The First Woke War

the new foreign policy begins with Israel. Where will it end?

It is 2028, and some names are being floated for key positions in the new Administration’s State Department. Secretary of State Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ambassador to Israel/Palestine Jamaal Bowman are under consideration. What would their foreign policy look like?

We are getting a sneak preview. Even as rockets are crisscrossing the skies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River and horrific rioting has broken out in cities from Lod to Ashkelon, a more far-flung front has opened up as a result of the violence in Israel: a war for public opinion and paradigm shifts here in the United States.

Just as the scale of the Hamas rocket attack and its seeming capture of the Palestinian cause suggests a new phase of an old conflict, so too does a transforming American political landscape mark the rise of a novel foreign policy consensus, one that unites left-wing political players, elite media outlets, online meme culture, and energized activists. Flush off flexing its muscles in the domestic sphere by policing speech, reshaping education, and advocating for abolishing law enforcement during an explosion of crime, it naturally is aiming for more distant shores.

We are seeing the emergence of woke foreign policy. Its linchpin is an assault on the right of Israel to defend itself. Its method is to fold pro-Palestinian activism into the existing catechism of oppression and sympathy. And its effect will be to make life dangerous for all American Jews, regardless if they march with it or against it.

The Middle East has been fairly muted since 2014 if you only count conflicts that involve America or Israel and forget about the atrocities of ISIS and Yemen, so this is really the debut moment for the centerpiece of this new approach to the world, and its advocates are taking full advantage. It is no surprise that Israel is the stage for its premier.

This should be no surprise: like any political persuasion worth its salt, the array of far-left strands of thought that travel under the ‘woke’ moniker have a vision for both America and the world. Or put another way, for the purveyors of this point of view, America is the world. Notions of oppression that allegedly structure life here in the U.S. are imported wholesale to the Middle East. Every vision of America’s place in the world will to some extant emerge from a vision of America, but one that is usually tempered by expertise about the far away. Not so much this time.

Bowman, who represents a robustly Jewish district in Riverdale and enjoyed the support of prominent community leaders, has decried “enough of Black and brown bodies being brutalized and murdered” in relation to Israel’s attempts to defend itself from quadruple digit numbers of rockets and ‘suicide drones.’ Bowman does or does not know that many Israelis are Muslims, and many Jewish Israelis are Arabs.

Bowman is hardly alone in his concern for Al-Aqsa. Squad members have long been at the avant-garde of this anti-Israel turn, and both Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib note in a statement “Let us be clear, however: we continue to provide the Israeli government with over $3 billion in military aid every year—with no conditions or accountability for wanton human rights abuses and continuing illegal seizures of Palestinian land.”

We already know how Omar feels about the Benjamins, but what is remarkable is that a whole raft of journalists and pundits seem to have come to the conclusion that she is a foreign policy oracle. New York Times Opinion writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof agrees with her, sagely asking in an editorial whether supporting our strongest ally fight for its survival is “really a better use of our taxes than, say, paying for Covid-19 vaccinations abroad or national pre-K at home,” as if that was the choice at all. Why spend money on a military ally, a “rich country,” in a dangerous region, after all, when we can spend it to cure all sickness and alleviate all poverty?

There are no shortage of articulations of this new orthodoxy. Any good revolution needs its intellectuals and water carriers. If a Times reader wanted an alternative perspective, she might click over to a ‘guest essay’ from a creative writing teacher in Gaza, but alas none from an Israeli in a bomb shelter.

Or perhaps she is an intellectual who wants to think about the Big Issues: fortunately, the very same Opinion Page features an essay by Peter Beinart, who has developed his perspective on the urgency of the one-state solution to now encompass the necessity of American Jews wholeheartedly embracing the right of Palestinian return, even as many of those Palestinians who never left are urged to cut off Jewish heads with cheap knives. The opportunity to joint-publish the piece with far-left and anti-Zionist publication Jewish Currents is a hat tip that this alignment is already deeply underway. 

If Teen Vogue is more your speed, you can read one of the three virulently anti-Israel pieces on offer there, which likewise consider woke identity politics to be the most fruitful lens through which to view a multifaceted religious and political conflict. 

Of course, it is vital that this foreign policy turn must not only be promoted but also defended from heresy. We thus were treated to the spectacle of NYC Mayoral frontrunner Andrew Yang being made to recant by AOC for the statement “I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists… The people of N.Y.C. will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.” You can read it again if you’d like, and wait for the outrage to build. It apparently did for AOC and a mob at a campaign stop in Astoria, with the Congresswoman calling Yang’s take “utterly shameful” and “chest-thumping” and sternly warned him not to pull that stuff in Astoria during Ramadan.

Increasingly, that barbed warning is being issued to any Jewish American who stands up for Israel’s right to simply exist and fight for that existence, from campuses to the internet and all the places in between. Early reports suggest anti-Semitism is up 250% In England since the start of hostilities: Jews can just as easily be targeted in Trafalgar Square as Tel Aviv.  

As of yet this woke foreign policy is still a shadow government: Joe Biden has admirably held firm against efforts to intrude its world view into the White House. But social media slanders and Congressional crusades are not so far from real life as they might seem. The turn against Israel is three dimensional: it exists on the domestic, foreign policy, and digital arenas.

What is required is not only a cultural Iron Dome to ward off the assault on Israel’s legitimacy, but also a mode of playing offense. Jewish American guilt will not stop the rockets or anti-Semitic barrage, but refusing to apologize at least stabilizes the ground beneath your feet. We need to name things for what they are: the notion that a legal eviction proceeding pending before a Supreme Court comprised of both Arabs and Jews justifies a war by a terrorist state against a democratic one is moral inversion.

The terrain is set for a major political and cultural struggle, one that is not grounded in policy choices but in moral absolutes and the dopamine hits of social media propaganda. As Batya Ungar-Sargon writes in Newsweek, “wokeness is a poor enough lens for understanding our own problems here in the U.S. Its distortions are even worse when it comes to the Middle East.” Everyone of conscience should be saying that, regardless of how many followers you lose.

Many things can be true: they usually are. The way forward for Israelis and Palestinians is complicated and unsure. Force is necessary to prevent barbarism, but it is not sufficient: it needs buy-in and bravery. The reality of war and borders and states is that there is suffering when they are drawn and defended. There are people with families launching rockets, and people with families fleeing from them.

But what is crystal clear is that in the fight between Hamas and Israel, there can be no equivalence. If our new foreign policy pundits can’t see that, woe to the world they are so eager to dismantle.

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