The Line We Keep Drawing

I’ve been sitting with two stories from the past week.

The first is Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary against Haley Stevens, despite AIPAC and its affiliated groups spending close to $30 million to stop him—their largest single-race investment ever. Outside money poured nearly $50 million into her campaign. Grossly outspent, El-Sayed ran a traditional, grassroots-focused campaign. And he won.

The second is a podcast. Jon Stewart sat across from Democratic Senator John Fetterman and asked whether he could agree with his own party 90% of the time and still walk away over Israel. Fetterman’s answer was immediate: “I can’t ever turn my back to Israel.” Stewart didn’t let it go, pointing out that this is a weird line to draw—and one that isn’t really about Israel once Fetterman began framing it around “the Jewish community.” Stewart had to remind him: the Jewish community and Israel are not the same thing.

The people insisting most strongly on equating Israel with American Jewish identity right now aren’t doing so because they’ve weighed the politics and concluded it’s strategically sound. Many simply haven’t realized until recently that the ground has shifted—that for a growing number of American Jews, especially younger ones, Israel is one issue among many, and often not the most urgent one. I don’t say this out of cynicism; I say it because it’s true, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

What concerns me most is what is happening here in these United States. We are watching an executive branch consolidate power while a co-equal branch of government, Congress, tasked with checking the executive branch has abdicated its responsibility. We have a healthcare system failing people daily. We have a small class of ultra-wealthy individuals wielding immense control over our economy and elections. These are the immediate crises in front of us. When Israel becomes the baseline threshold before any of that can be addressed, we are choosing the wrong emergency.

I don’t say any of this to resolve deep disagreements about what Israel should be, what safety for Jews requires, or what the war in Gaza means and has cost. Those are real, heavy questions, and I have no interest in flattening them. What I am naming is something narrower: the reflex to make Israel a precondition, the topic that must be settled before we can talk about anything else, And it is becoming a costly choice—for the party many of us have called home in this two-party system, and for the place of American Jews within the movements and coalitions we care about.

Jewish tradition has never demanded total agreement before collective action. Machloket l’shem shamayim—disagreement for the sake of heaven—assumes ongoing disagreement as a condition of healthy relationship, not an obstacle to it. I don’t need everyone in my community to be on the same page concerning Israel. I do need us to stop treating it as the one issue that gets to override every other value we claim to hold.

We can disagree about Israel and still organize together, vote together, create a better democracy together, and fight for the people being harmed right here. We should not be drawing these lines in the sand. If we keep drawing this particular line through every coalition we need to build, we will lose.

(A note before I start: I drafted most of this before the most recent primaries, so bear with me if the timeline feels slightly behind the news.)