Why are President Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress so eager to welcome Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, to Washington this week? Because he’s an Israeli leader not named Benjamin Netanyahu.
Many Democrats revile Netanyahu, who undermined Barack Obama and leads a government determined to entrench Israel’s brutal and undemocratic occupation of the West Bank. They also fear that legitimizing Netanyahu could strengthen his efforts to defenestrate Israel’s judiciary.
But they know Republicans will claim that their distaste for Israel’s prime minister constitutes hostility to Israel. Embracing Herzog solves that problem. That’s why the former Labor party leader, who now holds Israel’s largely ceremonial presidency, will visit the White House on Tuesday and address a joint session of Congress the following day. For Democratic leaders, he embodies the good Israel.
Compared with Netanyahu, he does. Unlike Netanyahu, Herzog has a long history of at least theoretically supporting a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which would grant citizenship to the millions of Palestinians who now live as stateless subjects under Israeli control. In 2017, Herzog proposed a freeze on many Israeli settlements. As Israel’s president in 2021, he publicly apologized for Israel’s 1956 massacre of 48 Palestinian citizens in the village of Kfar Qasim. It’s hard to imagine Netanyahu showing that kind of humility and grace.
So why are a handful of progressives – including Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – boycotting Herzog’s congressional address? Because they’re not grading on a curve. And the harsh reality is that if you stop comparing Herzog to the Israeli right and instead evaluate his commitment to the principles of equality and non-discrimination that Democrats claim to cherish, he doesn’t look very good at all.
Herzog spent his time as head of Israel’s Labor party looking fearfully over his right shoulder, trying to reassure Jewish Israelis that he could dehumanize Palestinians too. In 2015, he issued a campaign video in which veterans of the Israeli military claimed that he “understands the Arab mentality” and “has seen Arabs in all kinds of situations”, including “in the crosshairs”. In 2016, Herzog said Labor needed to ditch its reputation as “Arab lovers”. When his remarks drew criticism, he doubled down, vowing that he would never “prefer the interests of the Palestinians”, who constitute 20% of Israel’s citizens and roughly 50% of the people under Israeli control.
Whether Herzog ever supported a viable, sovereign Palestinian state – as opposed to a cluster of disconnected cantons that boasted a flag and national anthem but remained under effective Israeli control – is subject to debate. In 2016, he demanded that Israel complete the separation barrier begun under the premiership of Ariel Sharon, 85% of which lies inside the West Bank and thus essentially confiscates land that might have been part of a Palestinian country. He also called for routing the barrier in between different Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, thus severing the half of the city Palestinians claimed as their capital. As president, Herzog has travelled to some of the most remote and radical settlements in the West Bank and extolled their importance to the Zionist project. In 2021, when Ben and Jerry’s tried to stop selling ice cream in West Bank settlements, Herzog denounced the move as “a new sort of terrorism”.
But even when Herzog has argued for territorial withdrawal, he’s often done so in the language of Jewish supremacy. “In about a decade,” he warned in 2015, “the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority.” Israel must therefore divest itself of West Bank Palestinians because “I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel.” Among Jewish Israeli politicians, this kind of ethnonationalism is common. But it’s still ethnonationalism – the belief that the government exists to serve a particular tribe, not all the people under its domain. Even if Israel did leave the West Bank and Gaza – a prospect that now seems impossible – 20% of its citizens would still be Palestinian. Imagine being a young Palestinian Israeli and hearing one of your country’s most prominent politicians vow that someone like you must never lead the country in which you live.
The tragedy of Herzog’s career is that during his time atop the Labor party, prominent Palestinian citizens implored him to stop aping the racist right and instead bring Palestinians and Jews together in a struggle for equality. When Herzog pledged to overcome Labor’s reputation as “Arab lovers”, Ayman Odeh, leader of the largely Palestinian Joint List, urged him to stop acting like a “cheap and pale imitation of Netanyahu” and instead “present a real and brave alternative to the government of Netanyahu and the right”, based on “equality and democracy and … a common fight for the future of us all”. Herzog has never taken up Odeh’s call.
It should be no surprise that progressives like Omar, Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez – who are fighting desperately against ethnonationalists who want to entrench white Christian supremacy in the United States – would boycott an Israeli president who has made Jewish supremacy the guiding principle of his political career. When Narendra Modi – who is turning India into a Hindu supremacist state – addressed Congress last month, they boycotted him for the same reason. Far harder to justify is the decision of their Democratic colleagues, who proclaim their commitment to equality under the law yet line up to applaud a politician who baldly opposes it.
There is a good Israel. But it’s the Israel of Ayman Odeh and of those Palestinians and Jews who struggle – in the face of widespread ridicule, bigotry and outright violence – for a country in which ethnicity and religion confer neither superiority nor subordination. It is they who Democrats should see as their true allies. When one of those Israelis addresses Congress, I suspect Omar, Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez will be in the front row.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter
