“The State of Israel," declared David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, “will be judged not by its riches or military power, nor by its technical skills, but by its moral worth and human values." That statement is worth remembering now, because Israel is once again being judged before a hostile world-not by the moral quality of its enemies, not by the savagery it confronts, and not by the standards applied to any other nation, but by a uniquely punitive standard reserved for the Jewish state.
Israel is not merely fighting military enemies bent on destroying it. It is engaged in a worldwide political war against a vast infrastructure of activists, academics, media voices, NGOs, and political operatives committed not simply to criticizing Israeli policy, but to delegitimizing Jewish sovereignty itself.
The goal is not reform. The goal is reputational destruction.
That is why the 2026 Senate contests in Maine and Michigan matter. Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan are not just local candidates with foreign-policy views. Their rise signals that a politics once confined to the activist fringe has moved into the mainstream Democratic primaries. Platner became the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination in Maine after Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign, while El-Sayed is running competitively in Michigan’s open Senate race.
The issue is not whether one may criticize Israel. Of course one may. Israelis criticize their own government more fiercely than most foreign commentators ever could. The issue is whether American politics will normalize the claim that Israel is uniquely illegitimate, uniquely evil, uniquely undeserving of self-defense, and uniquely unworthy of sovereignty.
That is the death of shame.
For generations, calls for the destruction or dismantling of a democratic ally would have carried a political cost. Today, the shame barrier is eroding. The anti-Israel movement has learned to launder eliminationist objectives through respectable language: “decolonization," “one state," “anti-apartheid," “anti-Zionism," “human rights." But when translated into political reality, these slogans often mean one thing: the end of the world’s only Jewish state.
This is not theoretical. Reuters recently reported that opposition to AIPAC and to U.S. military aid for Israel has become a campaign issue for a growing number of Democratic primary challengers. Anti-AIPAC groups have endorsed more than 100 Democratic candidates, many of whom pledge to reject pro-Israel support and oppose military aid to Israel. Reuters specifically noted two competitive Senate campaigns-one in Maine and one in Michigan-as part of this trend.
El-Sayed’s own “Jews for Abdul" campaign page states that he has “long called the war in Gaza a ‘genocide of the Palestinian people’" and that he advocates an “immediate cessation of military aid to Israel." Platner, according to Common Dreams, drew applause at a rally when he called for ending U.S. funding for the Israeli military.
Common Dreams
This is the strategic achievement of the anti-Israel campaign: it has made hostility to Israel a badge of moral seriousness. The more extreme the accusation, the more falsely righteous the posture. Genocide. Apartheid. Colonialism. Ethnic supremacy. These are not neutral policy criticisms. They are instruments of moral criminalization. Once the Jewish state is successfully branded as a moral monstrosity, its destruction becomes not only permissible but virtuous.
Here lies the profound irony. The same political forces that claim to speak in the name of pluralism ignore the fact that Israel, despite its flaws and internal divisions, remains one of the only societies in the Middle East where Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Circassians, secular citizens, religious citizens, and political dissidents participate in a functioning civic order. Israel’s Basic Law gives Arabic a “special status" and states that nothing in the law is intended to harm Arabic’s prior practical status; it also recognizes the right of non-Jews to rest on their own Sabbaths and festivals.
This does not make Israel perfect. No serious person claims perfection. But it does make the obsessive singling out of Israel morally revealing. Where are the comparable Senate campaigns built around the denial of sovereignty to authoritarian states that persecute minorities, crush dissent, subordinate women, imprison dissidents, execute gays, and export terrorism? Where is the equivalent rage directed at regimes that have emptied ancient Jewish communities from lands where Jews lived for centuries?
Instead, the pressure is placed on Israel-the one state in the region where an Arab judge can sit on the Supreme Court, Arab parties can sit in the Knesset, Arabic is protected by law, and minorities possess civic and religious rights unimaginable in many neighboring societies.
The “one-state solution" must therefore be named honestly. In Western activist circles, it is marketed as equality. In the Middle Eastern political context, it means the dismantling of Jewish self-determination and the subordination of Jews to a hostile majority culture that has not demonstrated liberal tolerance toward Jewish sovereignty. Palestinian Authority practice gives a glimpse of the problem: a 2025 article in Israel Studies by Haim Sandberg documents the PA’s criminal prohibition on land sales to Israelis and Jews, including prison sentences from five years to life and the treatment of such sales as a grave act akin to treason.
This is the double standard at the heart of the debate. Israel’s imperfections are magnified into proof of illegitimacy. Palestinian Arab rejectionism, corruption, incitement, financial support of terrorists and persecution are minimized, excused, or ignored.
The Jewish state is told it must transcend the brutal realities of the region, while its enemies are excused as products of that same region.
That is not justice. It is propaganda.
Nor does this remain a foreign-policy issue. Antisemitism has always functioned as a societal fissure-a warning sign that the culture is losing its attachment to truth, proportionality, and the rule of law. The Jew is first made exceptional, then suspicious, then guilty, then disposable. Today, the collective Jew is Israel. The old libels have been updated:
The Jew poisons wells; Israel poisons the world.
The Jew drinks blood; Israel commits genocide.
The Jew controls money; Israel controls Washington.
The consequences are visible. The ADL reported that 2025 was the third-highest year for antisemitic incidents in the United States since it began tracking them in 1979; the Associated Press noted that although total incidents declined from the 2024 record, 2025 included a record-high 203 physical assaults and three deaths tied to antisemitic attacks. In the United Kingdom, CST recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total it has ever reported. Tel Aviv University’s 2025 global antisemitism report warned that in countries with major Jewish populations, antisemitic incidents remained dozens of percent higher than before the Gaza war and that the number of casualties from antisemitic attacks in 2025 was the highest in decades.
This is why rhetoric matters. Dehumanization never remains rhetorical. Jewish jurist André Gantman recalled that when he spoke at the University of Antwerp in 2009, a young man asked him, “Is there human blood in your veins?" Gantman understood the question immediately. It was not a question. It was an attempt to remove him from the human family.
That is what happens when the collective Jew is portrayed as uniquely evil. First comes delegitimization. Then isolation. Then intimidation. Then violence.
The Senate races in Maine and Michigan are therefore not merely about two candidates. They are indicators of a deeper political realignment.
-A movement that once had to disguise its hostility to Israel now increasingly wears that hostility as a credential.
-A movement that once denied seeking the end of Israel now openly treats the U.S.-Israel relationship as a problem to be broken.
-A movement that once insisted it opposed only specific Israeli policies now increasingly rejects the moral legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself.
America should be honest about what this means. If candidates who treat Israel as a pariah are elevated to the Senate, the consequences will not stop with foreign aid. The pressure will move into civil-rights enforcement, campus policy, immigration discourse, nonprofit oversight, and the public definition of antisemitism. Jewish students and institutions will be told that their fear is paranoia, that their Zionism is racism, and that their attachment to Israel is a political liability unworthy of protection.
That is how democratic societies decay-not all at once, but through the steady normalization of the unthinkable.
The warning is clear. The hatred that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews. It corrodes the moral immune system of every society that tolerates it. When the destruction of Israel becomes a respectable topic in elite circles, when the blood libel is rebranded as human-rights advocacy, and when Jewish self-defense is treated as the true threat to peace, the West is not defending democracy. It is surrendering the very values that make democracy worth defending.
Ben-Gurion’s standard still stands. Israel must be judged by moral worth and human values. But so must its accusers. And by that standard, the new respectability of anti-Israel extremism is not a sign of moral progress. It is a sign of civilizational decline.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.