They Blamed the Jews for Eggs. Then They Won.
Cenk Uygur posted on X the Saturday before the election that the response to his anti-Israel grocery-store ad was “a historic moment for online media”: establishment media called the ad antisemitic, online commentators “left, right and center” said it wasn’t, and Abdul El-Sayed “saw that and refused to condemn it.” On Nov. 3, El-Sayed beat Mike Rogers for Gary Peters’ Senate seat. Democrats took both chambers, and the incoming House class includes six new members of the Democratic Socialists of America, which libels Israel’s war against Hamas as “genocide” and wants American military aid cut off.
That morning, with polls still open, President Donald Trump told “Fox & Friends” that the roughly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel would be cut off at the end of the year. He said Benjamin Netanyahu raised it months ago, called the aid “a bad talking point” and named El-Sayed. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Israel had “graduated” beyond American financing and would now be a “sales country.”
The mechanics are a mess. Netanyahu told The Economist in January he wanted the aid tapered to zero over a decade, not ended in eight weeks. The 2016 memorandum of understanding runs through 2028 on money only Congress can appropriate, and Israel’s Finance Ministry had budgeted on it for 2027 and 2028. Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Israel’s Channel 12 he wasn’t sure whether the aid ends now or in 2028. What Israel didn’t do was object. On Friday, Netanyahu’s office issued a statement, in English only, calling the change a move from aid to partnership. It gave no timeline and did not dispute Trump’s year-end date. The subsidy El-Sayed campaigned against is on its way out, and Jerusalem has accepted it.
Recall what Uygur’s Rebellion PAC was selling. A wife in a grocery aisle tells her husband to put the eggs back because they need that $7 “for killing Palestinians.” He asks whether Israel gets universal health care too, and she says yes, as if Americans were paying for it. All of it was false. American aid to Israel is military aid spent overwhelmingly in America, not a cent of it funds an Israeli hospital, and it comes to about one-twentieth of 1% of the federal budget. Eggs got expensive because avian flu forced farmers to cull tens of millions of hens.
El-Sayed’s campaign said the PAC was “not affiliated in any way” with him. He never said the ad was false. Since winning, he has told MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” that he agrees with Trump on ending the aid and told NPR he would also like the USA to stop selling any weapons to Israel, which he libels as using its military for “genocide and apartheid.”
Without military aid, Israel pays full price, as Saudi Arabia will for the $142 billion arms package Washington agreed to sell it in 2025. For Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan, El-Sayed has asked for a review of American military support. For one country alone he wants the weapons sales stopped, even when it pays cash. That country is the Jewish one.
A national wave, not the egg ad, probably did most of the work of electing El-Sayed. But it matters that an ad blaming the Jewish state for grocery bills cost him nothing. El-Sayed is the first Muslim elected to the Senate, and his defenders call any criticism of him bigotry. His faith should be irrelevant. His record is not: years of falsely demonizing the state where nearly half the world’s Jews live, and silence about antisemitic lies told on his behalf.
Run the experiment. The aid was supposedly the grievance. Washington declared it over, and Israel said fine. Within a day of Trump’s announcement, the grievance had found a new target: weapons Israel will buy with its own money. The objection was never to the aid. It is to a sovereign Jewish state that fights back.
JD Vance made the same move from the right. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote on X the day after the midterms, meaning the war on Iran that America and Israel launched in February. Fourth on his list of what defecting Trump voters supposedly want, sourced to a pollster he did not name: “change our relationship to Israel.” Trump, who says he would launch the war again, called Vance’s post largely true. Huckabee told Channel 12 that Vance was wrong, and Fox News’ voter survey backs him: only 19% of Republican voters called American support for Israel too strong, while 59% said it wasn’t strong enough. Vance never said what is left to change. El-Sayed already answered for him: the sales.
Uygur thinks going around “establishment media” to sell a story about Jews and money is new. Michigan has heard it before. Henry Ford used his Dearborn Independent in the early 1920s to publish what became “The International Jew.” Father Charles Coughlin broadcast from Royal Oak in the 1930s to tens of millions, blamed Jewish bankers for the Depression and printed the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He began by championing the New Deal and ended by defending fascism. He switched sides, never targets.
Ford and Coughlin belonged to one of two American traditions toward Jews. George Washington set down the other in 1790, promising Newport’s Hebrew Congregation a government that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The darker tradition produced Ulysses Grant’s 1862 expulsion order, the lynching of Leo Frank and, in 1939, the turning away of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the MS St. Louis. After World War II, Washington’s version won for two generations, long enough for American Jews to assume it had won for good. It hadn’t.
The darker tradition is back, with two homes. On the left, the DSA has treated the Jewish state since at least 2017 as emblematic of everything it thinks is wrong with the West. German socialists of the 1890s had a name for that, usually credited to August Bebel: “the socialism of fools.” On the populist right Vance is courting, Israel gets blamed for a war an American president chose, and gas prices Americans paid. Both have learned what Coughlin learned: blaming the Jews, or their one state, for your troubles draws a crowd.
Uygur calls that crowd a victory. Look at what such crowds have built. The Nazis never won a majority in a free election. About 37% in July 1932 was enough to ruin Germany and drag much of Europe down with it.
Last week proved the case against Israel was never about the aid. Take the aid away and the accusation doesn’t budge, because what offends Uygur, El-Sayed and the DSA is a Jewish state, surrounded by dictatorships and Islamist militias, that refuses to be weak and refuses to be destroyed. Every society that has made the Jews the explanation for its misery has paid for it, and never only its Jews. America is now testing whether it is the exception.
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.
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