Opinion | No, All Politics Everywhere Is Not About the Gaza War, Zionists and Antisemites

Credit: Menahem Kahana / AFP

Israelis are protesting against the war in Gaza outside the Knesset on Thursday. Many Israelis think that Israel was forced to embark on a justified war in Gaza. Due to the corruption of its leaders and the folly of its generals, it has been criminally prosecuting that war.

Some Israeli officials are enthusiastic at the success of far-right parties in last weekend's European Parliament elections, so Amir Tibon informs us in this newspaper. They believe that along with the losses of the parties of the Greens bloc, it will temper European initiatives to sanction Israel and recognize a Palestinian state.

Our buffoonish Foreign Minister Israel Katz (or whoever operates his X account) certainly shares that feeling. In a departure from diplomatic niceties, he posted a cartoon of the prime minister of Spain and his deputy covered in egg, and he crows at the failure of their left-wing parties in the European elections. "It turns out that supporting Hamas murderers and rapists is not electorally profitable," Katz wrote.

It's easy to dismiss this as a misreading of European politics. Most voters in the European Union's 27 member-states don't see them being as crucial as their national elections, and may use them to lodge a protest vote against their incumbent leaders. In France, the main beneficiaries of this were Marine Le Pen's hard-right National Rally party, but in most of the other countries, including Spain, the far-right barely gained, and some lost ground. The overall picture shows a slight shift to the right, which may change the makeup of the current coalition, though the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, a German center-right politician, will probably remain in charge.

Supporters of the French far-right National Rally party react after the polls closed during the European Parliament elections, in Paris last week.Credit: Sarah Meyssonnier / REUTERS

Under von der Leyen and whatever coalition she cobbles together, Israel has little to worry about from the EU. Some diplomatically inconsequential European countries like Spain, Norway, and Ireland may make the empty gesture of recognizing a nonexistent Palestinian state, but any Europe-wide movement to sanction Israel wasn't on the cards. Josep Borell, the EU's foreign minister, or to use his grand title High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has some harsh-sounding words of criticism, but as a Spanish socialist, he has little real power in any of the main European governments and is unlikely to keep his job in the post-election European Commission anyway.

The provincial Israeli outlook that somehow everything that happens somewhere in the world revolves around them makes Israeli politicians think the European elections were somehow about us as well, while in reality Israel, Gaza, and this war are so far down the European agenda, it's not even there. This is to a large degree true of the upcoming elections in Britain and the United States. Despite the incredibly disproportionate media attention to the electorally insignificant encampments on campuses and the attempts by rabble-rousers to use Gaza as a wedge issue to shift disaffected Muslim voters, any reliable survey shows that these are not major issues for voters.

In Britain's general election, Labour is on the verge of a landslide win, which won't be affected even if it loses a seat or two because of soon-to-be premier Keir Starmer's low-key support for Israel and refusal to be sucked into the controversy over a war on which Britain has zero influence. He has won many more seats by detoxifying his party from the antisemitism of the "pro-Palestinian" former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, than he could ever gain from making the war into a major issue on the campaign trail.

Likewise, the Democrats, if Joe Biden indeed loses in November, will have a long list of electoral and societal reasons, and above all the bizarre match-up between two physically and mentally unfit candidates, for their defeat. Biden's valiant support of Israel since October 7 and his indefatigable efforts to bring about a cease-fire will be the least of them.

A screengrab of an X post by Israel's Foreign Minister Israel KatzCredit: X

But it's not just Israeli populists like Katz who see foreign politicians in a binary framework of "pro-Israel" or "pro-Hamas." In the media bubbles we inhabit – and yes, if you're reading this column in Haaretz's English edition, you are also in one of those bubbles where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies such an inordinate space – so many, on both sides, are similarly afflicted. It's one of the least appealing characteristics of populist politics in our age, both the right and left-wing brands, to force public figures who so obviously have no idea about the facts on the ground into these boxes of "Zionists" and "antisemites," "for" or "against" Palestinians and Israelis.

It's so pervasive that in recent days, politicians and pundits in New York have had to preface their condemnation of targeted attacks of Jews in Brooklyn with the caveat that they can both call out antisemitism and criticize Israel at the same time. Why does doing the one even necessitate mentioning the other?

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian-American in Congress, speaks at an event to call for a cease-fire in the hostilities by Israel in Gaza, at the Capitol in Washington earlier this year. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite /AP

Surely a Congress member or major journalist can stand up for their constituents and neighbors without having to virtue-check their positions on a conflict taking place 10,000 kilometers away. But they have to because they are also in that media bubble where everyone has to be put in one of the camps.

Actual elections, where millions of real people with real lives who don't live in these bubbles prove again and again that this conflict, which we feel consumes our entire being, is of consequence only to a small minority and that most voters appreciate candidates who spend their campaigns dealing with issues that actually matter to them. But in these bubbles we occupy, the compulsion to divide everyone like soccer supporters stifles attempts to express any sort of reasonable, nuanced position.

Many of us, especially those who are directly impacted by this war, hold those positions and think that Israel was forced to embark on a justified war in Gaza, but, due to the corruption of its leaders and folly of its generals, has been prosecuting that war in a criminal fashion. Or that the Palestinians have been denied their rights for far too long but Hamas has only served to bring further destruction and most likely more decades of statelessness upon them.