Undesirable Ally

 Just when I was starting to legitimately like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's campaign in Michigan (his response to J.D. Vance's attacks was masterful), he's let me down by once again failing to distance himself from a rather unsavory admirer. 

As the New York Times reported earlier this week, just days after a number of Jewish leaders in Michigan had said they would endorse El-Sayed in spite of certain misgivings, Tucker Carlson has come out as an improbable (or perhaps not so improbable) defender of the Democratic candidate.

It should confuse no one why Tucker Carlson would suddenly be backing El-Sayed. He is the definition of a single-issue voter—and for Carlson that one issue is what Henry Ford or a certain type of French journalist in the 1890s would have called "the Jewish question." 

Carlson, lest we forget, has promoted Holocaust denialism on his show and spouted antisemitic conspiracy theories. This is a guy who really does sound like he sleeps with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion under his pillow. 

So El-Sayed now finds himself once again in the position of being "embarrassed by undesirable allies," to borrow a phrase from Arthur Koestler. 

To be clear, I do not believe that El-Sayed is anything like the monomaniacal anti-semite that Carlson often appears to be. But his response to Tucker's "horseshoe theory" enthusiasm for his candidacy also sounded pretty underwhelming. 

In the Times's telling, he said that he disagreed with Carlson on "a lot of things"—including, we must hope, things like whether the Holocaust happened and whether Hitler started World War II—but that he saw eye to eye with him on his Republican opponent's hawkish views. 

El-Sayed has also, let it be said, forcefully condemned antisemitism. And he has repeatedly talked about his "ironclad" commitment to "Jewish safety." 

This is a slightly odd way to put it, though. What about Jewish rights? 

In his book Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner talks about how antisemitism seems to surge at times of social and economic upheaval, because Jews are stereotyped as "economically privileged," but they are also numerically small and politically powerless enough to be vulnerable to populist rage. 

We are obviously living through another moment of disruption and dislocation in the labor market—due to AI among other things—as well as an accompanying moment of considerable populist fury on both the right and the left. 

I worry that the conditions are indeed ripe for a resurgence of antisemitism, then; indeed, we've already seen it. 

I have no idea if Tucker has ridden the wave of this trend for years now because he is a sincere bigot, or if it is just because he sensed early on that antisemitism was the coming thing for the right. 

This is a man, after all, who has already reinvented himself multiple times over. This may just be the latest iteration. 

For his part, El-Sayed, I suspect, strongly and sincerely dislikes Carlson. But he probably feels for similar reasons that it is politically advantageous not to go out of his way to reject Carlson's endorsement and distance himself from the right-wing influencer. 

And that should trouble us—because it means that political figures on both ends of the spectrum are starting to think and act as if antisemites were indeed a significant constituency of voters that need to be appeased in the elections. 

That is not a thing that would have seemed close to normal or likely just a few years ago. 

Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman at the New York Times agrees with me that El-Sayed's comments about "Jewish safety" feel somehow inadequate. 

But his reason is different: he thinks that El-Sayed should have made clear that he not only supports "Jewish safety," but that he supports Jewish "self-determination" in the State of Israel. 

Here's where I swing around again and find myself back on El-Sayed's side. I've never really understood the argument for why anyone is supposed to be enthusiastic or even untroubled about the founding of Israel in 1948. 

I understand the argument for why it might have been at best a brutal necessity to create such a state—perhaps even the least bad of a host of bad options. But I've never understood what the plan was supposed to be for the Arab population already living in the same land. 

Many of them, of course, were expelled from Israel's new borders. Others fled their homes in terror, and then were denied the possibility of returning to their previous homes. 

The ones who remained within Israel's 1948 border were granted citizenship but remained under martial law for another twenty years. And Palestinians in the occupied territories are still denied any vote to this day in the government that effectively controls their daily lives through an endless military occupation. 

Are they really supposed to be enthusiastic about this ordeal, and to say: "well, but the Jewish people needed a state of their own in their ancestral homeland"? 

As Ernest Gellner observes in the same book already quoted: the creation of the State of Israel may have "solved a European problem," but it did so at the cost of "creating an Asian one, about which the Israelis have barely begun to think." 

The best argument I've heard some liberal Zionists make in defense of all this is that the brutal reality of the State of Israel's founding is simply how states are made. Where do you think the United States and Australia came from, kids? The stork? 

Maybe so. Maybe it was really the best anyone could do. The United States certainly has no right to look down on anyone else in this regard, given our own country's history. (Though, may I add, Native Americans at least have U.S. citizenship today, whereas Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not have a vote in the Knesset.) 

But saying, "our state was a necessary evil; we had no other options; please don't judge us too harshly" is hardly the same thing as saying: "you have an obligation to support—economically, politically, morally, ideologically, and militarily—our right to a state of our own in our ancestral homeland, and you must pay verbal obeisance to our moral right to this land with enthusiasm!"

The two attitudes also lead to very different policy conclusions. One says: "we might have to settle for two states for two people as the least bad of bad options; just as partition between India and Pakistan may have been regrettable but historically inevitable." And then we can work on a two-state solution. 

Whereas the other seems to imply: "Israel's formation as an exclusionary ethno-state in 1948 was morally righteous"—in which case, the right-wing Israeli settler extremists are not entirely crazy to ask the inevitable corollary: "so why is it any less righteous to seize the West Bank too?"

The situation then really does seem to be one in which we need to reject a lot of the intellectual tenets of Zionism, then.

Yet, we have to do it without succumbing to the perils of right-wing antisemitism, or of a left-wing anti-Zionism so one-dimensional in its view of the conflict that it serves merely as ideological camouflage for left-wing antisemitism. 

It's not always an easy line to walk, I admit. 

But disavowing Tucker Carlson should be the easiest of easy lifts, in this whole domain of moral questions rife with so many hard lifts. 

In a cluster of issues chock full of genuine dilemmas, here is one thing that is not a dilemma at all. It has a perfectly obvious and simple solution: disavow Tucker Carlson.

The day we need help from the likes of him, we will already be beyond all helping.