On Sunday, in the lead-up to the American midterm elections, Michigan Congresswoman Haley Stevens carried out an extraordinary act of principle, conscience, and individual will: she decided not to endorse a fellow Democrat she considered unfit to serve in the Senate, who had downplayed the attempted massacre of more than 100 Jewish children at a Detroit synagogue and failed to condemn an advertisement blaming Israel for rising prices in America. While remaining a committed Democrat, Stevens withdrew her support for Abdul El-Sayed and endorsed Republican Mike Rogers.
Stevens attempted to draw a moral boundary, affirming that bigotry has no place in the Democratic Party. In response, she faced a wave of condemnation. She was cast as a traitor and an enemy of the party line. Stevens had offered the Democratic Party a historic opportunity to reaffirm its foundational liberal values, an opportunity it resolutely failed to seize.
Stevens’s rejection of El-Sayed could have placed a dam on the flood of anti-Jewish hate that has been consuming so many institutions since October 7. Fuelled by relentless disinformation, with the genocide libel at its centre, antizionism has become a dominant ideology of the left across academia, the media, and international organisations. Antizionists (and their enablers) pushed Stevens out of the Democratic Party, just as they have harassed, abused, and purged countless Jews and “Zionists” from the cultural and political institutions of the West.
Those seeking to discredit Stevens’s gesture argued that Rogers – standing in for Republicans generally – was himself a bigot, and that the campaign against Abdul El-Sayed was anti-Muslim in nature, thereby neutralising the issue of antisemitism and antizionism.
Some remarks made against El-Sayed and his family were indeed unacceptable – including Trump's mockery of his name by calling him “Mohammed El-Sayed” – but none of these remarks was made by Stevens. Moreover, this argument reflected a profound failure of moral reasoning, as though such remarks were comparable to the “context” El-Sayed offered for the actions of Ayman Ghazali, a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist who attempted to massacre worshippers at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan: “Hurt people will hurt people.”
Many Democrats, including Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, explicitly sought to shut down scrutiny of El-Sayed’s possible Muslim Brotherhood ties, including his half-sister’s exuberant response to the October 7 massacre and her own account of their mother’s involvement with the Brotherhood as a university student in Egypt in the early 1970s. In August, five Democratic senators – including Sheldon Whitehouse and Richard Blumenthal – had already boycotted a congressional hearing on the Brotherhood’s network in America.
Research by numerous scholars, including those affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP), has shown that the Brotherhood operates through a decentralised network of ideologically aligned organisations and actors with only a small core of formal members. Regardless of formal affiliation, El-Sayed appears to embrace many of its aims, placing opposition to Israel at the centre of his politics. Rejecting the Brotherhood and all it represents ought to be an expression of progressive values.
The problem is hardly confined to political Islam, however. Many other movements and actors spread libels and propaganda about Israel and seek to justify the exclusion of Israelis, Jews, and “Zionists.” Historically, antizionism emerged from the convergence and mutual influence of communism, Arab nationalism, and Western postcolonialism. Today, it unites a broad coalition of actors who portray Israel as the beachhead of Western imperialism and a scapegoat for domestic problems.
The realignment underway in both parties will inevitably produce internal tensions. The Republican Party faces a growing divide between a rising anti-Islamist element – one that sees a civilisational war emerging inside the United States, driven by forces seeking to impose an Iranian-style social order – and an anti-Israel element that favours a regressive isolationism. The Democrats, on the other hand, risk continuing to exploit the genuine problem of anti-Muslim bigotry to subvert Jewish concerns about antisemitism and antizionism.
Jewish institutions have been slow to establish a clear boundary on antizionism. Polarisation and the absorption of propaganda have fragmented the Jewish response. While everyone agrees that "antisemitism” is a problem, the term lacks a stable referent, and fails to translate the core issue to the public. A mass educational effort is needed to teach the history of antizionist ideology, the harm it has caused to Jewish communities wherever it has become entrenched, and to condemn it clearly and directly.
The fight must be to win back and reconstruct a pluralist left, one that can expand its understanding of oppression to include antizionism. There are more Haley Stevenses out there – people willing to risk their careers and reputations to speak out against injustice. In the wake of Rogers’s defeat – and the continued institutional consolidation of antizionist hate – the stakes of doing so will only rise. But Stevens's decision poses a challenge to every individual confronted with a moment of historical and moral crisis.
As it is said in the book of Esther, “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
Adam Louis-Klein is the Founder of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ)
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