solution as the only viable path. Those positions fit comfortably within what was ordinarily called liberal Zionism. Now I note the post Oct-07 liberal Zionism sentiment, which is not yet clear, as it evolves in real time- to complicate this further. So, based on his own stated views, describing Wiener as a Zionist is fair if the term is being used in its basic sense: support for continued Jewish national self-determination in Israel alongside Palestinian self-determination.

Yet Wiener also now, recently – amidst campaign pressure - states unequivocally that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. That is important because of how he arrived there. At a January 2026 candidate forum, Connie Chan and Saikat Chakrabarti immediately answered “yes” when asked in a lightning round whether Israel was committing genocide. Wiener declined to reduce the question to a yes-or-no response and was met with anger and heckling. Days later, he changed position publicly, saying: “I do believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.”

By March, all three leading candidates were using the genocide characterization and opposing future U.S. military spending for Israel.

For anyone concerned about political litmus tests, Wiener’s sequence is significant. He initially resisted a binary demand on an exceptionally grave legal accusation, then adopted the required formulation after political pressure. That does not tell us his belief is insincere; he has explained his reasoning at length. But it does show how the word itself functioned in the campaign as a test of progressive acceptability.

Even after passing that test, Wiener continued to face hostility from activists because (or so they said) - he remained openly supportive of Israel’s continued existence. In June, he was harassed in a much publicized incident - at San Francisco’s Trans March, where one person reportedly invoked his alleged “Israeli handlers” and another told him he had “stopped being queer” once he supported Israel.

Some characterized the incident as antisemitic, including me in my writings.

Chan condemned the harassment.

Chan is more difficult to categorize on Zionism. The evidence reviewed establishes that she says Israel committed genocide and opposes U.S. offensive military support. But it also shows that she has proposed pairing humanitarian aid to Gaza with U.S. funding for Israeli defensive systems.

That is not, by itself, an anti-Zionist position. What remains missing from the public record reviewed for this comparison is an equally explicit statement from Chan answering the questions Wiener has answered directly:

The Questions Connie Chan Still Needs to Answer

Does Israel have the right to continue to exist as a Jewish state or homeland?
Does she support two states for two peoples?
Does she oppose the global BDS movement?
Does she believe Hamas can have any legitimate role in a future Palestinian government?

Wiener has answered these questions. Chan, based on the public record I have been able to establish, has not.

Until those questions are answered, calling Chan anti-Zionist would go beyond the available evidence.

And that absence of clarity is politically significant. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has nevertheless endorsed Chan. The question for Jewish Democratic voters is not whether Pelosi’s endorsement establishes Chan’s position - it plainly does not - but why these foundational questions about Israel and Jewish self-determination have apparently not been required of her in a race where Gaza has already become a political litmus test.

This produces an unusual contest. On Gaza, the candidates are now close: both use the word genocide and both oppose further U.S. offensive military aid. On the underlying question of Jewish national self-determination, Wiener’s position is explicit and affirmative; Chan’s is less clearly defined in the sources reviewed.

For Jewish Democratic voters, that distinction may matter more than the familiar progressive labels attached to the candidates. The race is also useful as a case study in a larger Democratic debate: whether support for Palestinian rights and severe criticism of Israeli government conduct can coexist with an unequivocal commitment to Israel’s continued existence, and whether candidates will be permitted to reach those positions without first passing a prescribed vocabulary test.

This situation cries out for DNC leadership: we have yet to see where the party will draw the line when politicians use debate stages, DNC gatherings, and campaign platforms to present contested allegations as settled fact: Genocide has not been adjudicated in the Israel-Gaza case, yet politicians increasingly state it as fact in a political environment where use of the term has itself become a test of progressive acceptability. That conflation of allegation, political belief and adjudicated fact is unacceptable, and it is getting out of hand.

Bottom line: Wiener’s Zionism is explicit; Chan’s underlying position on Israel’s continued character and existence is not sufficiently documented here to label her anti-Zionist. On Gaza, however, both candidates now occupy substantially similar ground. That distinction should not be obscured.

Author’s Note: There is no Republican running against Wiener and Chan in the November general election. California uses a top-two primary system, regardless of party. In the June 2, 2026 primary for Nancy Pelosi’s CA-11 seat, Scott Wiener finished first with 40.7% and Connie Chan second with 29.7%, so both Democrats advanced to the November 3 general election.

Sources and notes

• Scott Wiener campaign, “Foreign Policy / Israel & Palestine”: source

• KQED, Jan. 12, 2026, “Scott Wiener Pivots … ‘Israel Has Committed Genocide in Gaza’”: source

• KQED, Mar. 31, 2026, debate coverage: taxes, transit and Israel: source

• KQED, Jan. 2026, first congressional candidate debate: source

• JTA, June 1, 2026, California primaries and Jewish issues: source

• KQED, June 3, 2026, primary results and candidate policy overlap: source

• San Francisco Standard opinion, July 4, 2026, Trans March incident: source

My essay on Genocide: https://substack.com/@melnathan/p-211333159

BE PROGRESSIVE. BE COMPASSIONATE. BE HARD TO MANIPULATE.

A short guide to thinking critically about Israel, Palestine, and seeking clarity on organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace

Progressive values are not only about compassion for the vulnerable. They also require equality, fairness, due process, intellectual honesty, anti-discrimination, consistency, human dignity, and the willingness to question power, including the power of our own movements.

Justice stops being justice when it is applied selectively: when one people’s nationalism is interrogated but another’s is romanticized; when one side’s suffering is centered while another’s is minimized; or when allegations are treated as established facts because they serve a preferred political narrative. Inquiry is therefore a progressive value. It is how we test whether our principles are actually universal rather than ideological.

Applied to these seven steps, that means: define before labeling; investigate before repeating; examine the source rather than trusting its identity; seek the missing history; test competing claims against evidence; apply the same moral standards to Israelis, Palestinians, Jews and everyone else; and resist pressure to adopt a cause before doing the intellectual work. The purpose is not to predetermine the conclusion. It is to insist that the method by which we reach the conclusion reflects the very progressive values we claim to defend.

You came to university to learn how to think - not what to think.

When you are surrounded by political language, moral certainty, chants, viral posts, professors, influencers and organizations telling you what the conflict means, do something genuinely progressive:

THINK BEFORE YOU JOIN. QUESTION BEFORE YOU REPEAT.

Here are the 7 steps:

1. STOP. ASK. INVESTIGATE.

When you hear:

GENOCIDE.
APARTHEID.
SETTLER COLONIALISM.
ETHNIC CLEANSING.
RESISTANCE.
LIBERATION.
ZIONISM.

Don’t simply absorb the vocabulary.

Ask:

What does this term mean? Who is using it? What evidence supports it? What evidence complicates it?

Popularity is not evidence. A chant is not proof. Neither is a flyer. An encampment and flags may popularize it. Popularity and repetition do not turn an allegation into a fact. Modern political organizing is sophisticated. It comes through TikTok, Instagram, encampments, teach-ins, student organizations, professors, influencers and algorithms.

The danger is not that students cannot think. The danger is that constant repetition can make it feel as though the thinking has already been done.

2. LOOK BEYOND THE NAME.

Consider the name: JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE. It sounds reassuring. Jewish. Voice. Peace. But a name tells you nothing about whether you agree with the organization’s actual politics, or whether it should be treated as representative of Jewish opinion, particularly when some of its core positions may stand in direct opposition to those held by a large majority of Jews. Perhaps there is controversy that should be assessed for yourself.

So ask:

What does this organization actually believe? What political outcome does it seek? Whom does it claim to speak for? How representative is it? What does it oppose? What does it leave out? What political outcome does it seek? What does it oppose? What does it leave out?

JVP openly identifies itself as anti-Zionist. That is not merely criticism of Netanyahu, settlements, or Israeli military policy. It rejects Zionism itself and does not affirm Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. For Jews who understand Zionism as Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland, that is not simply a disagreement over Israeli policy — it challenges the political framework through which they understand Jewish collective security and self-determination.

Whatever conclusion you ultimately reach, understand that distinction first. Read the platform. Not the label.

3. DON’T LET IDENTITY BECOME A PERMISSION SLIP.

A Jewish organization does not speak for all Jews. For a non-Jewish progressive, the words Jewish Voice can suggest: “Jews themselves say this, so it cannot be antisemitic.” For a Jewish student, they can suggest: “If this Jewish organization says it, I can safely accept the argument.” Neither is critical thinking. Some Jews are anti-Zionists. Some are non-Zionists. Many are Zionists. Jews disagree profoundly about Israel, war, settlements, Palestinian statehood and Israeli governments.

Jewish identity does not prove a political argument. An organization such as JVP, particularly when its position differs from that held by many or most Jews, should never function as your permission slip to stop asking questions.

4. DEFINE THE WORD BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT

Political language can carry enormous emotional force. That makes precision more important. If someone says genocide, ask what genocide legally means. If someone says apartheid, ask what constitutes apartheid. If someone says settler colonialism, ask whether that framework accounts for Jewish history, persecution, migration, indigeneity and historical connection to the land.

Then ask: IS THIS A FACT - OR AN ARGUMENT?

A claim does not become proven because:

• thousands of people chant it;

• a professor endorses it;

• an influencer repeats it;

• a student organization puts it on a poster;

• or an organization purporting to represent Jews says it.

Separate slogans from evidence. Separate advocacy from scholarship. Separate legal allegations from legal findings.

5. ASK WHAT AM I NOT BEING TOLD?

If you have learned one narrative, look deliberately for the other.

Have you studied:

• Jewish history in the land?

• Palestinian history ?

• Zionism and its meaning?

• Palestinian nationalism?

• the 1947 UN partition proposal?

• the wars of 1948 and 1967?

• Jewish Expulsion from Arab and Muslim countries?

• The Pogroms | The Holocaust

• Palestinian refugees?

• Hamas’s ideology and its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza

• October 7?

• The 300-page report titled Silenced No More was published in May 2026 by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children?

• Israeli politics and its deep internal divisions?

• peace negotiations and why they failed?

• international humanitarian law?

• Apartheid in South Africa?

• Adjudicating Genocide in the ICJ - trials and procedures?

• Israeli society?

You do not need to reach a particular conclusion. But you should know what evidence exists before you reach one. If you have been given only one narrative, you have not yet been educated about the conflict. You have been given an argument about it.

6. APPLY YOUR PROGRESSIVE VALUES CONSISTENTLY.

You can support Palestinian freedom and dignity. You can condemn Palestinian civilian suffering. You can fiercely criticize Israeli governments. You can oppose settlements. You can support Palestinian statehood. You can protest.

AND YOU CAN STILL ASK:

Do Jews also have a right to collective self-determination?

Why is Palestinian nationalism described as liberation while Jewish nationalism may be described automatically as supremacy?

Can October 7 be described as “resistance” without examining what was done to civilians?

If October 7 is described as legitimate “resistance,” ask the harder question: can deliberate atrocities against civilians - murder, rape, mutilation, hostage-taking and the killing of children, ever become an acceptable model of “resistance”? And if you accept the principle once, are you prepared to accept its repetition consistently in every instance of resistance?

Can antisemitism exist inside progressive movements?

Are women, LGBTQI+ people, religious minorities and political dissidents entitled to progressive concern when their oppressors are not Western?

Are you applying the same moral standards to everyone?

These are not right-wing questions.

THEY ARE PROGRESSIVE QUESTIONS.

Progressivism without consistency becomes ideology.

7. REFUSE TO PICK A CAUSE BEFORE YOU’VE DONE THE HOMEWORK.

University should make you harder to manipulate — not easier to recruit.

So: Ask for primary sources. Read Palestinian scholars. Read Israeli scholars. Read Zionists. Read anti-Zionists. Read historians who disagree with one another. Look for the counterargument. Read beyond social media.

And when somebody tells you:

“THERE IS NOTHING TO DEBATE.”

START READING.

You are allowed to care about Palestinians and Israelis. You are allowed to condemn injustice without accepting somebody else’s entire ideological package. You are allowed to say: I don’t know enough yet.

Empathy is not surrender. Solidarity is not obedience. Activism is not scholarship. Identity is not evidence. A chant is not an argument. And peace written into an organization’s name does not tell you what political outcome it seeks.

BE DIFFICULT TO RECRUIT. BE WILLING TO CHANGE YOUR MIND. BE WILLING TO STAND ALONE. DEMAND EVIDENCE.PROTECT COMPLEXITY.

THINK

SCIENTIA ET VERITAS

That may be the most progressive thing you do on campus this year.

WANT THE DEEPER DIVE? More information on Jewish Voice for Peace?
Read: College Students, A Warning: Prepare for the Great Campus Con - Melanie Nathan Melnathan.Substack.com, here.

Compiled by Melanie Nathan
Writer • Speaker • Lawyer • Human Rights Advocate • Country Conditions Expert
Executive Director, African Human Rights Coalition.
Melnathan.Substack.com

And then the vocabulary starts arriving, not necessarily in a textbook, and not always as an argument you are invited to interrogate. It is on the signs taped to walls and carried across the quad. It is in chants at rallies. It is projected onto lecture-hall screens. It appears in student-group posts, teach-ins, encampments, speaker events, Instagram slides, petitions, flyers pushed into your hand on the way to class: Settler colonialism. Apartheid. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Zionist supremacy. Resistance. Liberation.

These words surround you. Before you have had much opportunity to examine them. They seem not to arrive as contested claims. You are expected to understand, accept at face value, and perhaps eventually to repeat.

These aren’t small words. Each carries history, moral judgment and, in some instances, extraordinarily consequential legal meaning. But in the atmosphere of repetition, that can cease to matter. There is little inquiry, little testing of the proposition, little critical examination of what the words actually mean. They are being said everywhere — by the loudest voices, the most visible groups, the speakers drawing the crowds, the students who seem to set the moral temperature of the campus. And repetition begins to perform the work of proof. The words are no longer presented as claims to be examined. They simply are.

You might initially hesitate before repeating them. Then you see the name of one of the organizations standing behind them:

JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE.

Jewish. Voice. Peace.

And something important has just happened before you have examined a single argument. The name has done what is left that may need persuading….

Surely, you might reasonably think, if a Jewish organization says Zionism is racist, Israel is an apartheid state and the war in Gaza is genocide, these cannot be fringe propositions hostile to Jews. These are Jews saying it. And not merely Jews. Its Jewish with a voice for peace.

That is the extraordinary political power of the JVP brand. The name does not simply identify the organization. It confers legitimacy upon the language surrounding it.

And that is why Americans, particularly parents, students, universities, journalists and progressive political organizations, should know considerably more about what lies behind those three extraordinarily effective words.

Start With What JVP Says About Itself

There is no need to invent a hidden agenda. Jewish Voice for Peace tells us quite openly what it believes. It is anti-Zionist. It is one of the first admissions you find on its website. When presented as integral to the brand and in brag format – it must be right! Right?

JVP is not merely anti-Netanyahu. It is not merely opposed to settlements or to particular Israeli policies. JVP declares its opposition to Zionism itself. It rejects the very framework through which Jews understand their right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland, and it embraces a settler-colonial framing of Israel that recasts Jewish return not as indigeneity or national restoration, but as oppression. And while JVP speaks unequivocally of Palestinian liberation, Palestinian return and Palestinian freedom, you will search its stated vision in vain for an equally unequivocal affirmation that Israel should continue to exist alongside a Palestinian state as the national home of the Jewish people. Instead, when asked about the ultimate political arrangement, JVP says it is not its place to prescribe the outcome, preferring to advocate a “Judaism beyond Zionism.” That is a profound distinction for the nineteen-year-old who thought she was encountering simply a Jewish voice for peace.

That distinction becomes exceedingly important on a college campus. That proposition is what that 19-year-old will absorb in the name of PEACE and ending a WAR!

A student hears Jewish Voice for Peace and may reasonably imagine an organization occupying the traditional peace-camp position: two peoples, two national movements, compromise, coexistence, opposition to extremists on both sides. But that is not an accurate description of JVP’s political project.

JVP describes itself today as the world’s largest Jewish organization “supporting Palestine” and offers itself as a political home for Jews on the left.

It has approximately 44 Rabbis on its Rabbinical advisory council, all seemingly lending a hand in validation to the Jewish part. At least until July 26, 2026, it named those rabbis on its website. I took a screenshot and posted it on an article I wrote here last month. It seems that at the time of writing this, JVP has taken down the names of the people in the Rabbinical Council. I am wondering if it has something to do with my article where I exposed the JVP direct support of convicted terrorist, Rasmeah Odeh. (You will see the link at the end of this essay. )

While people are perfectly entitled to hold those beliefs, students are equally entitled to know what they are being recruited into.

Now Put Yourself Back on Campus

This is where the branding becomes consequential. Suppose another organization tells a Jewish freshman: Zionism is racism. She may recoil. Suppose she is told: Israel is a settler-colonial state. She may wonder whether that erases Jewish history and Jewish indigeneity. Suppose someone tells her: Israel is committing genocide. She may wonder whether that is an established legal judgment or an accusation being advanced as political fact. But now append four words: Jewish Voice for Peace says so.

The psychological equation changes. The organization’s Jewish identity becomes a kind of permission structure. It tells the non-Jewish student: You are not being antisemitic. Jews agree with you. It tells the progressive student: This position has already passed a Jewish moral test. And perhaps most importantly, it tells the uncertain Jewish student: You don’t have to choose between your progressive identity and your Jewish identity. Here are Jews telling you that rejecting Zionism is the more authentically just Jewish choice.

That is enormously powerful political organizing. And it deserves far more scrutiny than the organization’s congenial name ordinarily receives.

Then Came October 7

And here the chronology becomes impossible for me to ignore. On October 7, 2023, Palestinian Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, brutally massacred civilians, burned people alive, raped, mutilated, committed unspeakable savage atrocities, and then kidnapped hostages into Gaza, while proudly publishing their cruelty.

Before Israel’s subsequent military campaign had unfolded, before the arguments over proportionality, civilian casualties, humanitarian access, genocide that would consume the following months, JVP’s political apparatus was already moving.

• On the evening of October 7, JVP activists in New York joined a march to Senator Chuck Schumer’s home demanding an end to U.S. military funding for Israel.

• By October 8, JVP voices were already publicly placing what had happened within a narrative of Palestinian oppression and Israeli responsibility.

• By October 9, JVP Executive Director Stefanie Fox was explaining publicly that the violence had to be understood through what she described as 75 years of Israeli dispossession, discrimination and state violence.

JVP’s own later account of this period says that in the days following October 7, “we could see what was coming, and we sprang into action together.”

Read that sentence again. They sprang into action.

That does not prove some sinister conspiracy. Nor do I need one. Something much more consequential was happening in plain sight. An existing ideological movement had the organization, vocabulary, activist networks and Jewish imprimatur necessary to interpret an event of almost unimaginable brutality virtually as it occurred.

And that interpretation was about to travel onto American campuses.

The Money Changed Too

Then something else happened. JVP became dramatically larger financially. Its publicly filed financial records show approximately $3.3 million in revenue in FY2023. The following fiscal year: approximately $11 million. What NGO gets to do that!

That is more than triple the previous year’s revenue. That fact demands examination, not conspiracy.

A fiscal-year return does not allow us simply to declare that $7.7 million suddenly materialized on October 8. It would be irresponsible to say so without tracing the timing and sources of contributions. JVP itself says that more than 85 percent of its annual budget comes from its members and individual supporters. Fine. Then let’s look.

Who funded the extraordinary expansion? When did the donations arrive? How much was institutional and how much individual? Which foundations contributed? How much of the growth occurred after October 7? And how was that money subsequently deployed? What was it spent on?

Those are not smear questions. They are the ordinary questions we should ask whenever a political advocacy organization experiences explosive growth while simultaneously becoming enormously influential in a national movement.

Especially when that organization is helping shape what students believe.

The Campus Expansion Was Real

JVP itself boasts about what followed. It says that as campus encampments spread across more than 100 universities, JVP student chapters participated in at least 47 of them. The organization says it added 30 new student chapters, expanded its campus organizing program, hired additional campus-organizing staff and eventually reached 50 campus chapters. Not exactly an organic grassroots expansion and on the back of October 07!

This is the part of the story I think many American Jewish parents have failed to understand.

Their children are not necessarily arriving at university and independently conducting scholarly investigations into Zionism, the 1948 war, the 1967 war, Palestinian nationalism, Hamas, international humanitarian law, and the competing historical narratives of two peoples.

They are walking into an already constructed political vocabulary, and an organization with a motive. And one of the organizations helping validate that vocabulary has the word Jewish stamped across its forehead.

That is the CON!

JVP provides a Jewish permission slip for a political movement overwhelmingly directed against the Jewish state.

Look Behind the Name

Then if we thought this was ominous, let us look at whom JVP has been prepared to elevate.

Look at its decision to honor Palestinian convicted terrorist, dubbed activist, Rasmea Odeh, despite her Israeli military-court conviction in connection with the 1969 bombing in a Jerusalem, super market just before Shabbos, that killed Eddie Joffe and Leon Kanner, college students, from South Africa and Uruguay, in their early twenties. Injuring many others.

Look at JVP’s relationships within the broader Palestinian-solidarity infrastructure. Look at Hatem Bazian, whom JVP itself acknowledges as a supporter: founder of American Muslims for Palestine and a central figure in the development of Students for Justice in Palestine. Then consider a revealing social-media episode from May 2023. Bazian posted from his own Twitter account a message apparently written in JVP’s collective Jewish voice, ending with the formulation, “As Jews…” Critics reasonably asked whether he had mistakenly posted material intended for JVP’s account. The episode does not, standing alone, prove that Bazian controlled or had access to JVP’s social-media account. But it certainly raises questions about the operational proximity between Bazian and an organization presenting itself to the public as an authentically Jewish voice , questions that merit investigation rather than dismissal.

OOPS!

Look at the partnerships. Look at the organizing. Look at the money. Look at the extraordinary expansion on American campuses. And then return to those three words:

Jewish Voice for Peace. The question is not whether the people involved are Jewish.

Many plainly are. The question is whether Americans have allowed an organization’s name to substitute for scrutiny of its ideology. Another question with eyes on Bazian - who are the actual ideological influencers?

I think we have.

And I think an entire generation of students has been exposed to some of the most loaded language in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the implicit reassurance that if a Jewish organization supplies or validates the terminology, the terminology has somehow already been vetted. That is not a reflection of student inadequacy. It is a reflection of how extraordinarily sophisticated modern political machinery can be.

And once this happens, something essential to university life is lost. The great promise of higher education is not to tell students what to think, but to teach them how to interrogate claims, test evidence, challenge orthodoxies, recognize propaganda, and resist the seduction of moral certainty. Yet when one cause comes prepackaged with its own vocabulary, its own moral hierarchy, and even its own Jewish seal of approval, critical thinking can give way to ideological conformity.

The danger is not only that students may be exploited or pulled into a selective cause so consuming that other injustices disappear from view. It is that they may be robbed of something even more precious: the habit of independent thought itself. And that is a terrible irony. A university should enlarge the mind. It should not teach students to surrender it.

More reading about Rasmea Odeh and Jewish Voice for peace: Here

UPDATED:
A 7 Step Guide to Preserving Progressive Values on Campus - here.

Well, I was born, raised and educated in South African too.

I lived on the white privileged side of apartheid, and I would never pretend that my experience was the experience of those upon whom apartheid inflicted its greatest cruelty. It was not. My grandparents were Jewish refugees from pogroms, orphaned as young children and deposited without family in a faraway country. From an early age, I inherited a vocabulary for recognizing exclusion, oppression and persecution, and for understanding what happens when a society normalizes them through law.

And then, as a young lawyer, I saw apartheid not as theory, but as machinery: a system so perverse that ordinary human existence could become unlawful. Entire lives could be constricted by a force whose purpose was to make one population permanently lesser.

Remember those children emerging from the cells on Monday morning? In our imaginary Israel-like South Africa, they would never have been there. Their race would not have made visiting their own parents an offense. They could have boarded a bus, gone into Johannesburg, slept in their parents’ home and attended a nearby school. The state would not have separated child from parent by declaring one racial geography lawful and another forbidden.

I did not live the horror of apartheid from the side of its primary victims. But I saw enough of its bowels, its bureaucracy, its casual cruelty, its legal architecture, to know what apartheid was designed to do and did.

And that is precisely why I think the comparison with Israel deserves to be taken seriously. Seriously enough to reverse it.

Imagine if apartheid South Africa had actually looked like Israel. What would it have looked like?

Before we reverse the analogy, we need to challenge one of its hidden assumptions: that the historical casting is already settled. That Israelis occupy the role of South Africa’s white colonists and Palestinians the role of its Black indigenous majority.

South Africa was indeed shaped by European settler colonialism: Dutch settlement beginning in 1652, followed by British colonial rule from 1795 and again from 1806, expanded across territory inhabited by African peoples, producing conquest, dispossession and ultimately a state in which a white minority governed a Black majority. Apartheid later converted that political hierarchy into an extraordinary legal architecture designed to preserve white supremacy and minority rule.

Israel begins with a very different historical story: Allow me to address this as one who has had the misfortune to encounter the esteemed (pardon the snark) TikTok PhD’s on the topic: No! Jews were not Europeans who discovered a distant territory with which they had no prior connection. Jewish peoplehood, language, religion and national history originated in the land of Israel. Ancient Israelite societies existed there; Jewish exile and dispersion followed successive conquests; Jewish communities remained there across centuries; and the idea of ‘return to Zion’ remained embedded in Jewish religious and national consciousness. Even the Palestine Mandate referred to the Jewish people’s historical connection with Palestine, while the United Nations ultimately proposed two states in 1947, one Jewish and one Arab.

This does not erase Palestinian history or the Palestinian attachment to the same land. It means something more important for this comparison: this is not a simple historical reproduction of Europeans arriving in Africa and subjugating an indigenous population. It is a conflict involving two peoples with profound attachments and competing national claims to the same territory.

But let us put even that distinction aside. Let us accept the comparison and run the experiment.

What Apartheid Actually Was

Before reversing the comparison, it is worth understanding what apartheid actually was. It was not simply racism, inequality, social separation or hostility between communities. Apartheid took racial ideology and constructed it into law. The state classified every South African by race through the Population Registration Act of 1950, and that classification became the key that determined virtually everything that followed.

- The Group Areas Act determined where people could live and enabled enormous forced removals from areas designated for another racial group.

- Pass and influx-control laws regulated whether Black South Africans could enter, remain or work in supposedly “white” urban areas.

- The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act outlawed marriage between whites and people classified as belonging to other racial groups, while the Immorality laws criminalized interracial sexual relations.

- The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act legalized racially segregated public facilities and did not require those facilities to be equal, while the Bantu Education Act institutionalized a separate educational system deliberately designed around the racial hierarchy.

- Most consequentially, apartheid’s political architecture ensured that the Black majority could not choose the national government: Black South Africans were excluded from meaningful representation in Parliament, while the remaining non-white franchise was progressively dismantled and separated.

- Later, the homeland system completed the fiction by subscribing Black South Africans to their tribal identities - in designated ethnic “homelands,” allowing white South Africa to pretend that millions of people living and working inside the country properly exercised their political rights somewhere else.

Apartheid was therefore not racism floating through society. It was racism transformed into an operating system of government, legislating where the majority could live, move, learn, love, work and, above all, whether they could exercise political power in their own country.

Now I see your minds working – ‘ah haaaa this is what Israel is doing to Palestinians. So now let us launch the experiment ….. and see where it actually leads…’

Imagine Apartheid With the Vote and …..

Suppose Black South Africans under apartheid had possessed the political and civil rights that Arab citizens of Israel possess.

Nelson Mandela could have walked into a polling station and voted in a national election. More than that, he could have stood for Parliament, built a political coalition and, if enough South Africans voted for him, risen to the presidency through the ballot box. He would not have had to wage a liberation struggle for the elementary political right to participate in his own country’s government.

His Party, the ANC could have organized openly rather than being banned. Black political parties could have contested national elections and sat in Parliament. Black South Africans could have served as judges, including on the country’s highest court, as professors in leading universities, as physicians treating white patients, as diplomats representing South Africa abroad, as senior officials of the state, and served in the military, police and security forces. Imagine that!

Remember those children I described earlier, the children arrested for violating pass laws while trying to visit parents who worked as domestic servants in white areas? In our imaginary “Israel-like” apartheid South Africa, there would have been no racial pass law preventing them from turning up in a city suburb, getting a bus from Soweto … (which would not have existed as a legally designated Black township from which race restricted their movement) into Johannesburg, merely because they were Black. They could have travelled to visit their parents without first establishing that the government had granted them permission to be there. A policeman could not have arrested them simply because their race placed them in the wrong geographical space. In fact dive deeper and you realize they would have actually been able to live with their parents, go to school near where their parents worked, and not be reduced to a mere weekend visitor.

-A Black family could have moved into a neighborhood without the state first consulting a racial map to determine whether Blacks were legally permitted to live there.

-A Black doctor could have bought or rented a home in a predominantly white suburb without a Group Areas Act declaring the neighborhood legally reserved for whites.

-A Black student could have enrolled at a leading university alongside white students rather than being assigned to an institution designed by the state for his or her racial group.

-A Black patient could have entered the same hospital used by white South Africans.

-A Black lawyer could have walked into the same courthouse through the same entrance, appeared before the same court and later perhaps become the judge presiding over it.

-A Black family could have gone to the same beach, park, restaurant, hotel or public facility without confronting a government sign declaring WHITES ONLY.

-And perhaps most intimately, a Black South African and a white South African could have watched a movie together, fallen in love, and even married without the state declaring their marriage illegal.

-A Black person and a White person could have sat in a restaurant and enjoyed a glass of wine together. (White and Black people were not allowed to be served alcohol together. (In fact even liquor stores had separate entrances.)

Imagine No Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act: No police investigation or imprisonment if two adults of different races had violated the Immorality Act by sleeping together. No bureaucrat deciding that love itself had crossed a racial boundary established by law.

Imagine that South Africa. It does not look like Apartheid anymore…

Now imagine Black and white children attending the same universities, doctors treating patients across racial lines, lawyers practicing together, citizens voting in the same national elections and political parties competing for everyone’s support.

A Note: While I refer to Black I include by association the other racial classifications separated by law which include those classified as “Coloured” which meant mixed race, and “Indian” - South Asian heritage. Asian and Latino heritage - even more complicated under the system!

Apartheid did not mean that racism existed. Apartheid meant that racism governed.

Racism exists in Israel. It exists in the United States. It exists throughout Europe, Africa and much of the world. It produces discrimination, unequal outcomes and injustice, all of which deserve confrontation. However, racism and apartheid are not synonyms.

Apartheid converted racial identity into legal destiny. Your race determined where you could live, where you could travel, whom you could marry, where you could work, what school you could attend, what political rights you possessed and whether you had any meaningful voice in choosing the government ruling over you.

Most importantly, apartheid’s political architecture existed to ensure that the Black majority could never govern South Africa. The job reservation laws and deliberately inferior Bantu Education further entrenched the system.

And then the analogy encounters a mathematical impossibility:

Black South Africans were the overwhelming majority. Give them the franchise on the same basis as Israel gives citizenship and the franchise to its Arab citizens, and apartheid cannot survive an election. The National Party, the architects of apartheid - loses power. Not eventually. Immediately.

And that produces the question at the heart of this entire reversal:

If apartheid South Africa would have ceased to function as apartheid the moment its Black population possessed the political and civil rights we are imagining, how interchangeable can these two systems really be?

Put differently: Imagine apartheid South Africa without pass laws. Without legally segregated neighborhoods. Without racially segregated public facilities. Without laws prohibiting interracial intimate relations. Without the exclusion of the Black majority from national elections. Without laws preventing Black political parties from competing for power. Without a state designed to ensure permanent white political rule.

How much apartheid would actually be left? Still let us dig a bit deeper -

But What About the Bantustans (Homelands)?

This is where the comparison becomes more difficult. And it should. Because Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, KwaZulu and the other so-called homelands superficially evoke what critics see when they look at the fragmented Palestinian territories. So we should not avoid the comparison. We should examine it.

The homeland system was central to apartheid’s political machinery. The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act assigned African South Africans to homeland citizenship even when they lived in the supposedly “white” Republic. The entire structure helped Pretoria claim that Black South Africans possessed political rights somewhere else and therefore need not possess equal national political power in South Africa itself.

In other words, the Bantustans helped answer apartheid’s impossible political question: How can a white minority permanently govern a Black majority while maintaining the appearance that the majority possesses somewhere to exercise political rights?

Tell them they belong somewhere else.

Here is the critical difference. That is not how Gaza and the West Bank originated. This does not mean there was no displacement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There plainly was. During the 1948 war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from territory that became Israel, creating a Palestinian refugee population whose dispossession remains central to the conflict. And in 2005 Israel itself forcibly removed more than 9,000 Israeli Jewish settlers from Gaza as part of its disengagement.

But neither history turns Gaza or the West Bank into a South African-style Bantustan. Pretoria created the Bantustans for the specific political purpose of telling people who were already South Africans that they were no longer fully members of the South African polity. Their ethnic “homelands” were the mechanism through which a Black majority could be assigned political rights somewhere else and thereby excluded from governing the country in which they lived.

Israel did not take its Arab citizens in Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth or Acre, cancel their citizenship and assign them instead to Gaza, Ramallah or Jenin. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are not former Israeli citizens whom Israel expatriated into invented ethnic states in order to protect a Jewish electorate from their votes. Their national identity predates Israeli control of those territories, and Palestinian nationalism itself asserts a separate Palestinian claim to political self-determination. The West Bank and Gaza came under Israeli control in the 1967 war, rather than being created as fictional national homes for Israel’s Arab citizens.

That is the distinction: displacement occurred in both histories; the Bantustan system was something more specific, a constitutional device designed to manufacture political exclusion.

So similarity in particular mechanisms does not establish identity between entire political systems. The crucial question is purpose.

To be clear - Bantustans were created by Pretoria to deny full political membership to people whom apartheid South Africa claimed as belonging elsewhere. Palestinian nationalism, by contrast, demands that Palestinians constitute a people entitled to political self-determination of their own, on their own. Indeed, the international two-state formula has envisioned separate Jewish and Palestinian Arab states since the UN partition proposal of 1947.

Whatever one believes the eventual borders should be, Jewish and Palestinian nationalism are competing claims by two peoples to national self-determination in the same land. That is a fundamentally different historical structure from a white minority inventing ethnic “countries” for the indigenous majority in order to exclude that majority from political power. Those histories are not the same.

Call these policies occupation, dispossession, discrimination, if you believe the facts support those terms. But historical resemblance is not legal identity. A Bantustan was designed to expatriate a country’s own majority from political power. Gaza and the West Bank were not. That distinction matters. This is not apartheid merely because the map can be made to rhyme.

The Analogy Works Best From a Distance

And perhaps that is the larger problem. From a distance, comparisons can look compelling. Separate territories. Checkpoints. Different legal arrangements. Communal identities. Power disparities. But move closer and history begins interfering with the Apartheid when uses as a slogan.

Black South Africans were the indigenous majority of one country deliberately deprived of citizenship and political sovereignty so that a colonizing racial minority could govern them indefinitely.

Arab citizens of Israel vote in the state that governs them.

Palestinians in the West Bank present the hardest case for my argument. They do not vote in Israeli national elections while Israeli settlers living nearby do, and they live under substantially different legal and administrative regimes. Settlement expansion, movement restrictions and prolonged Israeli control make the apartheid analogy especially possible there. Those realities should be confronted rather than minimized.

But acknowledging them still does not write a blank check allowing every contested Israeli policy, every territory under Israeli control and the sovereign State of Israel itself to be collapsed into one historical object: apartheid South Africa. No, that said, Israel is not an Apartheid State.

So by acknowledging that we can condemn what some may see as an occupation in the West Bank without rewriting apartheid. We can oppose settlements without pretending Johannesburg in 1975 is Tel Aviv today. We can condemn the Israeli government for not doing a better job of handling the Settlers. We can and we should.

We can identify discrimination without declaring every system containing discrimination to be apartheid. And we can defend Palestinian rights without erasing Jewish indigeneity or converting Jewish national return into an African-style European colonial imperialistic adventure.

We do not need misappropriation and slogans to do it! The misuse of the term is profoundly useful to those who believe Israel should not exist at all, because it affords a demonization that paints Israel too egregious to exist!

Perhaps We Have Been Asking the Wrong Question

Instead of asking whether particular Israeli policies resemble something South Africans remember from apartheid, ask what made apartheid apartheid. Then return to the experiment.

Imagine Mandela voting. Imagine the ANC openly contesting Parliament. Imagine Black judges on the highest court. Imagine white politicians having to persuade Black voters to keep them in government.

We don’t actually have to imagine the result.

That is the democratic South Africa that replaced apartheid. And had those political rights existed in 1970, apartheid could not have survived until 1994.

Why did some of the great anti-apartheid figures reach so readily for the apartheid analogy when speaking about Israel?

One possible answer lies in history itself. Israel maintained a deeply troubling strategic relationship with apartheid South Africa, particularly in the later decades of white minority rule. For those who fought that regime, that relationship could understandably leave resentment, anger and a sense of betrayal.

But once that grievance entered political discourse, the word apartheid became an extraordinarily powerful weapon.

To accuse Israel of bad policy is one thing. To accuse Israel of occupation is another. But to call Israel apartheid, especially when the charge comes from South Africans who defeated apartheid, is to place Israel inside one of the most universally condemned moral categories of the modern age.

That accusation carries a force far beyond ordinary criticism. It does not merely say, Israel has done wrong. It says, Israel has become what we defeated.

And that is why motive matters.

Was the analogy born solely from neutral comparison of legal systems?
Or did historical resentment toward Israel’s relationship with Pretoria help make the apartheid label especially attractive, emotionally satisfying and politically potent?

I cannot prove what lived in the minds of Mandela, Tutu or others who reached for the analogy, and I must be careful not to appropriate the moral authority of those who endured apartheid from the side of its primary victims. That experience was theirs, not mine. But the historical grievance I am describing is not my invention. Mandela himself acknowledged that Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa had influenced the ANC’s attitude toward Israel. Tutu later invoked his own apartheid experience in describing what he believed he saw in Israel and the Palestinian territories. They had every right to carry that grievance. The question is whether that grievance also helped shape an analogy whose emotional force exceeded its historical precision.

So the question is legitimate: did apartheid provide the most accurate description, or the most powerful available accusation?

Because if the comparison begins to unravel when we examine what apartheid actually was, we should at least entertain the possibility that the power of the accusation helped sustain the analogy more than the precision of the analogy sustained the accusation.

So before we fling “apartheid” at Israel like a political swear word, perhaps we should make sure we have not first emptied the word of the very history that gave it its moral force.

So the next time “apartheid state” is bandied about as though the comparison requires no argument, perhaps ask one inconvenient question: Which apartheid do you mean, the one South Africa actually had, or the one you need Israel to be?

Author’s Note - A Deeply personal Connection to the BOP Homeland

My relationship to the homeland question is more complicated than this essay can fully explore. My late mother was closely involved in Israel-Bophuthatswana relations, helping establish Bophuthatswana House in Israel and heading the International Center for Medicine and Law. I therefore encountered discussions and even discourse about Tswana sovereignty and homeland autonomy within my own circles and family history.

That history does not rehabilitate apartheid’s Bantustan project. But neither does intellectual honesty permit me to pretend that every African who supported homeland autonomy understood himself merely as Pretoria’s instrument.

Some articulated indigenous, ethnic or territorial beliefs and aspirations of their own. While that must receive the utmost validity, respect and consideration, whether those aspirations could ever have been disentangled from apartheid’s political purposes is a complex question, and another essay.

For present purposes, the complexity serves as one final warning:

South African history itself resists being reduced to a slogan.

I remain deeply connected to the Mangope Royal family - who provided my late Mom’s burial place in Motswedi, Bophuthatswana - with the greatest of honors.

More reading about Mom’s burial in Bophuthatswana, here.

Exploring the motive for calling Israel an Apartheid State - further - may not be conjecture:

Here lies the resentment of Mandela and Tutu toward Israel, notwithstanding the fact that South African Jews were at the forefront of South African ‘White’ anti-Apartheid movement - Read this Guardian article that is more is more than 20 years old

“During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship - A-bomb technology” Here

In fact, don’t.

That conversation usually becomes an exhausting exchange with the myopic, the self-righteous, the ideological, the uninformed, the ill-informed, the selectively over-informed, and everyone else who arrived with a verdict already tucked neatly into their pocket.

Instead, Keep the burden where it belongs: on the person asserting as established fact that the gravest crime in international law has occurred.

1. START WITH THE QUESTION THEY WOULD RATHER NOT ANSWER

Why this matters:
Before debating whether genocide occurred, establish whether genocide has actually been legally adjudicated on the merits by a competent tribunal applying law, evidence, and procedure. The answer matters. An allegation, however serious and however widely repeated, is not the same thing as a final judicial determination.

SAY THIS:

Has genocide actually been adjudicated and finally determined by a competent legal tribunal applying evidence, law, and due process? If the answer is no, then please describe it accurately and honestly: it is an allegation and a legal claim, not an adjudicated fact. If you tell me the answer is yes, identify the final judgment. Otherwise, you are presenting your conclusion as though a court has already rendered it.

2. ASK WHY THEY ARE WILLING TO ABANDON THE VERY PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE THEY CLAIM TO DEFEND

Why this matters:
We ordinarily understand that accusation and guilt are different things. We do not declare someone legally guilty of murder merely because we find the accusation convincing. Courts exist precisely because evidence, intent, competing arguments, standards of proof, and law must be examined. That principle should not suddenly disappear because the accused is Israel.

SAY THIS:

Why would you subvert the very concept of justice you claim to believe in by appointing yourself the tribunal? We do not say that someone accused of murder has therefore committed murder as an adjudicated legal fact. We say they have been accused until the legal process determines guilt. Justice does not cease to require process simply because you feel morally certain of the outcome. That you would do that is terribly disturbing.

3. REMIND THEM THAT ‘GENOCIDE’ IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR ‘HORRIFIC’

Why this matters:
People increasingly use genocide as though it means a war involving terrible civilian suffering. It does not. That is not the definition of genocide. Civilian deaths can be catastrophic. Warfare can be disproportionate. Conduct can potentially constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. Government policy can be cruel, reckless, unlawful, or morally indefensible. None of those conclusions automatically establishes the separate legal crime of genocide.

SAY THIS:

Genocide is not a synonym for horrific civilian suffering, disproportionate warfare, war crimes, or a government policy you despise. It is a particular legal accusation with particular elements that must be established through evidence. An accusation does not magically turn into an adjudicated judgment because enough people repeat it.

4. DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED BY THE SPEAKER’S TITLE

Why this matters:
The person announcing “genocide” may be a politician, professor, journalist, historian, activist, celebrity, organizational leader, public intellectual—or someone with 600,000 followers and a blue checkmark. None of those qualifications makes that person a court. Experts can offer opinions. Politicians can make declarations. Scholars can analyze evidence. Journalists can report allegations. But authority of voice is not authority to adjudicate.

SAY THIS:

No matter who you are – you are not entitled to represent your conclusions as though they constitute a final judicial determination.

5. PRE-EMPT THE INEVITABLE MORAL BLACKMAIL

Why this matters:
At some point you may hear: “If you refuse to call it genocide, you support genocide.” This is the moment when the argument stops being about evidence and becomes a loyalty test. Do not accept the premise. Refusing to pronounce someone legally guilty before adjudication is not support for the alleged crime. It is support for the principle that grave accusations require grave evidentiary scrutiny.

SAY THIS:

I hope you will respect that refusing to declare genocide as an established legal fact does not mean that I would ever support genocide. Quite the opposite. I believe in justice, evidence, judicial institutions, and democratic principles strongly enough that I will not abandon them merely because I am being pressured to pronounce a predetermined verdict. My refusal to prejudge a case – where all the evidence from bot sides has been presented, is not moral indifference. It is respect for justice.

6. FORCE THE DUE-PROCESS QUESTION

Why this matters:
There must still be room for evidentiary rigor, competing evidence, legal argument, uncertainty, and the apparently radical proposition that the most serious accusations imaginable should actually be proved through a legitimate process. Consider how absurd the alternative sounds in any other context: “Everyone knows he did it. Why bother with the jury?” Progressives in particular have spent decades warning against wrongful convictions, prosecutorial overreach, mob judgment, guilt by accusation, and systems in which the verdict precedes the evidence. Those principles cannot suddenly become optional.

SAY THIS:

We would be horrified if a prosecutor announced, ‘Everybody knows he is guilty, so why bother waiting for the jury? Yet when the defendant is Israel, asking people to distinguish allegation from adjudication somehow becomes morally suspect. Justice is either a principle or it is a convenience. You do not get to champion due process and wrongful-conviction safeguards from the one side of your mouth and embrace trial-by-hashtag from the other side of your mouth.

7. END THE CONVERSATION — DO NOT ENTER THE INFINITE LOOP

Why this matters:
You do not have to convince the other person that Israel did not commit genocide. That is precisely the trap. Your point is narrower—and stronger: They may hold their conclusion. They may argue for it. They may believe the evidence will ultimately prove it. But they may not erase the distinction between accusation, opinion, and adjudicated legal fact—and then morally condemn you for refusing to erase it with them.

SAY THIS:

You are entitled to your conclusion. You are not entitled to convert your conclusion into an adjudicated fact – when it is not one – and you certainly are not entitled to demand that I surrender my standards of evidence and due process to prove that I am a good person. When warranted: I will condemn civilian suffering, demand accountability, criticize Israe, as the case may be. And I will accept the judgment reached by a competent tribunal through a legitimate legal process. What I will not do is confuse repetition for proof, popularity with law, accusation with judgment, or moral bullying with justice. “Say genocide or you’re immoral” is an immoral subversion of Justice. And trial by slogan is still trial by slogan, even when the slogan comes wrapped in a keffiyeh of self-righteous certainty.

Here is the entire 7 steps in one response:

You are entitled to believe that Israel is committing genocide. What you are not entitled to do is present that belief as though it has already been finally adjudicated by a competent tribunal. Genocide is not simply a synonym for horrific civilian suffering, disproportionate warfare, war crimes, or a government policy you despise. It is a specific legal accusation that must be proved through evidence, law, procedure, and judicial determination. A politician, professor, journalist, activist, organizational leader, public intellectual, or ten thousand people repeating the same word, does not acquire judicial authority by repetition. A platform does not confer judicial robes, and an accusation does not become a judgment because it is morally or politically popular.

I also reject the idea that refusing to pronounce the verdict in advance somehow means I support genocide. That is moral blackmail, not argument. I would never support genocide; I support justice strongly enough to insist that even the gravest accusations be adjudicated rather than declared by social consensus. We would be appalled if a prosecutor said, “Everyone knows he is guilty, so why bother waiting for the jury?” Yet somehow, when the accused is Israel, demanding evidentiary rigor and due process is treated as suspicious. Justice is either a principle or it is a convenience. You do not get to champion wrongful-conviction safeguards, due process, and institutional legitimacy in every other context and then embrace trial-by-hashtag when the defendant is one you despise.

So this is where I land: I will condemn civilian suffering, demand accountability, examine the evidence, criticize Israel fiercely where warranted, and accept the judgment of a competent tribunal when it is rendered. I will not subscribe to genocide – as a slogan, like you have done. Because until adjudicated that is all it is! And as such, diminished in gravitas. I will not confuse repetition with proof, popularity with law, accusation with judgment, or moral bullying with justice. “Say the word or you’re suspect” is moral cowardice. It is an abusive litmus test dressed up in a Kafiyeh of certainty.

Updated: Thank you to Rabbi Neal Katz in Texas for turning this into an Infographic:

The word genocide was not incidental to the political vocabulary surrounding his candidacy. It carried enormous moral force, was easily repeated, readily amplified, and increasingly functioned as a politically expedient slogan.

That matters because my concern is not simply whether I agree with the characterization.

My concern is what happens when an unresolved allegation of the gravest crime in international law becomes politically useful , and when politicians believe that saying the word is a condition precedent to their credibility, belonging, even progressive bona fides.

That is where this becomes larger than Gaza, larger than Israel, and larger than Abdul El-Sayed.

What Happens to Justice when a Legal Allegation Becomes a Political Slogan

And what happens when the political message to candidates becomes: If you want our support, you must be heard saying the word?

People are entitled to believe that Israel has committed genocide. They may be scholars, activists, politicians, lawyers, students, commentators, or ordinary citizens. They may be informed, misinformed, ideologically driven, painstakingly analytical, or utterly sincere.

But belief is not the judgment of a Tribunal.

Somewhere along the way, “Do you believe Israel has committed genocide?” has morphed into something far more troubling: “If you will not say Israel is committing genocide, you have not earned my vote.”

That is no longer merely an opinion. It becomes a political password — a test of acceptability, ideological alignment, even political legitimacy.

And that should trouble anyone who believes in justice, intellectual integrity, political authenticity, and the independence we should expect from elected leaders.

Genocide is not simply a synonym for terrible suffering, enormous civilian casualties, devastating warfare, or even war crimes. It is a specific legal conclusion carrying extraordinary consequences.

And as of this writing, the International Court of Justice has not issued a final judgment on the merits finding that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

There is no parallel tribunal empowered to substitute its verdict, not the TV pundit table, not the genocide scholar, not the classroom, not the NGO, not the activist movement, not the politician, not the donor, not the voter, not the student in a tent on a campus, and not the Reconstructionist rabbi sitting on the Advisory Board of the antizionist organization, Jewish Voice for Peace.

They may accuse, analyze, advocate, condemn, persuade, and protest.

They cannot deliver the judgment.

That includes experts. Genocide scholars and human-rights organizations may examine the evidence and believe they have reached their ‘deeply informed’ legal conclusions. Their work may be important. They may ultimately prove entirely correct. Yet, no amount of expertise eliminates the possibility evidence likely to be missing from a non-Tribunal process, - a process without with strict rules of evidence and proceedure.

Imagine a renowned forensic scholar examining everything publicly known about a murder case and declaring the accused guilty. Her assessment may be extraordinarily persuasive. But what if there is DNA evidence she has never seen? What if an unexamined witness changes the story? What if evidence disclosed at trial completely alters the meaning of what appeared obvious from outside the courtroom? We would never say that the scholar’s eminence eliminates the need for the trial. That is why “genocide scholars have said it is genocide” cannot end the inquiry. A highly credentialed opinion remains an opinion until the full case has been heard.

None of this means the allegation is frivolous. It does not mean Israel has been exonerated. It does not rule out other violations of international humanitarian law, and it certainly does not diminish Palestinian suffering.

Nor should the reason for the war disappear from an analysis that, by definition, requires proof of intent. The circumstances in which a war begins, the objectives articulated by the parties, and the conduct that follows may all bear upon the crucial question of what a State intended to accomplish. Hamas’s October 7 massacre and hostage-taking, followed by a senior Hamas official’s declaration that such attacks would be repeated “again and again,” with Israel ultimately eliminated, are therefore not peripheral facts. They form part of the context against which Israel’s asserted objective, to defeat Hamas and prevent another such attack, must also be examined. The question is not simply whether catastrophic harm occurred. The legal inquiry must ultimately determine why the acts alleged to constitute genocide were committed and whether the specific intent required by the Genocide Convention can actually be proved.

All I am insisting upon is something remarkably basic:

Evidence matters. Process matters. And political usefulness cannot be allowed to become a substitute for either.

For politicians, particularly highly educated, sophisticated politicians and lawyers this distinction should be a crucial one. Yet increasingly, it appears not to matter at all.

Imagine this hypothetical through the lens of one of our most basic principles of justice: we do not pronounce guilt before adjudication. I know this is another duh -basic - however indulge me:

A man is accused of murdering his wife. The evidence appears stacked against him and is terrible. There are photographs. Witnesses. Perhaps statements he made that look extraordinarily incriminating. Public opinion is overwhelmingly against him. But his trial has not begun. Now imagine a political constituency telling a Senate candidate:

“If you want our votes, you must publicly say this man is a murderer. That he is guilty of murder.”

The candidate responds: “I believe the evidence is deeply disturbing. I believe he should be prosecuted. I believe the victim deserves justice. But he has not yet been tried, and I am not prepared to pronounce guilt before the evidence has been adjudicated.”

And the constituency responds: “Then you have not earned our vote.”

Would we really consider that a principled demand? Or would we recognize it for what it is, a demand that a politician trade the principle of justice for political support?

Because THIS is increasingly what I fear we are doing with the word genocide. Though perhaps self-imposed and not an articulated condition – it is as if it is!

The problem is not that Abdul El-Sayed believes genocide has occurred. He may sincerely believe every word he says. What concerns me is the political environment surrounding him and others like him: an environment in which adopting the word genocide has become a demonstration of moral credibility, while refusing to pronounce that legal conclusion before adjudication is treated as moral cowardice, complicity or disqualification.

This is dangerous for many reasons.

Especially when the politicians involved are sophisticated enough to know the difference between an allegation and a finding. And where they just do not consider that as important - as well as the further ramifications when ‘sloganizing.’

I am not asking elected officials to remain silent about Gaza until judges in The Hague complete their work. Quite the opposite. There is plenty for politicians to allege, question, and do without pretending that every disputed legal question has already been answered. Such as the following which I state without assuming the truth of any of it: They can condemn civilian deaths. They can demand unrestricted humanitarian aid. They can investigate allegations of war crimes. They can oppose Netanyahu. They can criticize Israeli military strategy. They can call for ceasefires. They can support Palestinian statehood. They can oppose settlements. They can argue for restrictions on particular weapons. They can demand that U.S. assistance comply with American and international law. But they cannot scream GENOCIDE!

And if we are speaking seriously about policy, responsibility, and an end to Palestinian suffering, there should also be room for an equally unequivocal demand that Hamas lay down its arms, renounce the “again and again” threat, relinquish its capacity to wage terror, and cease sacrificing the people of Gaza to an endless conflict. Politicians demanding accountability should also be asking harder questions about Hamas itself: Where did all the funding to Gaza go? Who has financed Hamas, through what channels, and for what purposes? What accountability exists for funds diverted through Hamas-linked financial networks and purported charitable organizations? What responsibility does Hamas bear for the repression, detention, torture, and killing of Palestinians who challenge its authority? And what role have Hamas, armed groups, criminal gangs, and the collapse of civil order played in obstructing or interfering with the distribution of desperately needed humanitarian aid, and questioning the efficacy of calls to martyrdom and the use of human shields?

These questions do not diminish Israel’s responsibilities. They insist upon parity in examining responsibility. Calls for peace that place obligations only on Israel undermine a politician’s claim to a balanced peace policy; they leave a substantial part of the political, humanitarian, and moral equation untouched. They call into question trust. The trust of the Democratic voters.

All of those are legitimate political positions. None requires a politician to pronounce a pending legal allegation as an adjudicated fact. None requires a politician to declare or speak as if genocide has legally been established.

This distinction matters because genocide has a very particular meaning under international law: The Genocide Convention requires proof of one or more specified acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. That intent requirement is fundamental. It is precisely why genocide is different from other grave international crimes. This is where we cannot even begin to imagine what evidence will be submitted until it happens!

Examining the use of Genocide as a politically expedient slogan in an expanded context:

“We should stop supporting Israel, Israel is committing genocide, and Israel should not exist as a Jewish state.” Those propositions have different meanings and different consequences. When they are bundled together, Jewish voters are entitled to ask what the ultimate political objective actually is.

If you argue that a country is committing humanity’s paradigmatic crime, that American support for it should be withdrawn, and that its foundational identity as a Jewish state is itself illegitimate, then people are entitled to calculate where that argument leads.

The cumulative impact may impinge on Jewish safety – and as it happens around us, we are now already faced with heightened blame, antisemitism bordering Pogrom and Intifada. The Israel question with the slogans invoke age old libels as people scream “baby killer” at an American doctor in a waiting room, just because he is a Jew.

That does not mean every person who opposes Israeli military aid wants Israel destroyed or will blame the Jews. Obviously not. It means that nuance is not a distraction from the debate. Nuance is the debate. And yet nuance is precisely what political litmus tests destroy.

A litmus test demands a sentence. Say the sentence and you are morally acceptable. Refuse to say it and you are suspect.

Expanding this even further to greater consequences:

This is the part I believe Democrats should fear. Because once a political movement accepts the principle that a legal verdict can become a condition of electoral belonging, there is no principled reason the practice ends with Israel.

Today the demanded declaration is: “Israel is committing genocide.” Tomorrow another constituency will demand another conclusion about another accused person, institution, government or country.

And politicians will learn a terrible lesson: The question is no longer “What has been proved?” The question becomes: “What must I say to secure these votes?” There could hardly be a greater corruption of justice. And there is an irony here.

Much of the progressive movement rightly speaks about due process, wrongful conviction, prosecutorial overreach, racial injustice in the criminal legal system, and the danger of allowing public passion to substitute for evidence. Those principles cannot suddenly disappear because the defendant is Israel. Justice is either a principle or it is a convenience.

We cannot demand evidentiary rigor for the causes we favor and dispense with it when certainty becomes politically useful.

Allegation is not proof. That principle protects everyone. And ultimately democracy itself.

The Democratic Party should be very wary of a political culture in which the word itself becomes a password and candidates are judged not by whether they will seek truth and accountability, but by whether they will announce the required verdict.

I am a Democrat because I believe democracy requires more than winning. I believe it requires institutions, evidence, fairness, process and the restraint to distinguish what we passionately believe from what has actually been established.

SO

Dear Democratic Party:

How do we trust politicians so willing to abandon core principles of justice - designed to uphold justice- in the name of political acceptance and support?

You start by naming them -

I believe Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, Scott Wiener, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Becca Balint, and the twenty-one members of Congress who introduced or joined Tlaib’s November 2025 resolution have crossed the line I am describing. That resolution did not merely allege genocide or call for its investigation; it declared that the Israeli government “has committed the crime of genocide.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose endorsement has become highly sought after among DSA-aligned candidates running on the Democratic ticket, was equally unequivocal: “The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

While we debate those conclusions, my question is whether elected officials committed to the rule of law should pronounce an unresolved legal allegation as established fact before the tribunal charged with hearing the case has rendered its judgment.

That is the principle I believe they have abandoned.

But the degradation becomes worse when that premature verdict is then turned outward and imposed upon everyone else as a political litmus test. It is one thing for a politician to reach a legal conclusion before the court has done so. It is quite another for that conclusion to become the price of admission, to Democratic credibility, progressive acceptance, endorsements, donor enthusiasm, or votes.

At that point we are no longer merely tolerating premature judgment and what it does to the rule of law. We are rewarding it. And worse, we are punishing restraint that would otherwise embrace the rule of law.

This is what makes the litmus test so repugnant. Beyond the unchecked harms it can license, libel, demonization, and the flattening of complexity, it invites politicians to trade justice for votes. It creates an incentive structure in which political conformity is rewarded over evidentiary discipline, and that is fundamentally at odds with the democratic principles we claim to defend.

__________________________________________________________________

Author’s Note:

Here are the non-politician most aggressive co-conspirators: This is who these politicians co-habit space with!

Mehdi Hasan: has described the United States as “complicit in genocide” and has argued publicly that Israel is committing genocide. In debates he has directly challenged politicians with versions of “Why won’t you say genocide?”—

Hasan Piker: routinely uses genocide as the descriptive noun for what is happening in Gaza. In discussing Netanyahu, for example, he said Netanyahu was “someone who is doing a genocide.” His refusal to endorse Kamala Harris was also tied explicitly to what he characterized as the “continuation of the genocide in Gaza.”

Cenk Uygur: has repeatedly characterized Israel’s actions as genocide in his commentary on The Young Turks. Contemporary reporting describes both Uygur and Piker as outspoken opponents of what they describe as Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Let us not forget the Graham Platner debacle:
Voters and prominent supporters were willing to look past a tattoo associated with Nazi symbolism, deeply troubling past statements, and other early warning signs, and Platner went on to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Maine. Only later, after a former girlfriend accused him of sexual assault, an allegation he denied, did his candidacy finally collapse.

Yet through all that scrutiny, one issue barely registered as a question of judgment: Platner’s unequivocal declaration that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza” and that Americans therefore should not be “complicit.” He actually used this in his political campaign advertising. People gave their money for THAT!

That is precisely my point. We scrutinized his tattoo, his character, his history, his conduct and ultimately the devastating allegation against him. But where was the scrutiny of a would-be United States Senator pronouncing the gravest crime in international law as established fact before the court hearing the case had reached a final judgment? Somehow that was not considered an irresponsibility. In parts of Democratic politics, it may even have helped establish his credentials.

Special thanks to my brilliant editor: Carol Goldman

UPDATE: I have followed this Essay with a Seven Step guide for people having this conversation - it kind of serves also as a summary - take a look - link here:

Please note so far this is Part 3 in a series with more to come:

Not necessarily that everyone agreed with me. They certainly did not. But clearly there is an argument, an anxiety and perhaps even a political warning here that extends far beyond one Michigan primary.

So I want to return to the framing of that letter.

Dear Democratic Party: we need to go deeper.

In the first piece, I identified several concerns surrounding Abdul El-Sayed that I believe many Democratic leaders have been too quick to dismiss: his repeated characterization of the Gaza war as genocide; his equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli government; his difficulty affirming Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state; his response to the attack on Temple Israel; his political association with Hasan Piker; and, finally, his attacks on AIPAC.

Each deserves more than a paragraph. So this is the beginning of the deeper dive I suggested. And I want to start with AIPAC, because I think we can add to some of the usual questions.

AIPAC Is Not the Beginning of the Story

In progressive political discourse, AIPAC is increasingly spoken about as though its very existence explains what has gone wrong with Democratic politics on the issues around Israel.

Too much money. Too much influence. Too much involvement in primaries. Too much power over candidates. There are legitimate questions contained in all of those concerns. No political organization should be exempt from scrutiny simply because the cause it represents matters deeply to us. But there are other questions asked far less frequently, if at all:

Why has an organization like AIPAC become so important to so many American Jews in the first place? What does the Democratic Party not understand about this? If the Party understood would they permit the current litmus tests they seem to be complicit in?

These questions change the conversation. Because AIPAC did not invent Jewish anxiety about Israel’s survival. It did not invent antisemitism. It did not create October 7. It did not create Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran. And it did not create the growing discomfort many Jews now feel inside spaces they once regarded as politically safe.

Nor did AIPAC create a Democratic political culture in which some candidates increasingly speak about Zionism as though it were inherently shameful, question whether a Jewish state should exist at all, describe Jewish concern about antisemitism as manipulation, or treat American Jews as morally responsible for the actions of whichever Israeli government happens to be in power.

If anything, AIPAC’s contemporary political strength should force Democrats to confront an uncomfortable possibility:

Perhaps organizations become powerful because constituencies believe something crucial will be lost without them. For Jews it extends to the very idea of survival.

AIPAC may therefore be not only a political actor. It may also be a political symptom. Which came first - the horse or the cart? At this point, what does it matter? The hill has become a mountain.

The Unequal Scrutiny Problem

American politics runs on organized interests: Labor unions organize politically. Environmental organizations do. Trial lawyers do. Corporations do. Gun-rights organizations do. Reproductive-rights organizations do. Technology executives do. Pharmaceutical companies do. Arab-American organizations do. Muslim-American organizations do. HELLO CAIR! Christian organizations do. Hello Heritage Foundation! And even corrupt individuals find ways to inject their cash - need we say who!

Enormous amounts of money move through American elections because that is the political system we have built. One may dislike that system. I despise it.

We have been chirping for decades about the need for campaign-finance reform. But reform cannot credibly begin and end with a Jewish organization, while all the others are ignored in the very discourse that should herald the reform. Imagine a world that permits THAT message.

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable. Why does money associated with support for Israel so frequently acquire a sinister vocabulary that money attached to countless other political interests does not? It taps into the very libel that syncs with the other libels deployed to seek our demise.

Why is a Jewish political organization so easily described as a “lobby” controlling politicians while other constituencies are described as successfully organizing their political power?

Why is spending by AIPAC frequently treated as evidence that a candidate’s democratic legitimacy has somehow been corrupted, while enormous expenditures by organizations representing other ideological constituencies are treated as an ordinary, if sometimes regrettable, feature of American elections?

The answer to all these questions are contained in the mere asking of the question!

AIPAC is not immune from criticism, yet seems inoculated from parity and consistency.

While money serves as mask in this instance, if it were authentically about money and we could say it distorts democracy, - then address money. If PACs distort democracy, address PACs. If outside spending in congressional primaries is corrosive, address outside spending.

However we know it is not what this is about. Creating a special moral category for Jewish political money is neither campaign-finance reform nor progressive principle. It becomes something else entirely - all dressed up as selective outrage.

And history gives Jews good reason to become nervous - maybe terrified- whenever Jewish political participation begins to be described as uniquely powerful, uniquely secretive or uniquely corrupting as a means to end it. Sound familiar!

But AIPAC Also Has to Be Discussed Honestly

None of this requires pretending there are no difficult questions about AIPAC. There are.

From my perspective, there is almost nothing that angers me more than seeing one red cent of Jewish political money spent to elect MAGA Republicans.

I speak only for myself here. Maybe there are more of you feeling this.

Everything about MAGA collides with my Jewish values.

The ICE killings, the cruelty toward immigrants and refugees. The demonization of Africans, Muslims. The attacks on LGBTQI+ people. The assault on reproductive freedom. The racial grievance politics. The retraction of crucial global aid that has caused 60,000 deaths and counting. The contempt for democratic institutions and the rule of law. The willingness to use vulnerable minorities as political targets. The normalization of language that divides human beings into those who belong and those who do not. The overt in our face corruption - with impunity. The appointment of unqualified loyalists and sycophants to positions that our lives depend upon. All the President’s Men - oops I mean “The Epstein Men.” The list is too long…

My values - my Jewish values cannot separate any of that from the lessons I believe Jewish history demands that I carry.

And yet here is where the political torment begins.

I am also a Zionist.

I believe profoundly in Jewish self-determination and in the continued existence and security of Israel. That is not a position I can simply trade away because another candidate happens to align more comfortably with me on domestic policy.

So what happens when the candidate who supports Israel also supports a political movement that violates almost everything else I believe in?

And what happens when the candidate who shares virtually all of my progressive American values will not unequivocally defend the continued existence of the world’s only Jewish state? Or worse speaks for its demise?

Welcome to the Jewish political Catch-22 of this moment.

We are being asked, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to choose which part of ourselves gets protection.

My values as an American? Or my security as a Jew?

My commitment to immigrants, refugees, women, people of color, LGBTQ people, Muslims and every other community vulnerable to majoritarian political power?

Or my insistence that Jews, too, constitute a vulnerable people entitled to security and national self-determination?

I reject the premise that I should have to choose.

And yet increasingly, politically, that is precisely what it feels as though we are being asked to do.

That is why this conversation about AIPAC cannot be reduced to good or bad.

I can be deeply troubled when AIPAC supports a Republican (all MAGA at this point) whose domestic politics (and also some foreign policy) I find abhorrent while simultaneously understanding why an organization dedicated specifically to protecting the U.S.-Israel relationship evaluates candidates primarily through that lens.

That does not resolve the conflict for me.

It is the conflict.

And perhaps this is what Democratic leaders most urgently need to understand.

For many Jews, Israel is not merely another item on a policy checklist alongside taxation, healthcare, climate or education. October 7 brutally reminded Jews why questions of Jewish security can feel existential.

But neither should support for Israel require Jews to abandon every other principle by which we live.

That is the impossible political space many of us now inhabit.

How much money should any outside organization be able to inject into a primary?

Should one issue play such an important role in determining whether a candidate survives politically?

Do enormous independent expenditures narrow political debate rather than improve it?

Can aggressive primary spending sometimes punish candidates whose disagreements with Israeli policy fall well within legitimate Democratic discourse?

And perhaps the hardest question of all:

Why should Jewish voters ever be placed in the position of choosing between candidates who will protect and advance our progressive values but equivocate about Jewish self-determination, and candidates who proclaim their support for Israel while threatening the rights and dignity of so many other people we are morally compelled to defend?

I do not want Democrats to replace one simplistic argument—“AIPAC is evil”—with another—“AIPAC can do no wrong.”

Neither helps us.

The better question is how we build a Democratic politics in which Jews are no longer forced into this grotesque choice in the first place.

Because the answer cannot be Israel first and everything else be damned.

Nor can it be progressive values first, except when Jewish survival and self-determination become inconvenient.

Surely we can demand more from our politics than that. Are we no clever enough?

Want Less AIPAC? Change the Conditions That Empower It.

And this is precisely why simply condemning AIPAC will never solve the problem.

If the Democratic Party wants Jewish voters to feel less dependent upon organizations whose political spending may sometimes collide with our other values, then the Party itself has to help create a political home in which those values no longer have to compete with our sense of Jewish security.

That means the answer to AIPAC cannot merely be: Make AIPAC weaker.

The more important question is: What would make Jewish Democrats feel less desperate for AIPAC to be strong? Because every time another Democratic candidate refuses to affirm Jewish self-determination, minimizes antisemitism, surrounds themselves with people who traffic in degrading rhetoric about Zionists, or treats Jewish attachment to Israel as somehow suspect or foreign to American political life, that candidate strengthens the very argument for an organization like AIPAC. And if this sounds like “duh!” then why the heck are we here?

Every time Jewish voters are told that their concern about Israel is really about Netanyahu, or Gaza, or settlements, as though none of us can distinguish between a government and a country, we are given another reason to believe that someone powerful needs to be standing guard. Every time a politician gets away with the deplorable libel “…blah blah Israel’s genocide…. blah blah” to a supposedly ethical journalist – a Chris Hayes or a Mehdi Hasan- without challenge, as if it’s an adjudicated fact – we justify our powerful AIPAC guardrail. Every time Zionism itself becomes the litmus test, instead of the policies of an Israeli government, the political ground shifts beneath our feet to a 7.4 on the Richter Scale. And every time the Democratic Party appears unwilling to recognize that distinction, AIPAC’s relevance grows, and grows…

That is the paradox. (My new T-Shirt: “ Zionists for Zeno! - No!)

The political movement most determined to diminish AIPAC may be engaging in precisely the behavior that guarantees its continued power.

So, Dear Democratic Party, here is where I believe the solution begins. Do not ask Jewish Democrats to choose between our progressive values and our Jewish security. Do not make us choose between protecting immigrants and protecting Israel. Between LGBTQ people and Jewish self-determination. Between reproductive freedom and Zionism. Between racial justice and the right of Jews to have a homeland. Between our Muslim neighbors and our Israeli family. These things are not mutually exclusive. They should never have been made mutually exclusive.

Do not force me to choose between people whose policies threaten everything I believe as an American , and as a Human Rights advocate, and people whose politics leave me wondering whether they believe my people are entitled to a homeland at all.

That is an impossible political choice for anyone on a good day, let alone for Jews—an historically vulnerable minority, once again waving a hand above the water in a tempest of demonization. We are drowning in an extraordinary failure of coalition politics.

If Democrats want to step outside of the Jew dilemma - how about reducing the outsized role of money in politics by pursuing campaign-finance reform that applies equally to all major political spenders. AIPAC, corporate PACs, labor organizations, ideological PACs, billionaires, dark money, dammit - all of it.

If outside spending distorts primaries, deal with outside spending. If PACs have too much influence, deal with PACs. But do not build an entire reform narrative around what you toss about as the Jewish problem.

And if Democrats want Jewish voters to feel less need for an organization specifically dedicated to the U.S.-Israel relationship, then give us confidence that the Democratic Party itself understands why that relationship matters. Take the lead - speak about Israel’s strategic importance to America – about Israel as a partner - instead of quivering behind the threats of some ‘non-committed’ who refused to vote for presidential candidate Kamala Harris in a sordid blackmail bound not to stop there!

- Shed a flashing neon light brightly on the line between criticism of Israel and opposition to Israel’s existence

- Make equally clear that support for Palestinian dignity, statehood and human rights does not require hostility toward Zionism or Jews

- Confront antisemitism emanating from the Left with the same moral clarity Democrats rightly demand when racism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and authoritarianism emerge from the Right

- Stop treating Jews who raise antisemitism as though we are merely trying to silence criticism of Israel

- Talk to us – teach the progressive young voters the difference between tiktokkers and truthtellers

- Listen before telling us what antisemitism is

- Engage Jewish voters before the election, not after they have already begun wondering whether they still belong

- Find candidates who fit a clear inclusive Party platform

- And stop assuming that because MAGA is so repugnant to so many of us, Jewish Democrats have nowhere else to go and therefore can safely be ignored

That assumption may not keep many Jews voting Democratic. It will not keep them engaged, donating, organizing, volunteering or feeling represented, as has been the case historically. This is an exceptional era and you need to listen.

None of this requires Democrats to surrender progressive values. In fact it will enhance them.

I am willing to concede almost the entire legitimate indictment against AIPAC:

Too much money, too much outside spending, single-issue politics, intervention in primaries, support for MAGA candidates I find abhorrent, and legitimate questions about whether any organization should possess this much electoral firepower.

Now give me parity.

If the objection is money, regulate money. If the objection is super PACs, regulate super PACs. If the objection is billionaires, regulate billionaire spending. If the objection is outside groups overwhelming primaries, regulate outside groups.

But if the critics suddenly become obsessed with the Jewish organization while accepting the architecture that empowers everybody else, then I am entitled to ask whether money was ever really the issue.

That noted, if the Democratic Party can build its coalition based on this clean and inclusive framework, perhaps Jewish Democrats will feel less need to rely upon outside organizations to protect one piece of ourselves from another piece of our politics.

And no, I am not going to bring this deeper dive back to El-Sayed. I relegate him to the tiny one-percent margin that may yet cost us a general election - and that pains me. Because this is not really about him. He is simply the vehicle that brought us here.

This is about you, Dear Democratic Party.

Keep us home.

Do not ask us which part of ourselves we are prepared to abandon.

We won’t.

And you should not want us to.

There is a reason genocide scholars study what happens before people are killed. Mass atrocities do not ordinarily begin with mass graves. They begin with words, categories, laws, lists, accusations, moral panics and institutions. They begin with permission.

Gregory Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch, developed what he calls the Ten Stages of Genocide: Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination and Denial. They are not necessarily sequential, and several can occur simultaneously. Stanton’s purpose is preventive: to recognize the machinery while there is still time to stop it.

I want to apply that lens to something I have watched developing across parts of Africa for years: the escalating persecution of LGBTQ people. The historical synergy of Colonizers, Christian Evangelicals and Islamists.

Let me be precise from the outset. I am not alleging that Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Nigeria or Mauritania is committing genocide against LGBTQ people as that crime is presently defined in international law. The 1948 Genocide Convention protects national, ethnic, racial and religious groups; sexual orientation and gender identity are not enumerated protected categories.

That legal limitation, however, does not render Stanton’s warning framework useless. Quite the opposite. If the same social mechanisms that precede atrocities against one minority begin appearing against another, - classification, dehumanization, state discrimination, organized propaganda, persecution and eventually authorization of death, - why would we deliberately refuse to see them? Nowhere is that question more urgent than Uganda.

An aside, and many of my readers will understand why this may matter also to Americans who have yet to think this: Uganda is also the country where New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was born and whose citizenship he continues to hold. He retains substantial personal and family ties to the country, returning there in July 2025 for an elaborate celebration of his marriage at his family’s property. More troubling to me, he has been photographed warmly with Rebecca Kadaga, one of Uganda’s most prominent and longstanding political proponents of its anti-homosexuality legislation, known as “the Kill the Gays Bill”. Yet despite his public identification with LGBTQ equality in New York, he has not used anything approaching the same political voice to demand repeal of Uganda’s extraordinarily brutal Anti-Homosexuality Act.

That contradiction is difficult for me to overlook. One can rightly condemn anti-LGBTQ politics in America while also asking why the same moral urgency seems to disappear when the government perpetrating the persecution is one to which a politician has unusually close personal and citizenship ties. For readers interested in that particular issue, I have written about it separately in a petition begun during Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and now being prepared for delivery to him. (Link at end of essay.)

Lest we forget the myriad of reasons to call out President Museveni for his crimes against humanity and oppressive 40 year regime – yet from Mayor Mamdani – crickets!!!!

Museveni’s Extraordinary Call: Save Africa From Homosexuality

In April 2023, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, addressed an inter-parliamentary gathering in Entebbe and urged African leaders to take a common position against homosexuality. He described homosexuality as a danger to human procreation and called upon Africa to help “save the world” from it.

Think carefully about the architecture of that message. A minority is no longer simply a collection of citizens whose private conduct a government dislikes. It is transformed into an existential danger, something from which Africa itself must supposedly be “saved.” Once a government persuades a population that a minority threatens children, families, religion, reproduction, sovereignty or civilization itself, almost any response can subsequently be framed as defensive. That is why language matters: it establishes permission.

Several weeks after that gathering, Museveni signed Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023. The law provides life imprisonment for consensual same-sex relations in certain circumstances and retains the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” (several components to this including so called “serial offender.) Uganda’s Constitutional Court upheld most of the law in April 2024. Reports since enactment describe an uptick in arrests, evictions, violence, extortion and denial of services against LGBT Ugandans by state and non-state actors alike. This is persecution.

The Ten Stages

I. Classification

The first step is deceptively simple: us and them. Society divides human beings into categories, and Ugandan political rhetoric increasingly contrasts the supposedly authentic African heterosexual family with the “homosexual,” characterized as foreign, Western or culturally alien.

The irony is enormous. Same-sex relationships did not arrive in Africa aboard an airplane from Europe, yet many of the criminal statutes used against them did. British colonial governments exported laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy throughout their empire, including to Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana. Many surviving “sodomy” laws around the world descend directly from British colonial criminal codes. Lest we forget France, Portugal, Belgium and Netherlands followed suit.

And yet today the person who is gay is described as the foreign import, while the colonial criminal law is defended as African tradition. That historical inversion has become foundational to the modern political narrative.

II. Symbolization

Classification becomes more dangerous when the targeted group receives a recognizable social label: “homosexual,” “promoter,” “recruiter,” “un-African,” “enemy of the family.” These labels matter because they collapse complex human beings into a supposedly threatening category.

A teacher ceases simply to be a teacher. A son is no longer simply a son. A human-rights organization is no longer merely an organization advocating for vulnerable people. They become “promoters of homosexuality,” and once the label attaches, suspicion can extend far beyond LGBTQ people themselves.

Uganda’s law criminalizes the “promotion” of homosexuality, turning advocacy, association and support themselves into suspicious conduct. Ghana’s proposed legislation similarly targets promotion, advocacy and funding, while Senegal has expanded criminalization to include the “promotion” or financing of homosexuality. The category therefore grows outward. It eventually threatens not only gay people, but anyone willing to defend them.

III. Discrimination

This stage is unmistakable: the state removes rights from the designated group.

Uganda criminalizes consensual same-sex intimacy and advocacy. Nigeria criminalizes same-sex relationships and LGBT organizations under the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, while pre-existing laws carry sentences of up to fourteen years; in some northern states, Sharia provisions authorize death by stoning for same-sex activity.

Mauritania’s criminal law formally provides the death penalty for consensual same-sex conduct between Muslim men, through incorporating Sharia law into the criminal code. Senegal strengthened its law in March 2026, doubling the maximum prison term for same-sex relations to ten years and creating new offenses involving promotion and financing.

Burkina Faso presents another troubling development because it represents regression rather than merely preservation of inherited criminal law. Consensual same-sex relations had previously been lawful, but in 2025 its transitional authorities criminalized “homosexual acts” and conduct deemed to promote them, with prison sentences attached.

Now Ghana’s Parliament again passed sweeping anti-LGBT legislation in May 2026 targeting not only same-sex activity, but also people’s identity. If you merely “hold out” as LGBTTQAP (I kid you not) you will have committed a crime. It includes advocacy, promotion and financial support. At this stage, the common denominator becomes clear: identity becomes a basis for state-sanctioned unequal treatment.

IV. Dehumanization

This is where my concern sharpens. A government need not literally call people animals before dehumanization has begun. It happens whenever a minority is described principally as contamination, corruption, disease, predation or existential threat.

If homosexuality is portrayed as something from which society must be “saved,” homosexual people cease to be neighbors requiring protection and instead become dangers requiring containment. The accusation that LGBTQ people are “recruiting” children is especially potent because it transforms a despised minority into an alleged predator class.

History teaches us how dangerous that transformation can become. Once citizens believe they are protecting children, defending religion or saving civilization itself, cruelty becomes far easier to justify.

V. Organization

Persecution becomes qualitatively different when it is organized. It moves from prejudice expressed by individuals to networks capable of producing law, propaganda, political pressure and enforcement.

Africa is now seeing increasing coordination across national borders. In June 2026, lawmakers and activists from numerous African countries gathered in Ghana for the African Regional Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty. Participants discussed a coordinated continental framework concerning family, sexuality and gender, while lawmakers from numerous countries committed themselves to advancing restrictive approaches at home.

That should receive far more international attention than it has, because the question is no longer merely, “What is Uganda doing?” We should also be asking: What political architecture is being constructed across Africa?

VI. Polarization

Polarization destroys the middle. People who might otherwise say, “I personally disapprove, but my gay neighbor deserves protection,” are pressured into choosing between supposedly irreconcilable camps. You are either defending the family or defending homosexuality. You are either authentically African or serving foreign interests.

Religious leaders, politicians, activists, journalists and NGOs who advocate tolerance can themselves be branded as promoters. This is why “promotion” laws are especially chilling. They do not merely silence the targeted minority; they silence the people who might defend them.

The result is the destruction of the bridge between the persecuted and everybody else. Once that bridge disappears, the targeted population becomes increasingly isolated and vulnerable.

VII. Preparation

Preparation means persecution becomes institutional rather than episodic. Laws are drafted, police receive authority, organizations can be prohibited, citizens understand that reporting someone may bring state consequences, and evidence can be gathered against people whose relationships or advocacy have become criminalized.

The consequences are already visible in the behavior of communities forced underground. People delete material from their phones, abandon homes, hide relationships, shut down organizations and flee across borders. That does not mean extermination is inevitable. It means the machinery capable of escalating repression is being assembled.

In Uganda, that machinery includes criminal statutes reaching private conduct, advocacy and specified offenses carrying death. That is why Uganda occupies a uniquely alarming position in this comparison.

VIII. Persecution

Here the warning becomes impossible to dismiss. Persecution means targeted people lose liberty, property, livelihood, safety or the ability to live openly.

Uganda has documented arrests, arbitrary detention, violence, extortion, evictions and denial of services against LGBT people. Nigeria has experienced mass arrests under its anti-LGBT legal framework; in one notorious case, police arrested dozens of people accused of attending a gay wedding and publicly paraded suspects before the media.

Ghana has documented arrests, mob attacks, arbitrary detention, extortion and discrimination even before its newest legislation becomes fully operative. Senegal’s intensified crackdown has generated arrests, fear, flight and an atmosphere in which association itself can produce suspicion.

At this point we must stop speaking as though this is merely an abstract philosophical disagreement over “values.” People are being arrested, beaten, driven from their homes, exposed, threatened and forced underground. Whatever terminology one ultimately uses for the wider trajectory, that is persecution.

IX. Extermination

This is where precision becomes indispensable. I am not asserting that these states have reached Stanton’s extermination stage against LGBTQ populations. There is no basis for casually making such an allegation. However trajectory counts …

But Uganda forces us to ask an uncomfortable question: What does it mean when a state has already written death into the legal architecture of anti-LGBT persecution? Essentially such laws can be a license to kill. I have seen it in my work at African Human Rights Coalition.

Uganda permits capital punishment for “aggravated homosexuality.” Mauritania retains a statutory death penalty for male same-sex conduct, although executions have not been carried out under that provision in modern practice. Certain Nigerian states operating under Sharia likewise provide death as the maximum punishment for same-sex conduct.

These facts do not amount to extermination, but neither are they trivial. The state has crossed an extraordinary conceptual line when it declares that conduct linked to a stigmatized sexual minority may lawfully result in death. That should be understood as a flashing red warning light, not ignored because mass killing has not occurred.

X. Denial

Denial does not always wait until after an atrocity. It can run throughout the process, and one of its most powerful forms in this context is the assertion that there are no gay Africans. The logic becomes circular. Homosexuality is declared Western; therefore, anyone identifying as homosexual must have been recruited, corrupted or imported. First erase the historical existence of the minority. Then criminalize its present existence. Finally, describe the resulting disappearance or silence as proof that the minority never belonged there in the first place.

That is denial functioning not merely as an after-the-fact excuse, but as part of the ideology that makes persecution possible.

And so one can analyze each country on the warning continuum. We can also delve to understand where this all came from:

But Where Did All of This Come From?

The answer is not simply “African culture.” At least four historical and political streams feed today’s movement:

Colonial Criminal Law: The exported laws from Colonizers - criminalizing same-sex intimacy across the empire, and those laws survived independence. This creates one of the great historical ironies of contemporary anti-LGBT politics in Africa: politicians characterize homosexuality as a Western import while defending criminal prohibitions that themselves descend from European colonial rule. History has effectively been turned on its head. The African homosexual is labeled foreign while the colonial statute is reimagined as indigenous tradition. (Sound familiar?)

Religion: Christian and Islamic moral teachings have profoundly shaped attitudes toward sexuality across the continent, and in some states those traditions have become intertwined with criminal law.

Transnational Conservative Activism: There is substantial documentation of American and other international conservative organizations building relationships with African religious and political actors around sexuality, abortion, gender and “family values.” Here again the irony is profound. African politicians denounce LGBT equality as foreign interference while participating in an international anti-LGBT movement that has itself benefited from substantial foreign ideological, organizational and religious support.

Political Opportunism and Sovereignty: Finally, homosexuality has become politically useful because it provides an easily identifiable minority against whom politicians can define national authenticity. Economic problems are difficult to solve. Corruption is difficult. Unemployment is difficult. Authoritarianism, inequality and failing public institutions are difficult. By comparison, “protect our children from homosexual recruitment” is politically simple. (Think South Africa’s accusations in ICJ against Israel – and then examine the deflection from the horrific gender-based violence, deathly xenophobia and extreme corruption in a country that cannot keep its own house free of death and destruction.

The Continental Danger

This is why Museveni’s call to other African leaders should be remembered. He was not merely talking about Uganda; he was proposing a continental cause. Three years later, pieces of that project can be seen across multiple jurisdictions: Burkina Faso has criminalized conduct that was previously legal. Senegal has dramatically strengthened its penalties. Ghana continues advancing sweeping “family values” legislation. African parliamentarians are gathering across borders to discuss common approaches to sexuality, gender and sovereignty. Nigeria maintains one of the continent’s broadest criminalization regimes. Mauritania retains death in its statute book. Uganda has already embedded death within its Anti-Homosexuality Act.

The lesson of Stanton’s Ten Stages is not that every society displaying Classification or Dehumanization will inevitably reach Extermination. The lesson is that Stage Nine has predecessors. Classification, dehumanization, propaganda, organized political movements, criminalization and persecution matter precisely because they can create the environment in which far greater atrocities become possible.

When a president tells an entire continent that humanity must be saved from a minority, and then signs legislation under which members of that minority can be sentenced to death, we should not comfort ourselves with the thought that extermination has not begun. Prevention exists precisely because it has not. The moment to become alarmed is before Stage Nine. That is the entire point.

For Jews there should be something familiar and profoundly unsettling in the progression from identifying a minority, to naming it as dangerous, to accusing it of corrupting society, to isolating those who defend it, and finally to placing the machinery of the state behind its persecution. That does not mean any other persecution is the Holocaust, nor that every warning sign culminates in genocide.

Yet I wonder to what extent any Jew who reads through this is feeling not only the visceral familiarity of the past - the memory - but the impact of the current wave of demonization and the fear for where it can lead.

Authors Note:
In Memory of dear friends David Kato (Uganda), Eric Lembembe (Cameroon), and Carlos Fernandez (Angola) - May their memories be a blessing.

With thanks to Carol Goldman, thinker and editor.

MAMDANI PETITION: HERE

I know the dangers of a shallow-end dive. One can break a neck—and paralysis can follow. Let me preface this by saying that I have so much more to share than this shallow dive. I am aware of the risks in speaking before every thought is fully developed. Perhaps there will be time for the deep dive later—if we survive. For now, just this.

If you want Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to win the general election, listen. Just listen.

As someone who believes the millions spent on the Michigan primary would have been better invested in humanitarian aid than political campaigns, I write this in good faith.

This Senate seat should have been a moment of celebration for Michigan’s Arab and Muslim communities. Instead, it has become something else. Whether intentionally or not, Dr. El-Sayed’s path to victory has also embraced and perhaps relied upon a political climate in which antiZionism has too often crossed into hostility toward Jews. Even where he has not directly expressed that hostility, one only has to spend a few minutes on social media to see the rhetoric his campaign has energized and normalized.

When candidate Haley Stevens, graciously conceded the race, decided by barely one percentage point, illustrating Dr. El-Sayed’s tiny mandate, she acted understandably intending party unity. Yet for many Jews who had admired her willingness to also stand with the Jewish community, the moment also felt like the beginning of normalization, a ‘sweeping under the rug’, setting aside some critical issues that had defined the campaign, in the interest of rallying behind the nominee.

That is not a criticism of Haley Stevens so much as a reflection of how many Jewish Democrats experienced that moment. If even our strongest allies must immediately move past concerns that many Jews regard as existential, what confidence are we left with that those concerns will continue to matter once the election is over?

Let us be clear, this letter is not primarily about Dr. El-Sayed.

It is about the Democratic Party.

It is about whether the Democratic coalition still has room for Jewish Democrats whose Zionism is an inseparable part of their identity and/or who those who face a moral dilemma. It is about whether a party built on inclusion can continue to ask one minority to leave a core part of itself at the door.

If you can place yourself in the Jewish experience for just a few minutes, I ask you to read yesterday’s essay, which attempts to explain why so many lifelong Democratic Jews now feel politically homeless: (SEE Yesterday’s Essay Below)

The political question is simple.

Can Dr. El-Sayed win the general election without repairing the damage done to his relationship with Jewish voters?

He now faces not only the inevitable MAGA attacks painting him as an extremist, but also the loss of trust among many Democrats who have faithfully supported this party for decades. Ignoring that reality will not make it disappear.

I administer a private Facebook community of more than 30,000 members—all long-time Democratic Jewish women. Our former name was Jewish Women for Kamala Harris. Today we are Jewish Women ORI.

Many of our members are proud Zionists. Many support a two-state solution. Many oppose the ongoing war in Gaza. Most identify a combination of left of center, center, and also progressive. Our religious tent is wide - from Orthodox to Cultural/Secular. Nearly all grieve the immense civilian suffering throughout the region. At the same time, we remain profoundly shaped by what we witnessed on October 7, a savage massacre of Jews and Israelis, an atrocity with an aftermath that fundamentally altered how many of us understand our own safety.

Despite remaining committed Democrats, I have watched something I never imagined possible. Many members tell me they would rather vote for a Republican than vote for Dr. El-Sayed, even with attaining the majority at stake - notwithstanding the horrific damage of the Trump era Senate! This is unbelievable. But there you have it.

Think about what that means.

These are not Republicans. These are not MAGA voters. These are women who knocked on doors, donated, volunteered, organized, raised significant funds, and voted Democratic for decades. Yet many now feel morally unable to support their own party’s nominees.

They have become politically homeless.

That should alarm every Democratic strategist far more than it presently appears to.

The concerns most often raised include:

• The repeated use of the term “genocide.” Dr. El-Sayed has repeatedly characterized Israel’s military campaign as genocide. Whether one ultimately agrees or disagrees, genocide is a legal determination requiring proof before a competent tribunal. Many Jewish voters view its use as a political slogan wrongly presented as established fact.

• Equating the Israeli government with Hamas. When asked on CNN whether the Israeli government was as evil as Hamas, he answered yes. Many Jewish Democrats, including many who strongly oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu, see this as an unacceptable moral equivalence between a democratic government and a terrorist organization.

• Declining to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. When asked directly, he said he struggled with the question rather than offering an unequivocal answer. For many Jews, support for Jewish self-determination is not a partisan issue but a fundamental expression of their identity. Not one to be politicized or weaponized.

• Response to the Temple Israel attack. After condemning antisemitism following the Hezbollah-inspired attack on a Michigan synagogue, he later linked the attacker’s motivations to events in Lebanon, saying, “hurt people hurt people.” Many Jewish leaders believed this shifted attention away from antisemitism itself and treated local Jews as proxies for Israel. It sparks mistrust and fear.

• Campaign appearances with Hasan Piker. Appearing alongside a figure widely viewed by many Jewish organizations as promoting antiZionist rhetoric reinforced concerns that Jewish voters had already been expressing.

• Criticism of AIPAC. Criticism of AIPAC may well be legitimate in American politics under certain circumstances. However, many Jews view attacks on AIPAC differently when they occur alongside rhetoric questioning Israel’s legitimacy and minimizing Jewish concerns about antisemitism. They are also viewed as out of proportion when ignoring other PACS in the political discourse. In today’s environment, many see AIPAC not simply as another lobby, but as part of the infrastructure protecting Jewish security and Israel’s continued existence. Every one of the above missteps by El-Sayed , can be seen as a justification for AIPAC’s campaign spending.

To be fair, Dr. El-Sayed has consistently stated that he opposes antisemitism and wants Jewish Americans to feel safe. Unfortunately, for many Jewish Democrats, those assurances have not overcome the cumulative impact of the positions above. It signals a duplicity reminiscent of the duplicity we see in Zohran Mamdani today. Divisive and not helpful to the Democratic party. Is this going to be pattern?

If he wishes to win the general election, there is meaningful remedial work to do. Even then it may be too late for many.

More importantly, there is remedial work for the Democratic Party itself.

A Reflection for Democratic Leadership

This is a defining moment.

Centrist and establishment Democrats must do more than publicly reject antisemitism. They must articulate a hopeful vision that embraces the aspirations of younger progressives while making unmistakably clear that Jewish identity—and Zionism—have a legitimate home within the Democratic coalition.

The challenge is not to choose between young progressives and Jewish Democrats.

It is to build a movement broad enough to include both.

A party that asks any minority to abandon a core element of its identity in order to belong has already begun to betray the principles of inclusion it claims to defend.

If Democratic leaders fail to meet this moment—if anti-Zionism becomes an informal litmus test for progressive legitimacy, and if Jewish concerns continue to be treated as politically expendable—they should not be surprised when increasing numbers of Jewish Democrats conclude they are no longer fully welcome in the political home they helped build.

History has taught Jews to recognize that message.

This is the Democratic Party’s opportunity to ensure that no American Jew ever again feels they are being told, implicitly or explicitly:

“Die here—or go home.”

Hear us.

______________________________________________________________

UPDATES:

PREQUEL to DEAR DEMOCRATS:

For generations, American Jews occupied a remarkable place in the United States. We were a tiny minority that managed to become deeply woven into the fabric of American democracy. We helped build institutions, champion civil rights, defend constitutional freedoms, and participated disproportionately in the professions, academia, medicine, science, law, philanthropy, and the arts. We were never free of antisemitism, but we largely believed America had become the exception to Jewish history.

October 7, 2023, shattered that confidence. Exposed the illusion.

The massacre and hostage aftermath was horrific enough. And for many American Jews, the additional shock came in the days that followed. Before Israel had even begun its military response, before the scale of the atrocities was fully understood, celebrations erupted on university campuses and in city streets. The murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and mutilation of civilians were explained away, justified, or celebrated as “resistance.” Suddenly, Jews found themselves expected to contextualize the slaughter of their own people before they were even permitted to mourn.

Something fundamental changed.

October 7 did not create anti-Zionism or antisemitism. Nor did it suddenly radicalize American politics. Rather, it served as a catalyst. It accelerated forces that had already been building and funded for years to provide an opportunity for factions within the so called progressive (socialist) movement to dramatically expand their influence. But was it just them? A clear infiltration of Islamist and Islamist influence added to the mix. Most opportunistically. Low hanging fruit in a society that was being robbed of its democracy by the swing right to MAGA. Perfect fodder – for the taking. Israel became the vehicle. Zionism became the target. Jews increasingly became the collateral damage.

The distinction between criticizing Israeli government policy and rejecting Jewish national self-determination began collapsing in public discourse. Increasingly, Zionism itself, not only (perhaps valid) specific policies, was portrayed as inherently illegitimate. For many Jews, whose identity is intertwined with the existence of Israel regardless of their views on any particular government, this shift felt deeply personal.

This transformation has had consequences beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Israel debate has become a proxy war over the future of the Democratic Party itself. Competing visions of progressivism, identity politics, foreign policy, and American power have converged on the Jewish state. For some activists, Israel is no longer simply another foreign policy issue; it has become a defining ideological litmus test.

In that environment, Jews occupy an increasingly uncomfortable and now what is clearly an unsafe position.

Many American Jews remain committed Democrats. They continue to support civil rights, pluralism, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ equality, immigration, voting rights, and liberal democratic institutions. Many are against the ongoing war in Gaza and want Middle East peace. Yet many now find themselves viewed with suspicion if they also support Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. Jewish identity itself is sometimes filtered through assumptions and libel - about privilege, colonialism, or oppression that leave little room for Jewish history, indigeneity, persecution, or the lived experience of antisemitism.

The result is an unsettling political homelessness.

On one side stands a Republican Party - taken over by MAGA - that many Jews believe has become increasingly undemocratic, autocratic, illiberal and cruel, with attacks on democratic institutions, and a style of politics that historically has rarely provided lasting security for minorities.

On the other side are parts of the progressive movement where Zionism has become morally disqualifying and where antisemitic tropes sometimes reappear cloaked in the language of social justice.

What has emerged since October 7 is more than disagreement over Israel. It is a political opportunity.

For a new generation of antiZionist politicians and activists, the conflict has become the vehicle through which they can redefine what it means to be progressive.

Figures such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed have become emblematic, for many Jewish Democrats, of a movement that increasingly treats Zionism not as one viewpoint among many but as a moral disqualification. The practical effect is to move Jews who identify with Israel from participants in the progressive coalition to suspects within it. Eradicating – erasing our historic role and foundational contributions from the very progressive movement they are now claiming, while excluding us from it. We did not merely belong there. We helped build it. We personified what we are now excluded from.

This is how minorities become isolated. This is how Jews die!

History rarely begins with exclusion by law. It begins with exclusion from belonging. It begins when a minority is told that, to remain welcome, it must abandon an essential part of its identity. For many Jews, Zionism is not something that we are willing to discard. It is there to cement indigenous rights, save us, include us – to insure our very survival. Proven further by this very moment of exclusion. It is the expression of Jewish self-determination after two thousand years of exile, persecution, expulsions, pogroms, and ultimately genocide.

The result is this painful paradox. American Jews who helped build the modern Democratic coalition are now torn. Finding themselves defending not only Israel’s legitimacy but their own place within the movement they helped build and strengthen.

This is also why organizations such as AIPAC have become so consequential. Their growing political engagement is often portrayed solely through the lens of campaign spending. But viewed through another lens, it’s spending is the predictable response of a community that believes its security is eroding. When Jews perceive that support for Israel has become grounds for political exclusion, defending pro-Israel candidates becomes, in their minds, an act of communal self-preservation.

The millions of dollars being spent are not merely about foreign policy. They reflect an effort to preserve something much closer to home: the ability of American Jews to participate fully, openly, and safely in public life without being required to renounce a central component of Jewish identity.

And that leaves many Jewish Democrats in an impossible moral position.

They cannot support a Republican Party they believe threatens the democratic institutions that have allowed minorities, including Jews, to flourish. Yet they also refuse to support Democratic candidates whom they perceive as hostile to Zionism or dismissive of Jewish fears.

They are left politically homeless, though many continue to fight for their place. As we get close to the general election – we are likely to see more capitulation, while now there is an opportunity to fight.

The message they increasingly hear is not spoken aloud, but it echoes through the debate all the same: You may stay—provided you leave your Zionism at the door. And if you cannot... Perhaps you belong somewhere else.

For two thousand years, those words would have carried only one meaning: “Jew, go home.” For the first time in Jewish history, there is a home. That is Israel. It exists not because Jews wished to leave America or any other country, but because history taught them what happens when every other door eventually closes.

Author’s Call to Action

This is a defining moment for the Democratic Party.

Centrist and establishment Democrats must do more than vocally and publicly reject antisemitism, they must articulate a compelling, hopeful vision that embraces the aspirations of younger progressives while making unmistakably clear that Jewish identity and Zionism have a legitimate home within the Democratic coalition.

The challenge is not to choose between young progressives and Jewish Democrats. It is to build a movement broad enough to include both. A party that asks any minority to abandon a core element of its identity in order to belong has already begun to betray the principles of inclusion it claims to defend.

If Democratic leaders fail to meet this moment, if they allow anti-Zionism to become a litmus test for progressive legitimacy and continue to treat the concerns of Jewish Democrats as politically expendable, they should not be surprised when many Jews conclude they are no longer fully welcome in the political home they helped build.

History has taught Jews to recognize that message.

This is the Democratic Party’s opportunity to ensure that no American Jew ever again feels they are being told, implicitly or explicitly:

“Go home.”

Two were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two were German militants from the Revolutionary Cells. After diverting the aircraft through Libya, they landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where they found an enthusiastic ally in the murderous dictator, Idi Amin.

Inside that old terminal, history took a chilling turn. The terrorists separated the Israeli and Jewish passengers from the others, recalling the selections that had become among the defining horrors of the Holocaust.

Uganda’s soldiers guarded the terminal while the hostages remained captive, trapped between terrorist fanaticism and the calculated cruelty of Idi Amin.

What followed changed history.

On the night of July 4, Israeli commandos flew more than 2,500 miles into hostile territory in one of the most daring hostage rescue missions ever undertaken. More than one hundred hostages were rescued. The hijackers were killed. Ugandan fighter jets were destroyed to prevent pursuit.

One Israeli soldier did not return home. Hostages died.*

Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, commander of the assault, was fatally wounded while leading the rescue.

Nearly fifty years later, his name still symbolizes courage, sacrifice, and a nation’s determination never to abandon its people.

A Monument in Entebbe

Today, at Entebbe Airport, Uganda unveiled a new monument celebrating Yoni Netanyahu. The very place where terrorists once held innocent civilians, now bears a permanent tribute to the man who led their rescue.

The events at Entebbe left an indelible mark not only on Israel, but on the Jewish people and on the Netanyahu family itself. They reinforced a national ethos that no Israeli should ever be abandoned to terrorism, wherever they may be. For Israel the loss of Yoni was a national tragedy and for Benjamin Netanyahu, the loss of his older brother was a deeply personal one that has undoubtedly shaped his understanding of leadership, security, hostages and Israel’s commitment to the Jewish people.

Nearly five decades later, the barbaric Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, with the abduction of approximately 250 people into Gaza, struck at the very heart of that ethos. Whether one supports or opposes Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, it is impossible to understand the country’s response without understanding Entebbe.

Operation Entebbe was more than a military success. It became a national promise that Israel would go to extraordinary lengths to bring its people home. On October 7^th, the terrorists knew this! Their decision to take that many innocent civilians spanning - baby to elderly, male to female, - and with the accompanying cruelty, was a calculated call to the martyrdom they openly recorded, publicized, and cherished – all translating to an obvious tactic, the orchestrated civilian sacrifice - even of their own Palestinians in Gaza. They knew who was at helm, and they knew the response!

More Than History

Now the monument to his brother is more than a memorial. It is an indictment. An indictment of terrorism. An indictment of hostage taking. An indictment of those governments that enable, fund, or shelter terrorists, and all who prop it up.

Entebbe reminds us that terrorism is not resistance. It is never merely an act of violence. The platforms that enable it depend upon those willing to justify it, facilitate it, or provide it with sanctuary.

That lesson has not grown old. It remains painfully relevant.

When Hamas crossed into Israel on October 7, murdering, maiming, raping, mutilating civilians, and abducting approximately 250 people, they also attacked one of the deepest covenants between the State of Israel and its people: The promise that Israel will go to the ultimate length to “bring them home.”

Now woven into Israel’s national identity, Entebbe helped define that promise almost fifty years earlier. The world saw a nation willing to cross continents to rescue innocent Jews.

Uganda’s Other Story

Yet there is another reason this monument matters. People who follow Israel may now find themselves looking more closely at Uganda. They should. Because Uganda’s story did not end with Idi Amin.

For nearly four decades, President Yoweri Museveni has ruled Uganda. What began with promises of liberation and democratic renewal has steadily given way to political repression, shrinking civic space, and the persecution of dissent.

An aging Dr. Kizza Besigye, one of Uganda’s most prominent presidential election opposition figures, remains imprisoned on trumped up treason charges, despite being in ICU after a collapse in a Ugandan court this past week.

Bobi Wine, a former MP and recent presidential candidate, has repeatedly faced arrests, violence, and intimidation in his attempts to stand for office.

Journalists continue to suffer persecution for honest reporting, several sought asylum abroad. Civil society faces increasing restrictions. LGBTQI Ugandans endure some of the harshest persecution on the African continent, with the recent signing by Museveni of what has become known as “The Kill the Gays Bill,” an anti-homosexuality act that carries life in prison for consensual same-sex relations, and the death penalty for so called “aggravated homosexuality.”

These stories remain buried, even by the Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani, who while holding dual citizenship to include the land of his birth, Uganda, seems hellbent on his selective performances when it comes to casting light on foreign leaders.

Looking Beyond Israel

There is an irony here. A monument honoring one of Israel’s greatest military heroes may cause many people to pay attention to Uganda for the first time. If that happens, I hope they do not stop with the story of Entebbe. I hope they ask what freedom looks like in Uganda today. I hope they learn about the violent crackdowns on political opposition, about those imprisoned for opposing the government. I hope they hear the voices of LGBTQI+ Ugandans, living in hiding, and fleeing the persecution and violence. I hope they understand that the struggle against oppression in Uganda did not end in 1976. The post Amin struggle simply changed form.

I hope they also look beyond the selectiveness that recently has shaped global outrage. Beyond the silence that greets some, while others command endless attention. Beyond the political calculations and opportunism of leaders, and the weaponization of fashionable causes by protesters, and the unequal spotlight cast by much of the world’s media.

Uganda must be seen not only when Israel enters the story. Its political prisoners, its persecuted minorities, and its people yearning for freedom ought to matter on their own.

This paragraph can scarcely capture the thoughts it stirs within me. It merely scratches the surface of a much larger conversation about moral consistency, selective conscience, and the obligation to care about injustice wherever it occurs. There is a danger in allowing our compassion and attention to become selective. When human rights become fashionable in one place and invisible in another, they cease to be universal. They become political. There are only so many hours in a day, so many headlines, so much public energy, and so much political will. When an overwhelming share of that attention is directed toward one conflict, people suffering elsewhere inevitably receive less of all of it. They become less visible, less advocated for, and less protected. The universality of human rights is diminished not because those rights disappear, but because our willingness to defend them becomes selective.

Human rights lose their universality when our concern is measured by the popularity of the cause.

The Reflection

The Yoni Netanyahu monument reminds us of extraordinary courage. It reminds us that terrorism should never be romanticized. It reminds us that democracies have both the right and the obligation to defend innocent lives. Perhaps it can do something else …. more …

Perhaps it can encourage those who came looking at Israel to also look at Uganda and beyond. Because history does not belong only to those we memorialize. It also belongs to those still waiting for the freedoms they were promised. Bronze remembers. The question is whether we will and how we will honor such memory.

*IN MEMORY OF THE HOSTAGES WHO DIED IN ENTEBBE:
Dora Bloch, Jean-Jaques Maimoni, Pasco Cohen, Ida Borochovitch
May their memories be a blessing.

At the International AIDS Society Conference in Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s largest and most respected global health conferences, attended by tens of thousands of scientists, physicians, advocates, and government officials, the United States Department of State, displayed a map of Africa that misplaced several countries.

The map showed Mozambique in the Horn of Africa, Ivory Coast to the East instead near the North West, the complete opposite side of the continent, and Nigeria landlocked in the space of Niger, a totally different country.

This was not a social media meme. It was not a school geography mistake. It was the United States of America State Department mistake, represented on one of the world’s biggest international stages.

Embarrassing does not cut it!

When I immigrated from South Africa to the United States more than forty years ago, one of the first things that struck me was how little geography American children were taught. Coming from a country where we learned continents, capitals, neighboring states, rivers, and mountain ranges as part of compulsory schooling, I found it astonishing that so many people could barely locate countries beyond America’s borders.

At the time, I reassured myself that while the average citizen might not know where every country was, surely those entrusted with America’s foreign affairs did. Surely the officials working in the U.S. Department of State, the very department responsible for diplomacy and engagement with the rest of the world, would know the geography of the countries with which they deal.

Apparently, that assumption was misplaced.

My first reaction on seeing Malawi relocated hundreds of miles from its actual location was almost instinctive: Who is supplying the maps? More importantly, what does it say about an administration when such a glaring error survives every layer of review before being displayed at one of the world’s premier international conferences?

My thoughts immediately turned to a map related tragedy reported earlier this year. Preliminary investigations into the U.S. strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, suggest that outdated intelligence and obsolete targeting data may have caused military planners to identify the school as a Revolutionary Guard facility that no longer existed. More than a hundred children were killed. The investigation is ongoing, but if the reporting proves correct, the consequences of failing to update basic geographic information are measured not merely in embarrassment, but in human lives.

Today I serve as a country conditions expert witness in U.S. immigration courts, specializing in African countries and the persecution of LGBTQI+ asylum seekers. My work requires an intimate knowledge of African geography, politics, law, history, and human rights conditions. Every year I rely heavily on the U.S. Department of State’s Human Rights Reports, which for decades have been regarded as among the world’s most comprehensive governmental assessments of human rights practices. No more…

Those reports have long reflected painstaking research, careful documentation, and detailed analysis. Whether one agreed with every conclusion or not, they represented serious work by serious professionals.

Since the Trump administration returned to office, I have watched these reports deteriorate into pale shadows of what they once were. Important detail has disappeared. Entire section disappeared. Analysis has been stripped away. Nuance has been replaced by superficial summaries. For those of us whose work depends upon accurate country information, sometimes in life-or-death asylum cases, the decline is not merely disappointing. It is alarming.

The misplaced Malawi – Nigeria - Ivory Coast - Mozambique - are therefore not simply a cartographic error. It could have practical application if some other trusting unknowing individual, who did not get schooled in geography, builds on it. Lest we forget the Tik Tok videos of Americans in Times Square being asked - “What country is Moscow in?” - Answer “Isn’t it in Paris!” I kid you not!

This goes further - it is reflective of a lot more: An administration that too often appears indifferent to expertise, dismissive of scholarship, and unconcerned with the standards that once defined American professionalism. Competence has become optional. Accuracy has become negotiable.

We have always trusted the State Department, Through many Republican and Democratic administrations. It has been a solid agency, with career non-partisan employees, many experts, and so many forced out during this administration.

Now relying on trust can have extraordinary consequences.

I am reminded of an unforgettable moment of trust. Where lack of knowledge helmed that trust. Admittedly I do not know sign language. Mea culpa! Back in 2013 I was in South Africa for some work related to the Mandela Foundation. That same week Nelson Mandela passed away. I bore witness to the extraordinary and profoundly important memorial service at a huge Johannesburg stadium. President Barack Obama, world leaders, and dignitaries addressed millions watching around the globe. A man stood on stage solemnly interpreting the proceedings in to South African Sign Language. His name was Thamsanqa Jantjie. He had been interpreting significant events for years. He was the go-to-guy.

To almost everyone watching, his performance looked entirely convincing. He wore the official credentials. He stood where an interpreter was expected to stand. His gestures appeared fluid and deliberate. There was no reason for the overwhelming majority of viewers to question what they were seeing. Only the Deaf community knew immediately that something was terribly wrong.

Jantjie was not interpreting the speeches. He was making random, incoherent gestures that bore no resemblance to recognized sign language. Deaf viewers described his performance as incomprehensible, meaningless movements presented with complete confidence. What the rest of the world accepted as professional interpretation was, in reality, an illusion of competence.

The lesson has stayed with me for years. Jantjie barely knew a single sign and we – the ignorant- went along for the ride. We trusted what we were seeing because we lacked the knowledge to recognize that it was nonsense.

Need I say more?

Author’s Note: Parents have an important role to play. Buy an old-fashioned globe. Put it in your front hallway or your living room. Each day, ask your children to find one different country. Learn together where it is, who lives there, what language they speak, and why that country matters. Turn curiosity into a family habit.

To give a sense of the race from a Congressional endorsement perspective, Rep Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal endorses Wahab while Rep. Zoe Lofgren endorses Hernandez. Notably Lofgren is a California representative and Jayapal represents Washington state in Congress.

So Indivisible’s endorsement of State Senator Aisha Wahab in California’s 14th Congressional District Special Election deserves closer scrutiny.

The endorsement praises Wahab’s record on affordable housing, healthcare, and working families. Those are legitimate reasons to support a candidate. Yet when Indivisible turns to explain why it rejected her opponent, former Dublin Mayor Melissa Hernandez, who asserts similarly, the distinction becomes alarmingly narrow.

Indivisible states in the press statement:

“Meanwhile, her opponent, Melissa Hernandez, has continued to accept campaign contributions from special interests and other rich donors. While Hernandez is accountable to her donors, Aisha will be accountable to the people of California’s 14th congressional district.”

This sentence is presented as though it settles the matter. Huh? Nope!

The statement creates a false choice between a candidate allegedly accountable to “special interests” and another accountable only to “the people.” That may be compelling campaign rhetoric, but it is not an accurate description of how democratic politics actually works.

Every successful political campaign depends upon organized support. Candidates receive backing from donors, political action committees, labor unions, advocacy organizations, grassroots activists, ideological movements, professional associations, and community leaders. Financial support is only one form of political influence. Volunteers, endorsements, activist networks, voter mobilization organizations, and issue-based coalitions all seek to elect candidates whose values align with their own.

Those organizations are, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, special interests. That does not make them illegitimate. It simply makes them INTERESTS!!!

The question therefore is not whether a candidate has organized interests behind them. Every serious candidate does. The real questions are: Who supports them? Why do they support them? How transparent is that support? And how might those relationships influence public policy? Example – CAIR ! A feasible silent support yet extremely well endowed in influence. It only takes a newsletter with a big mail list.

Indivisible never asks those questions of Aisha Wahab. Instead, it assumes that because her campaign is described as “grassroots,” she is accountable only to “the people.”

We must ask who are “the people”?

Grassroots organizations are not politically neutral. They consist of citizens who organize around shared priorities and seek to influence elections. They advocate for specific policies, endorse candidates, raise money, mobilize volunteers, and expect elected officials to advance the causes they support.

They are no less organized interests simply because they operate under the banner of activism rather than corporate lobbying.

To portray one candidate as beholden to organized interests while presenting another as accountable only to “the people” is therefore misleading. The distinction is rhetorical rather than analytical.

Indeed, every elected official is ultimately accountable to multiple constituencies simultaneously: They are accountable to the voters who elect them. They are accountable to the organizations that mobilize support on their behalf. They are accountable to the coalitions that invest their time, money, and political capital in their campaigns. And, if they are successful public servants, they are accountable to all of the constituents they represent, including those who did not vote for them.

That represents a democracy.

What is particularly striking about Indivisible’s endorsement is not simply what it says, but what it leaves unsaid.

The organization never identifies the substantive policy differences that supposedly make Wahab the superior candidate. Beyond generalized references to “working families” and “fighting fascism,” there is little discussion of where the candidates meaningfully diverge. Based on my research I am not sure they diverge here at all. One cannot always see campaign emphasis as differences.

If there are significant differences over foreign policy, Israel, national security, policing, immigration, energy, or other major issues, voters deserve to know that. If those policy positions played an important role in Indivisible’s endorsement decision, transparency would require saying so openly rather than reducing the distinction to campaign finance rhetoric.

Instead, the endorsement relies almost entirely upon a veiled moral purity contest: Melissa Hernandez answers to donors; Aisha Wahab answers to “the people.” That framing is misleading.

Ironically, Indivisible itself acknowledges that endorsements are driven by organized interests. It proudly explains that endorsements originate with local Indivisible chapters, receive supermajority support from Indivisible members, and are subject to ideological eligibility requirements. It further states that candidates receiving campaign donations from AIPAC, cryptocurrency interests, or what it describes as “the other funders of fascism” are categorically ineligible for endorsement.

Whether one agrees with those criteria or not, they plainly demonstrate that Indivisible is itself an organized political advocacy organization pursuing particular ideological objectives.

This becomes problematic when an organization portrays its preferred candidates as uniquely accountable to “the people” while characterizing others as uniquely accountable to “special interests.”

I reiterate – is there a distinction when both candidates are supported by constituencies with expectations. Both receive political backing from individuals and organizations that share their priorities. Both will face pressures from the coalitions that helped elect them.

Here is the crux: Maybe the difference lies not in whether special interests exist, but in which interests are being represented and whether voters are given an honest account of that reality.

Democracy is strengthened by transparency, not slogans. If policy differences drive endorsements, say so. If ideological commitments shape candidate selection, acknowledge them.

But suggesting that one candidate serves only “the people” while another serves only “special interests” asks voters to accept a political fairy tale instead of the far more complicated truth.

This pushes me NOT to trust Indivisible and their endorsements. That is a shame because there may be some I could agree with!

’We the people’ deserve more - the organizations which purport to prop up Democracy should deploy the most basic tools of democracy - TRANSPARENCY.