Why the American Left Is So Split on Israel

Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas in Gaza is provoking a crisis of unity among Democrats.

Few appearances before Congress in 2023 will have provoked a stronger reaction than those of the presidents from three of the most prestigious universities in the United States — if not the world — last week.

The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania were called to testify and respond to persistent criticism leveled against them since October that they are doing too little to counter antisemitic speech and actions on their campuses. Unfortunately, their response went viral.

One exchange that stood out in particular took place between Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik and Elizabeth Magill from Penn. Asked repeatedly by the congresswoman to state whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people went against Penn’s code of conduct, Magill tried to dodge the question and never offered a frank response. At one point, Magill said that such statements “could” constitute harassment if people making the statements acted on them. In other words, presumably, if they actively committed genocide.

As of Dec. 10, that exchange had been viewed on X, formerly Twitter, more than 100 million times.

Reaction was swift. The White House issued a statement within 24 hours, clearly distancing itself from Magill’s remarks. And the newly elected Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish, declared that he had lost confidence in the university president. Magill announced her resignation that weekend.

This episode has highlighted two major dynamics. First, it showed the extent of the inconsistency within certain “elite” establishments, which have spent the last decade prioritizing diversity and inclusion, often to the detriment of freedom of expression.

Second, the episode showed how the Israel-Hamas crisis continues to divide the Democratic Party and, more broadly, the American left like no other issue today. Articles, reporting and polling have revealed that this fissure has been widening for weeks, leading to one important and fundamental question: Why?

The answer is certainly multifaceted. That being said, two primary clues to the answer merit discussion.

The first is actually technological in nature. The Israeli lobby in the U.S. has been particularly powerful and well organized for decades. Major institutions, whether traditional media or political parties, have generally taken a pro-Israel stance that is rarely questioned. However, the explosion in the number of media platforms and the spike in parallel sources of information have exposed millions of Americans — especially the younger generations — to content sharply critical of the Jewish state.

The current Israeli response to the Oct. 7 attacks is a prime example of this. Every minute of every day, videos and reports share atrocities endured by Palestinian civilians. Controlling the message is not what it used to be.

The second clue is more ideological in nature. A growing share of the American left, notably on college campuses, view sociopolitical dynamics as being relationships of oppression between groups, with oppressors and the oppressed.

We saw this, for example, in the last decade with the Occupy Wall Street movement and the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, where a recurring theme was the oppression of the working class by the financial elite, commonly called the “1 Percent.”

We saw this in the passionate opposition to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. After Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, the opposition rooted itself in a much broader critique of the patriarchal oppression of the predominantly female voices that pose a threat to it.

We also saw this dynamic in the massive demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020, where the central issue was the white majority oppression of African Americans.

If you transpose this approach to the Israel-Palestine crisis, Israel is the oppressor, and Palestine is the oppressed.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, a key figure of the American intellectual left, wove a parallel when he returned from the region last month. He justified his critical stance toward Israel by saying that he recognized in the Israeli treatment of Palestinians what the American government has subjected Black Americans to throughout U.S. history.

But of course, this perspective is not unanimous, even on the left. The week that the three university presidents appeared before the House of Representatives, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, flanked by an Israeli flag, delivered a passionate, tearful, pro-Israel speech before the United Nations.

Gillibrand has held her seat since 2009, filling the vacancy left by Hillary Clinton, who was named to be U.S. secretary of state. That very week, Clinton herself came out publicly to charge that it was “outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and in their hearts to the victims of Hamas.”

The Israel-Palestine conflict has been intractable for generations. Today, one has to wonder if this dispute about the conflict is becoming so, as well.