Finger-in-the-Wind Politics and the Israel Scapegoat

There are certain politicians who treat principle the way sailors treat weather: something to be monitored carefully so the sails can be adjusted accordingly. Convictions are less a compass than a windsock. When the wind shifts, so do their positions.

In American politics today, Israel has become one of the most reliable barometers of that wind.

Consider the recent rhetoric of California Governor Gavin Newsom. For years, Newsom spoke warmly about Israel. He praised its democratic character and emphasized the importance of the U.S.–Israel alliance. Like many Democrats of his generation, he correctly described Israel as a partner in innovation, security, and shared democratic values.

Now, as the political winds within parts of the Democratic coalition shift, so has his tone. Israel is suddenly described by Newsom as an apartheid state — a claim that collapses upon even the most basic glance at reality. Israel’s Arab citizens vote, serve in parliament, sit on the Supreme Court, attend universities, and participate fully in public life. The charge of apartheid is not a serious description of Israeli society; it is a political slogan designed to delegitimize it.

The alliance itself is now openly questioned. And Newsom has begun announcing that he has “never accepted and never will accept donations from AIPAC,” as though engagement with a mainstream American pro-Israel advocacy organization were something morally suspect.

This line of attack is hardly new. For decades, critics have framed AIPAC not simply as a lobbying organization — which it is, like countless other advocacy groups in Washington — but as a sinister symbol of Jewish political influence. The insinuation is rarely subtle: that American support for Israel cannot possibly arise from shared interests, democratic values, or strategic realities. It must instead be the product of something nefarious or illicit.

That accusation has a long and ugly pedigree.

But the shift in Newsom’s rhetoric tells us far more about the political winds swirling inside the Democratic Party than it does about Israel. Newsom has long been regarded as a gifted political weathervane. He reads currents quickly and adjusts accordingly. When hostility toward Israel becomes a badge of ideological credibility in certain activist circles, a politician with national ambitions notices.

Those same winds help explain another curious development: the recent effort by Kamala Harris and her allies to blame her electoral defeat on the claim that the Biden administration was “too pro-Israel.”

This explanation collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

The 2024 election was dominated by domestic concerns. Poll after poll — from Gallup, Pew, AP VoteCast and others — showed voters focused overwhelmingly on bread-and-butter issues: inflation, the cost of living, economic anxiety, immigration and crime. Foreign policy ranked far lower among voter priorities. The overwhelming majority of Americans did not go to the ballot box thinking about Gaza or Jerusalem. They were thinking about grocery bills, mortgage rates, and whether their children would have better opportunities than they did.

Blaming Israel for an electoral defeat therefore serves a convenient political function. It avoids confronting the far more uncomfortable reality that voters often punish the party in power for economic frustration and policy failures closer to home.

It is also historically familiar.

When leaders struggle to explain political setbacks, Jews — and in the modern era the Jewish state — have often provided a convenient answer.

What is particularly striking in this case is that the Biden-Harris administration was not “too pro-Israel.” If anything, it attempted an impossible balancing act. It sought to reassure traditional Democratic voters and independents who support the U.S.–Israel alliance while simultaneously trying to appease an increasingly vocal faction of the party that views Israel through the distorted lens of settler-colonial ideology and American racial politics.

The result satisfied almost no one.

Pro-Israel voters saw an administration frequently willing to pressure Israel publicly, delay weapons shipments, and frame Israel’s war against Hamas primarily through the language of restraint. Meanwhile anti-Israel activists concluded that any support for Israel at all represented complicity with pure evil.

Trying to occupy two such mutually exclusive political universes rarely ends well.

Once that impossible balancing act collapses, the temptation is to search for a simpler explanation — and a convenient scapegoat. Historically, Jews and Israel have filled that role with remarkable consistency.

Israel occupies a peculiar place in global political discourse. Rather than being treated as a small, embattled country confronting difficult security choices in a hostile region filled with authoritarian regimes, militant movements, and chronic instability, it often becomes a symbolic stage upon which other societies project their ideological struggles. Israel is cast as whatever villain the moment requires: colonial outpost, imperial proxy, theological conspirator, or geopolitical puppet master.

The accusations shift. The structure remains.

This is why remarkably similar claims can now be heard from radically different ideological corners. On parts of the populist right, figures like Tucker Carlson increasingly promote conspiratorial claims that Jews or Israel secretly manipulate American foreign policy. Within the progressive left, the rhetoric is only slightly different while the logic is strikingly familiar. Members of Congress such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have suggested that American support for Israel is driven by political pressure and the “Benjamins” rather than national interest, while others portray Israel as the central destabilizing force in global politics — ignoring the many conflicts worldwide, including throughout the Middle East, that have nothing to do with Israel at all.

In both cases, Israel becomes a convenient explanatory device. If wars erupt, if elections are lost, if political movements falter, the cause can be located somewhere convenient to blame.

That story has circulated in Western political life for generations.

The characters change. The language evolves. But the underlying accusation remains remarkably durable: that Jews or the Jewish state wield a mysterious or underhanded power capable of bending nations to their will — and that the frustrations of ordinary citizens can therefore be traced back to them.

From the conspiratorial fantasies of nineteenth-century Europe to the propaganda of Soviet anti-Zionism to the ideological narratives circulating online today, the pattern is unmistakable.

Which brings us back to Gavin Newsom.

Finger-in-the-wind politics may help politicians navigate the gusts of public opinion. But scapegoating Jews or Israel has never been a sign of political courage or intellectual seriousness. It is among the oldest shortcuts in political blame-shifting.

And the fact that a prominent American governor in America’s largest state now seems eager to stake out territory in the anti-Israel corner of his party says something revealing about where he believes the winds are blowing.

When leaders run short of answers, they often look for someone convenient to blame.

For a very long time in Western political life, that someone has all too often been the Jews — and today, the Jewish state.