Nonnegotiables

A new group of Michigan Jews has released what they call a list of "nonnegotiables" they're demanding out of Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed before they'll give him their support. This is nominally a different and unrelated group from those who are actively urging a vote for El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, though to my mind the difference seems thin. In general, I think the absolute nicest thing one can say the people making these demands is that they are comparable to Muslim and Arab voters who either refused to vote for, or dragged their feet on supporting, Biden/Harris over Donald Trump because of their concerns about Israel/Palestine, and if you're like me that's not a very nice comparison at all.

Anyway, the letter's "nonnegotiables" are listed as follows:

• “Jewish safety — including for Zionist Jews — in Michigan and across America”; 
• “Our right to define our own Jewish identities”; 
• “Jewish sovereignty in Israel”; 
• “Welcoming our full participation in American political life”; and 
• “An affirmative vision for a better future in the Middle East.” 

One could do a line-by-line parsing of what these demands actually mean, but I think the best way to think about it is to envision what would happen if Abdul El-Sayed paired acceptance of these premises with a companion list of additional "nonnegotiables" which also must be accepted:

• “Palestinian safety — including for anti-Zionist Palestinians — in Michigan and across America”; 
• “Our right to define our own Palestinian identities”; 
• “Palestinian sovereignty in Palestine”; 
• “Welcoming our full participation in American political life”; and 
• “An affirmative vision for a better future in the Middle East.”

Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that the El-Sayed campaign respond to this petition with this companion list. Such a response would undoubtedly be viewed as inflammatory and a provocation. But that itself is revealing -- why would this be viewed as a provocation? More broadly, what can we learn from the likely response to this hypothetical initiative?

Well, for one, the last bullet point is vague to the point of meaninglessness. If it is meant to be a palette cleanser demonstrating that this is not just about punching left, it doesn't work. And most of the other bullet points lie in that interstitial space where either they're banal and obviously accepted by any mainstream Democrat (of course nobody should be subjected to violence due to their identity) or are trying to smuggle in considerable more controversial premises under the guise of the aforementioned banality (e.g., presenting certain forms of speech or political advocacy -- particularly condemnations of Israeli or Palestinian actors deemed overly harsh -- as a safety threat).

This is most obvious in the third bullet point. I have no doubt that a "nonnegotiable" demand to recognize "Palestinian sovereignty in Palestine" would be viewed as extraordinarily provocative by the signatories of this letter, because it at the very least raises the question "what count as 'Palestine'?" Are we demanding one state from the river to the sea, the entirety of which must be under Palestinian rule? Or is this a two-state solution, with Palestine comprised of the West Bank and Gaza and existing alongside Israel -- in which case stating that the the former should have "Palestinian sovereignty" is perhaps simply a vindication of Palestinian's equal rights to national self-determination? But the thing is, that same ambiguity exists in "Jewish sovereignty in Israel", which also does not clearly delineate if we're talking about a Jewish majority in pre-67 Israel or also a right to rule over the West Bank and Gaza. The former is something that sits well within the norms of contemporary nation-states, the latter is a demand for formalized apartheid. That's a rather large gap, and so one can understand those who are skittish about issuing an unqualified endorsement without having certainty of what exactly is being endorsed. On this point, it is especially notable that while the letter stresses sovereignty as a "nonnegotiable", it does not speak of democracy at all; the only substantive mention of democracy is when it calls the vision of "'one democratic state' between the river and the sea, with 'equal rights for everyone'" a smokescreen for the destruction of Israel.

The reality is that, if these Jews can understand why they might hesitate before unequivocally signing on to supporting "Palestinian sovereignty in Palestine" as "nonnegotiable" -- even if they truly have no quarrel with a sovereign Palestinian state that sits side-by-side with Israel -- they should understand why an El-Sayed might insist on a bit more clarity regarding "Jewish sovereignty in Israel." I agree that there is nothing intrinsically objectionable that there exists a state with a Jewish majority and that one should not demand such a state's dismantlement simply because one thinks the exercise of Jewish self-determination is inherently illiberal. I also agree that there is something very objectionable about a state that may or may not have a Jewish majority permanently subjugating its Palestinian residents because it determines that granting them equal citizenship and voting rights would mean that Jews no longer would exercise "sovereignty." And while it's true that the former position viewing the very existence of a Jewish-majority state in any context as abominable has very real supporters, it's also true that the latter position asserting an entitlement to permanently subjugate and dispossess Palestinians if necessary to vindicate "Jewish sovereignty" ("from the river to the sea") has no small share of backers in the current Israeli government, to say nothing of those abroad. So what, exactly, are we talking about?

In concept, I think El-Sayed's stated opposition to "ethnostates" is a perfectly valid way of parsing the difference: there is nothing wrong with there being an Israel so long as it adheres to the basic demands of liberal democratic equality -- which certainly does not necessarily impugn the existence of a nation with a Jewish majority or even a Jewish national identity, but does impose a set of basic commitments regarding equal voting and citizenship rights -- and this is the same standard we should assess any other nation by (not objecting to Japan or Ireland or Egypt having a particular national identity, but very much objecting if they permanently withhold full voting rights from certain ethnic groups in order to maintain that identity). But unfortunately, this is an area where the letter writers seem determined not to take "yes" for an answer, lashing out at "cleverly worded arguments" on the subject of "Jewish sovereignty", which here seems to be an elbow thrown precisely against people who validly ask the "what exactly are we talking about" question.

So that's my ultimate read. Is this letter being issued in good faith? My answer to that is to ask whether the letter-writers would endorse without qualification the parallel list of "nonnegotiables" I listed above. If they would, then I think these demands are valid ones. If not (and again, not because they necessarily "oppose" the demand, but because they think there are areas of ambiguity or blurriness that need clarification) then I think that same grace should be extended here -- but the tenor of "nonnegotiable" strongly suggests that such grace will not be forthcoming, and that asking for said grace and clarification would instead be dismissed as another "cleverly worded argument" meant to disguise one's bigotry.

Settler MAGA and Settler Susan Collins

The Dispatch has an interesting article about how violent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians are "dividing" the settler movement. In one corner, there are those who insist the attacks are aberrational. They condemn them, but also clearly see a significant part of the problem as the "embarrassment" they cause to the settlement cause.

“An overwhelming majority of the settlement movement opposes these acts,” Oded Revivi, a former senior figure in the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization of all the local authorities in the West Bank, told The Dispatch. He said the violence posed both a moral problem and a threat to the legitimacy of the settlement movement. “This is an extremist minority that, quite simply, does the settlements no favors,” he said. “It puts the settlement movement in an embarrassing position and undermines its legitimacy because of these acts.”

Then there is the corner that actively endorses the violence.

In an interview with The Dispatch, Yehuda Shimon—a lawyer who volunteers with Honenu, an organization that provides legal assistance to Israelis facing criminal proceedings over nationalist-related offenses, and a settler himself—unequivocally defended acts of violence by extremist settlers.

At first, Shimon denied that there was such a thing as settler violence at all, repeatedly pointing to Palestinian acts of terrorism. “The entire ‘settler violence’ campaign is something the left-wing media made up. There is no such thing as ‘settler violence,’” he said. He later acknowledged that there is “very limited violence” by settlers, but quickly added that it stems from the fact that “settlers are fed up with taking it,” arguing that Israeli authorities haven’t done enough to prevent terrorist attacks on Jews in the West Bank.

The second reason Shimon cited for settler violence: retribution. “Revenge is a feeling that exists among all peoples,” he said, invoking the American response to the attack on Pearl Harbor as an example. Shimon then made the case for collective punishment: “There is no such thing as uninvolved people. If they had eliminated Sinwar and Hitler when they were children, that would have solved a lot of problems.”

This isn't even the half of it -- Shimon did an interview with the BBC that was unabashedly genocidal ("I think now, after they killed one Israeli, we need to kill all the people in Tal and Sarra, even Jit and Farata.... One Jewish life, it's 10 million [Palestinians]."). He is a true sociopath and a monster, and we shouldn't diminish that a whit.

It would be easy to dismiss Shimon as an outlier, and take Revivi at his word that the "mainstream" position is condemnation of violent settlers. But that is in many ways far too convenient a take. Shimon himself might genuinely be an extreme example, but the article makes clear that it's his people that ultimately are holding sway over Israeli government policy in the West Bank. They're the reason why the IDF "stands down" in the face of violent settler activity; they're the reason why the Israeli government intercedes to sabotage efforts by the security services to actually try and clamp down on Jewish terrorism. It's very much akin to the relationship of MAGA and the GOP, where we're all supposed to pretend like the racists and the extremists are some outlier faction as opposed to the clearly dominant force within the movement.

Meanwhile, the "moderates" (if you will) give off extremely strong Susan Collins vibes. There's a lot of lip-chewing and brow-furrowing, and the regular expressions of "concern" over what's going on. But when push comes to shove, they aren't really willing to endorse substantial, concrete initiatives to crack down on settler terrorism. If they oppose violent settlers, they oppose doing absolutely anything to stop them even more.

The scourge of violence by settler extremists, aided and abetted by the Israeli government, against innocent Palestinians is at a fever pitch. It is in fact dangerous for Israel's security and public image; it would also be abhorrent and evil and demanding of opposition even if it had no negative implications for Israelis at all. Like with the GOP, it's good, I guess, when some people who are part of that "faction" eventually see the light and speak out against the violence and abuse. It's all hands on deck. But at the same time, we cannot wait for the settler leaders to come around to doing something (even if we do buy that they're actually interested in "doing something", which one may not) before we ourselves commit to do something. If the Israeli government wants to lash itself to the mast of protecting violent settler terror-thugs, they should expect to face the consequences of that choice in the international arena.

Trust and Traffic Lights (and Robots)

Suppose you stop at a traffic light. There are, say, four cars ahead of you. Eventually, the light turns green. When that happens, the first car goes. The second car waits to see the first car go, then it goes. The third car waits until they see the second car go before it goes, and so on. By the time you are able to start moving, several seconds have elapsed from the light turning green -- a lag that results from us double-checking that the car in front of us will actually move when it is supposed to. All those seconds could be saved if we all just trusted each other to go when the light turns green.

Now, obviously, there are many reasons why one shouldn't do this beyond just "trust". There's the obvious possibility that someone won't react immediately to the green light. There's also potential differences in how fast a car would move even if all cars started moving at the same time. And then there's complications if one car was turning instead of going straight.

Still, it does seem to me that robot cars, in communication with one another so they know how fast they'll be going, when exactly they'll start driving once the light turns green, and if any car is turning or doing something wonky, could circumvent many of these problems (if we trusted them to do so, that is). I wonder how much commute time would be saved by that change -- an impossible task for humans, but well within the capacity of a hypothetical fleet of driverless cars.

Lander Does For Self

The Jerusalem Post reports on Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander being harangued at a protest (against a Hindu nationalist event hosted at Madison Square Garden) for being a "Zionist". This was notable because Lander ousted incumbent Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman in part by hitting him from the left on Israel/Palestine, and Lander has been a sharp and staunch critic of the Israeli government throughout his career (even as he still think Israel should exist).

Given that backdrop, there were a lot of crowing comments on the JPost story to the tune of "See? No matter how much you prostrate yourself before the haters, you'll never win." This is true. But the correct lesson to draw from it is exactly the opposite of what the commenters think it is. If the antisemites will be antisemitic no matter what, then the right thing to do is to do the right thing. Why not, if it won't make a difference either way? If Brad Lander thought that positioning himself as a sharp Israel critic would immunize him from antisemitic attack, he was naive and wrong. But I doubt that was his thought process. More likely, he took the positions he took because he thought they were right. So why should he let some antisemitic idiot coerce him into doing wrong?

There's another, subsidiary lesson to this story though, one that relates to the Hasan Piker line that if Jews don't distance themselves from Israel, "eventually someone’s going to come around and take action .. against American Jews." Even viewed as purely descriptive/predictive, the flaw here is the assumption that the antisemite has reasonable demands that Jews can meet. But that isn't the case. To the extent the antisemitic wants anything out of Jews, it is supplication and submission. And for that reason, the sort of person making such demands can never be fully satisfied, and the Jew who tries to accommodate them will be chasing after an endlessly moving target. Criticize Israel? Not good enough, you still call yourself a Zionist. Don't identify as a Zionist? Not good enough, your synagogue still has an Israeli flag out front. Don't attend the synagogue? Not good enough, you still go to Israeli restaurant. Don't patronize the restaurants? Not good enough, you don't cheer the thought of your Israeli family members being kidnapped or worse.

I'm told that the context for Piker's remarks was seeking to advise an anti-Zionist Jew on arguments that might persuade their co-religionists to be less Zionist -- a counter to the notion that Israel would keep Jews safe. The fact that this argument resulted in a massive, furious backlash from the bulk of the Jewish community might seem proof of the seemingly obvious point that Hasan Piker does not actually have a good read on how American Jews. But beyond that, the Lander example is one of many that shows why this logic is so toxic -- it places Jews on an infinite treadmill of appeasement that will never satisfy the antisemite (for he loves to watch the Jew run and sweat). The only thing it accomplishes is the suffocation of Jewish life, a battery of public commentary sequentially explaining why any way that any Jew does anything Jewish is wrong, wrong, wrong.

So again, if you think that taking the "right" stance on Israel/Palestine will satiate those who enjoy watching Jews squirm, you're wrong. It won't. But to reiterate: the lesson to draw from that is not to take a wrong stance. It's to take the right stance because it is right. The haters will hate you no matter what you do, so don't do it for them. Do it for self.

The Flight 93 Court

"The Flight 93 election" was a term used by conservatives in 2016 to justify voting for Donald Trump. The basic idea was that, even though Donald Trump was essentially everything we, well, knew he was -- a racist, an idiot, a wrecker -- the absolute, desperate need to stop Hillary Clinton from being elected required action that may well be suicidal. "Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. [But] if you don’t try, death is certain."

Of course, to state the thesis is to underscore the absurdity-cum-perniciousness: the tier one emergency requiring conservatives to abandon all prudence and storm the cabin, was .... the possibility that a bog-standard Democratic politician might win the presidency. It is the prospect of ordinary democratic governance that was the emergency, and that shouldn't be forgotten. As Jamelle Bouie has noted, a running theme of contemporary conservative ideology is the belief that democratic outcomes are fundamentally illegitimate if they result in traditional White men losing. This is what unifies everything from birtherism to January 6 to the attack on mail-in ballots to great replacement theory.

In that vein, I think we might do well to start thinking of the current Supreme Court as a "Flight 93 Court". Over the past several months, it has interceded again and again -- with increasing levels of recklessness -- to sow chaos into the democratic system to the advantage of the Republican Party and the detriment of Democrats. First (well, not "first", but we'll start here) we had Callais, gutting the Voting Rights Act to enable Republican gerrymanders throughout the south and hopefully net the GOP a few more crucial House seats. Callais was followed by Milligan, and then today the Supreme Court's decision to intercede and (for now -- it's a wonky procedural posture) block a challenge to Donald Trump's efforts to sabotage mail-in voting in advance of November's election.

Aside from their obvious partisan tilt, what stands out about these decisions is their perversion of normal legal rules and processes -- blasting past the Court's own nominal guardrails to reach the preferred political result. The most obvious specific is the so-called Purcell principle, which supposedly forbids courts from issuing late-breaking alterations to the rules governing elections in close proximity to said election, but has very quickly developed the implicit caveat of "...unless doing so would benefit Republicans." But there are others. The Court's slaughtering of Humphrey's Executor -- and not just that they did it, but the way they did it; clearing the path for Trump's firings on an emergency basis notwithstanding the clear then-operative precedents that made them obviously unlawful -- spoke to a Court that is positively scrambling to let Trump consolidate as much power as possible, as fast as possible.

It is no revelation to anyone -- even someone as ideologically cocooned as John Roberts -- that these cases are obliterating the Court's legitimacy. Reforms like Court-packing, once viewed as fringe complaints from sore losers, are rapidly becoming litmus tests for any serious Democrat seeking higher office. It is almost impossible to imagine the Supreme Court surviving in its current form in the next Democratic trifecta. Last year, Justice Barrett lectured critics that "agree or disagree with the decisions that the court reaches ... we are engaged in a legal enterprise." The prevailing sentiment among liberal legal observers is to reject precisely this: that we are well past simply disagreeing with the decision the Court reaches, and into the terrain where the Supreme Court should no longer be viewed as engaging in a legal enterprise at all.

Given this cascading, calamitous drop in the Court's public esteem, what is prompting the Roberts Six to press forward? It's not commitment to legal principle -- again these cases stand out for their lack of consistent principle and their deviation from established precedential and doctrinal pathways. Rather, these cases give the unmistakable sense of a Supreme Court that is ready to do anything and everything -- no matter how reckless or lawless -- to stop the Democratic Party from taking power in 2026 and 2028. Nobody seriously thinks that the Court is announcing "law" in any meaningful sense, if by that we mean principles that will govern Democratic and Republican administrations in equal measure. The Court's rush to intercede to maximize Donald Trump's personal authority will not carry over to a Democratic administration. The Court is throwing caution to the wind because it views a Democratic political triumph as an existential threat. It is the charging the cockpit, knowing it might die.

Much like the original "Flight 93" justification, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, for the most part, the existential emergency prompting the Court's charge is little more than the prospect of Democrats winning. I'll concede there is a slight difference in this context because of the aforementioned emergent Democratic consensus that the Supreme Court needs to be utterly transformed at the nearest possible opportunity -- but again, that is a tide of revolutionary sentiment that is entirely of their own making. A regular, modest conservative Court would not have prompted this sort of backlash (precisely because, to crib from Justice Barrett, legal professionals do know how to distinguish between outcomes they disagree with and outright judicial lawlessness).

So the Court is locked in on its path. It will endorse all of Trump's lawlessness, it will imperil democracy itself. It may kill us all in the process. But standing in the ruins of a shattered electoral system, they'll at least be able to tell themselves that they did everything they could to stop Democrats from winning.

More Catholic than the Bishops

When I wrote Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty, my goal was to demonstrate how conservative proponents of expansive religious liberty exemptions would prevent liberal religious claimants from accessing those same protections. For example, I predicted that conservatives would challenge the authenticity of Jewish religious commitments insofar as they were liberal (and thus presumptively non-religious in a universe where true religion = conservative Christianity).

With that in mind, this is a great story about brewing contretemps between the Attorney General of Florida, James Uthmeier, and the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops over the subject of vaccine mandates in schools. Florida law requires that private schools in the state's voucher program to allow parents to religiously exempt their children from school vaccine mandates. As an expression of their own religious commitments, however, Florida's Catholic schools do not want to permit such an exemption, as part of its pursuit of the "common good" and ensuring that its schools are safe havens for the elderly and children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

In a fit of extraordinary arrogance, Uthmeier (who is himself Catholic) simply asserted that the bishops had "no legitimate religious reason" for denying vaccine exemptions. When the bishops replied that it was not for a state official to tell the Catholic Church what its religious commitments are, Uthmeier whined that vaccine mandates would represent a "completely new teaching." There were a lot of theological/antisemitic reasons why I felt Jews would be especially vulnerable to this sort of authenticity-policing, but it is striking to see that even the Catholic Church can have the authenticity of its religious views questioned when it speaks in a more liberal voice.

Uthmeier also questioned "whether a private school that doesn’t follow state laws protecting parental rights and deeply held beliefs should still be permitted to participate in state programs and receive state funding." This is, indeed, the million-dollar question that will arise again and again now that the Supreme Court has detonated historical barriers between church and state in allowing (and in many cases compelling) state funding of religious schools (and this very controversy illuminates why government "entanglement" with religion was historically seen as such a threat to religious liberty). 

Of course, the question Uthmeier raises is not intrinsically partisan -- in other cases, the variant will be a religious school that wants to discriminate against LGBTQ kids in defiance of state laws requiring equal treatment. But this situation represents a particularly weak case for denying a religious exemption to the church, since the entire premise of the Florida law is about protecting rights of conscience. It can't hold that out as a paramount interest and then withdraw it for religious claimants who express the "wrong" view.

Nonetheless, resolving these cases will be inherently messy, which leaves a lot of room for bias, which leaves ample opportunity for religious and political favoritism. So my baseline prediction remains that conservative adjudicators will grant the exemptions when it favors conservative beliefs (you can discriminate against the gay kids), and will not when it doesn't (you can't have a vaccine mandate). Either the Supreme Court didn't intend for that sort of religious preferentialism to be the consequence of its new free exercise jurisprudence -- or it did.

What's in the Polling Water in the Midwest?

When Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for Michigan Senate in a nail-biter, there was some talk about this actually being a disappointing outcome for the insurgent left given late polling that suggested El-Sayed running away with the race. This struck me as basically centrist cope -- one doesn't get to claim a moral victory of losing more narrowly than expected when you outspent your appointment by approximately seven trillion dollars -- but it did race significant questions about what went wrong for the pollsters.

Tonight, David Crowley narrowly upset Democratic Socialist Francisca Hong to win the nomination for Governor of Wisconsin in another race where late polling had given the progressive a commanding lead. In contrast to the Michigan race, I think this really does reflect poorly on Hong, as for an "outsider" candidate she couldn't have asked for more a glide path to the nomination watching her field of competitors implode around her (Crowley actually dropped out of the race a month ago before jumping back in, which is wild).

(Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan easily won the Senate nomination over Rep. Angie Craig in another progressive/moderate showdown, though this felt more expected.)

So we now have two major midwestern Democratic primary races that were defined by huge polling misses, both in the form of vast overstatements of the strength of the lefty candidate. The big question is what does this mean for November? Does this suggest an electorate that is more conservative than polls are letting on? Or is it actually just showing that there are more "normie libs" whose voices are being drowned out? More than the results, that's the question that's going to keep me up at night.