The Israel-Hamas War Is Causing a Reckoning on The Left About What Liberalism Really Means

The war between Israel and Hamas, which began with a horrific attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, has also riled the American left and reopened a deep cleavage in the Democratic Party that shows no sign of healing anytime soon.

While the GOP rallies around calls to ban refugees from Gaza or to “level the place,” as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) put it on Fox News, Democrats are tearing each other apart over how to appropriately honor the dead in Israel, hold Hamas accountable for its atrocities, and support Palestinian civilians – while combatting both rising anti-Semitism and Islamophobia at home.

The Democrats clearly have a more difficult task in managing the camps within their tent than does the GOP on this issue, particularly as many on the far-left have inflamed tensions into an all-out war in the Democratic Party. The war may also create a potential electoral liability for President Joe Biden as hard-left leaders attack his unwavering support for Israel and the American right looks to characterize those same Democrats as illiberal, terrorist-supporting antisemites.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has been a staunch supporter of Israel and was accused on Friday by pro-Palestinian activists of “funding Israel’s genocide.”

Torres hit back on Twitter, writing, “The extremists can’t and won’t intimidate me with their crazed lies and blood libels. I am fearless.” He added, “By falsely accusing me of ‘genocide,’ these anti-Israel extremists are inciting violence against me and putting the safety of my staff and me at risk.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has made headlines since the October 7 attack and has been accused of minimizing the massacre of Israeli civilians while being overly quick to blame Palestinian deaths on Israel. “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that,” Tlaib wrote on Tuesday, parroting Hamas-linked officials’ accounts of what happened.

Despite CNN, Israeli, and U.S. intelligence assessments concluding Islamic Jihad was responsible for the hospital bombing, Tlaib has yet to retract her statement and even later doubled down. “Your war and destruction only approach has opened my eyes and many Palestinian Americans and Muslim Americans like me. We will remember where you stood,” Tlaib added, threatening political reprisal against the leader of her own party, President Biden, for supporting Israel.

Immediately after Hamas’s attack that left some 1,500 Israelis dead, various chapters of the Democratic Socialists for America and independent chapters of Black Lives Matter publicly supported Hamas – despite their gunmen slaughtering, raping, torturing, and kidnapping civilians.

“The glorification and justification of violence against civilians is not something I’ve seen in this movement in the 25 years I’ve been looking at it,” Oren Segal, the vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism told Time last week. The ADL compiled a lengthy list of the various “fringe left groups” that offered public support for Hamas, images of which went viral online as college protests and activists parroted similar rhetoric.

So while the conflict on the left is explicitly out in the open, even though most everyone can agree that the killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians is never justified, the question remains what becomes of the American left and is there really a pro-Hamas faction out there?

While Governor Gavin Newsom (D) meets with Californians in Israel who survived the Hamas attack, viral videos on Twitter of activists tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis and high school students chanting, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” fuel the narrative that the left has lost its mind.

A poll from CNN found that a generational divide may explain some of what’s going on. “81% of those age 65 or older see the response as fully justified, compared with 56% of 50-to-64-year-olds, 44% of 35-to-49-year-olds and 27% of 18-to-34-year-olds,” the poll found when asking if Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack was “fully justified.”

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan weighed in on Twitter on the electoral implications for Biden’s unwavering support for Israel. He replied to a pro-Palestinian activist arguing that “Arabs, Muslims, and young voters” may “sit out 2024” or vote third party.

“Dems need to wake up to this. I’m hearing and seeing this everywhere. This conflict, and Biden’s position on it, could literally help decide a super-close, country-defining presidential election 13 months from now,” Hasan wrote.

Former Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA) hit back at Hasan and wrote, “Stop trying to get Biden to play electoral politics with national security… he is not counting votes right now.”

Hasan, who once worked for Qatari state broadcaster Al Jazeera, has also grabbed headlines for his controversial rhetoric and even went so far as to compare Israel to Russia. “A lot of people around the world see Russia and Israel the same, they see Russia invading and occupying another country,” Hasan said while slamming Biden’s recent prime time address.

Hasan’s controversial pushback of Biden’s worldview that the U.S. is fighting a generation-defining battle against brutal dictatorships – Hamas, Russia, and Iran – that are bent on destroying their democratic neighbors — Israel and Ukraine —  encapsulates the current battle on the left and the stakes for the Democratic Party in the 2024 election.

Scott Galloway made the argument on Friday’s episode of Pivot that a clarifying way to view the Israel-Hamas war would be to imagine if each side unilaterally gave up its weapons and stopped fighting. If Israel were to do so, he noted that the country would quickly be eradicated by Hamas and its regional enemies if it disarmed. He argued, on the other side, that were Hamas to give up fighting “there would largely be peace right now in Gaza and I’d like to think we could move to something resembling some sort of reparations or start thinking about the next chapter.”

The chasm between Hasan and Galloway’s analyses epitomizes the divisions on the left and in the media in covering the conflict, while Torres and Tlaib underscore the deep divisions in the Democratic Party — even within the progressive caucus. The GOP, meanwhile, would love nothing more than to make Tlaib and Hasan the face of the Democratic Party and put as much distance as possible between Biden and the majority of the country that supports Israel and was horrified by the terrorist attack on October 7.

As Israel and Hamas continue to exchange fire – with Israel largely protected by Iron Dome and its superior firepower doing far greater damage to Gaza – the death toll on the Palestinian side continues to skyrocket. As the war continues and the suffering in Gaza intensifies, so too will the war on the left, inevitably posing new challenges for Biden and further asking the question, just how much does the left support the only democracy in the Middle East?

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.