Hatred Opened the Door. A Missed Victory Held It Open.

Tuesday’s midterm results should alarm anyone who knows Jewish history, understands antisemitism or recognizes why Israel is central to the identity of the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews.

For me, the disaster isn’t that Democrats won or Republicans lost. It’s that politicians who demonize Israel, deny Jewish self-determination and explain away antisemitism are finding an increasingly receptive electorate in the world’s most important democracy.

Whatever the Democratic Socialists of America and their growing roster of allies insist, Zionism is not “colonialism.” It is the national liberation movement of an indigenous people who reclaimed sovereignty in their ancestral homeland after nearly two thousand years of actual colonialism in that land. Israel is the one country where Jews don’t depend on others’ goodwill for their collective survival. The last few centuries have taught us, at the cost of millions of lives, what that dependence means.

The political parties are not equal

Consider who just won Senate seats. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed beat Mike Rogers after a campaign that leaned heavily on demonizing one predominantly Jewish state and one predominantly Jewish-American lobby.

In Maine, Troy Jackson unseated Susan Collins. In two decades of state politics, Jackson said almost nothing about Israel. Then, vying to replace Graham Platner, with a Nazi SS tattoo, as the nominee, he declared that “anybody with eyes and a heart” knows Israel is “committing genocide in Gaza” and pledged never to vote for military aid to the Jewish state. In September he called it “unfortunate” that Jewish Mainers reject the label. He apologized for that remark. He kept the libel.

Every congregational rabbi in Maine signed a statement urging the state’s leaders to stop pushing the genocide libel. One Waterville rabbi said the charge had become a currency for acquiring power in Maine’s Democratic Party.

Both parties have people who understand Jewish history and defend Israel’s right to exist, and both have people who demonize it and traffic in antisemitic tropes. But pretending the parties are equally afflicted is dishonest. It is the Democratic Party that has a growing, increasingly influential faction for whom the Jewish state’s existence is itself the offense. Pro-Israel Democrats, fighting an increasingly lonely battle inside their own party, have warned about this for years.

Criticism of Israel isn’t the problem. Israelis criticize their government more fiercely than almost anyone. The problem is singling out the world’s only Jewish state for elimination, and recycling libelous accusations against Jews that Europe knew long before modern Zionism. Tuesday showed that politicians who embrace or excuse those ideas increasingly pay no price.

The war Trump walked away from

Antisemitism alone doesn’t explain how we got here. Republicans, especially those who have defended every Trump decision on Iran, must confront the rest.

To be fair, I am genuinely grateful the President did what no American president before him was willing to do: take the fight directly to the Iranian regime and the ballistic missile umbrella it was building to shield its nuclear program. I still hope the effort to isolate the regime and choke off its oil sales worldwide will bring it down. But that doesn’t change my judgment of how he handled what came next.

When the war began on Feb. 28, America and Israel had an extraordinary opportunity. The world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism was being battered and its leadership exposed. Iranians yearning for freedom had reason to believe the regime might fall.

Within a week, Trump began squandering it. In early March, Iranian Kurdish opposition fighters based in Iraq were preparing, reportedly with American and Israeli backing, to open a ground front. On March 5, Trump said he’d be “all for it.” Two days later, reportedly after an angry call from Turkey’s President Erdoğan, he ruled it out because the war was “complicated enough.” Apparently, helping Iranians overthrow the theocrats who have brutalized them for nearly half a century was a complication we could do without.

Then came the bigger mistake. With Iran badly weakened, Trump agreed to an April 8 ceasefire and negotiations, as if mullahs whose rule rests on revolutionary fanaticism, not their people’s welfare, would surrender at the table what they refused to surrender on the battlefield.

They didn’t. The ceasefire was punctuated by repeated fighting. In July, after Iranian attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, American forces struck more than 80 targets and Trump declared the ceasefire “over.” Yet for months he told Americans we had won, even suggesting regime change had effectively occurred. But the regime that ruled Iran before the war still rules it. Claiming otherwise appears either dishonest or detached from reality.

American and Israeli forces achieved real military successes. But military success is not strategic victory. A regime that survives to rebuild, rearm, and resume its terror campaign and its missile and nuclear programs has not been defeated.

That is where Trump’s failure meets Tuesday’s results. CBS News reported Republicans faced an unpopular war in Iran and high gas prices. Jackson attacked both Collins and Trump over the war’s damage to Maine’s economy. Every candidate who claims that supporting Israel drags America into costly Middle Eastern wars got to point at Tehran and ask what the fighting accomplished. Trump handed them that argument.

The verdict

None of this excuses the antisemitism now acceptable in American political life. The scapegoating of Jews and the one Jewish state didn’t begin with Trump and won’t end with him. Nor does opposing a war, or criticizing Israel, make someone an antisemite.

But criticizing Israeli policy is different from denying Jews the right to national existence routinely defended for everyone else. And complaining about money in politics or foreign aid in general is different from fixating on one source of campaign money and one aid recipient, then blaming the money tied to one people and one country for America’s “affordability” crisis. Too many politicians have erased those distinctions on purpose.

The broader danger is the lesson both parties now seem to be drawing. Right after the election, Vice President JD Vance listed “change our relationship to Israel” among the four demands of Trump voters who defected. The first was “end the war,” which is what voters say when a war is halted short of victory and left to drag on. Once politicians in both parties conclude that demonizing Israel and tolerating antisemitism win elections, they will keep doing it. Nations that learn that lesson don’t prosper. From Tsarist Russia to the Arab states that expelled their Jews, societies that made Jews the explanation for their failures only grew poorer, crueler and weaker.

Trump didn’t create that movement. But by fumbling the chance to quickly defeat the Iranian regime, then dissembling about it for months, he gave it political resonance just as this antisemitism and scapegoating was gaining ground.

The Iranian regime has thus far belligerently survived. Politicians who libeled Israel’s war against Hamas as “genocide” won Senate seats. American Jews now face a political culture that treats the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish state as an open question. That is the disaster: not which party won Congress, but what Americans are now willing to accept from the people they send to the most powerful legislative body on earth.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.