“The question about Israel isn’t about the theoretical right to exist of a country that exists. The question about Israel is, do they have a right to our tax dollars?” This is how, during a podcast interview with Pod Save America’s Alex Wagner, Abdul El-Sayed waded into the thicket of Middle East politics.
Throughout his U.S. Senate campaign, when asked about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, El-Sayed—who faces Michigan voters in the August 4 Democratic primary—has rejected or recast the premise of the question to avoid directly answering. But with Wagner, El-Sayed stumbled into an inherent contradiction.
Assuring voters that he does not “want ill will for Jewish Israeli people,” El-Sayed leaned on the egalitarian principle of self-determination for all: “I believe in equal rights, to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.” But what self-determination means for Jewish Israelis is an Israel that is a Jewish state, just as what self-determination means for Palestinians is a Palestinian state. (And for Hamas, at least, it means a Palestine that is an Islamic state.)
But instead of acknowledging that the principle of self-determination leads to helping both peoples peaceably live in states of their own design, El-Sayed abruptly moved away from such international-universalist sentiments into America First isolationist policy: “But I also understand that in an era where people ask you, ‘How you going to pay for that when you want to give people healthcare or how you going to pay for that when you want to give people good schools?’ It’s pretty crazy to be sending our money over there when it could be used over here.”
This is a false choice used as misdirection. For the last 15 years, the U.S. has spent about $4 to 5 billion a year on military aid to Israel, except for a one-year spike to $12.5 billion in Fiscal Year 2024 following the October 7 attacks. Annual federal spending on education between 2021 and 2024 roughly ranged from $170 to $180 billion. For health care, the range is $1.8 to $2.1 trillion. Aid to Israel is minuscule in comparison. One can argue we should spend more on health care and education and less on Israel, but our ability to spend on health care and education—especially since the federal budget is not subject to any balanced budget rules—is not constrained by what we give to Israel.
Taking an isolationist approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict is no way to ensure peaceful self-determination for all wins the day. People on both sides have no problem killing each other regardless of U.S. aid to Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and other actors in the region. This has been true since the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Arab-Israeli war that followed.
President Harry Truman, reflecting on the creation of Israel in a post-presidential interview, said he needed to forge a compromise because: “The Jews wanted to chase all the Arabs into the Tigris and Euphrates River and the Arabs wanted to chase all the Jews into the Red Sea.”
The conflict bedeviled Truman, and most of his top aides wanted him to stay out of it. “Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea. And that’s all there is to it. Oil: that is the side we ought to be on,” said his Defense Secretary James Forrestal. Truman wrote in his memoirs, “The Department of State’s specialists on the Near East were, almost without exception, unfriendly to the idea of a Jewish state. Their thinking went along this line: Great Britain has maintained her position in the area by cultivating the Arabs; now that she seems no longer able to hold this position, the United States must take over, and it must be done by exactly the same formula; if the Arabs are antagonized, they will go over into the Soviet camp.” He added, “I am sorry to say that there were some among them who were also inclined to be anti-Semitic.”
Truman did not approach the matter from such a cold standpoint: “My primary concern was to see justice done without bloodshed.” He pushed for a partition in a 1946 statement, which heavily influenced the United Nations decision to approve of one in 1947. Israel declared independence in 1948, which Truman swiftly recognized.
But when Arab armies attacked the embryonic Jewish state, Truman frustrated Jews by refusing to lift a regional arms embargo. He didn’t want to get into a proxy war with Arab-friendly Great Britain. The decision could have lost him the 1948 presidential election, as socialistic Jews played a pivotal role in taking the biggest Electoral College prize New York.
Democrats couldn’t take the Empire State for granted because in 1944 Franklin Roosevelt won it by only five points over Republican Thomas Dewey, the state’s governor. Dewey was the GOP nominee again in 1948, but so was a left-wing third-party candidate, Roosevelt’s second Vice President Henry Wallace, who had been jettisoned from the ticket in 1944 to make room for Truman.
In an October speech in New York City, Wallace said because the incumbent wouldn’t arm Israel, Truman, “stands like Lady Macbeth looking at his blood-stained hands. Like Lady Macbeth, he says, ‘Out, out, damned spot!’ But like Lady Macbeth, the spot will not out. The blood cannot be driven out when it is fixed in hands by oil.” The lashing left its mark. Wallace took 8 percent of the New York vote, allowing the Republican challenger Thomas Dewey to win the state by a single percentage point.
But Truman offset the loss of New York and won re-election, allowing him to continue trying to establish peace and self-determination in the region. According to historian Benny Morris in the book 1948, by 1949 Israel was winning the war. However, while Israel’s leading general wanted to push on, Israel’s top diplomat in the U.S. knew Truman had begun to see the new country as a “trouble-maker.” With American patience wearing thin, the ambassador convinced Israel’s prime minister to withdraw forces from Egypt and negotiate an armistice on favorable terms.
Only then did Truman lift the arms embargo, not initially to help the victorious Israel but to remedy “the weaknesses of the Arab governments.” He also authorized millions in aid to Palestinian refugees and supported the work of the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission to forge a lasting peace. Of course, this did not work. “None of the parties, including Israel, was prepared to make the necessary concessions to ensure peace in the area,” noted historian Donald McCoy in The Presidency of Harry S. Truman.
Violence has ebbed and flowed in the region ever since. But in part because Truman used American soft power, at least one side did not fully kill off the other.
Moreover, the region is better off when American presidents constructively engage in the cause of peace. Dwight Eisenhower’s pressure to stop Israel, aided by France and Great Britain, from taking the Suez Canal in 1956, probably averted a regional disaster. Richard Nixon (with Henry Kissinger) brokered an armistice and peacekeeping force in the Sinai following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Jimmy Carter successfully orchestrated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt.Even Bill Clinton’s ultimately unsuccessful Oslo Accords process, which came close to forging a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, was better than not trying at all. To reiterate a point I made last month, Middle East analysts used to compare the Israel-Palestine peace process to a bicycle that needs to keep pedaling forward, or else the rider falls off. We’re seeing that adage proved true as. Clinton’s failed peace attempt served the region better than the warmongering unleashed by Trump, laying waste to whatever hope people had of the Abraham Accords
And America’s ability to play a constructive international role stems from our ability to provide aid, both military and humanitarian. One person who once understood that is Abdul El-Sayed.
In a Huffington Post blog written 15 years ago, El-Sayed urged then-President Barack Obama to support pro-democracy protestors in Egypt. He noted that Egypt’s then-$2 billion annual aid package, of which the majority went to the military, would serve American interests whether Mubarak was toppled:
… with a weakened state security apparatus following this uprising, if he does survive, he will undoubtedly be more reliant on the army for power than he was before, increasing US leverage. [Or,] because the army will likely broker any transition of power if Mubarak is to fall, the US would likely maintain a degree of leverage with a future government, as well.
El-Sayed further argued that we should not fear an Islamist government controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood because the American-funded Egyptian military wouldn’t allow it: “the military is, and will remain for the time being, Egypt’s principal powerbroker–it is safe to say that the military wouldn’t back a Muslim Brotherhood government without strong liberal democratic structures in place.” (This proved all too true. Once Mubarak was ousted, a democratically elected president linked to the Muslim Brotherhood lasted only a year before he was ousted in a military coup.)
Today, El-Sayed holds a different position on the value of aid to Egypt. During the Pod Save America interview, he extended his logic regarding Israeli aid and Israeli existence:
My family’s from Egypt, OK? Would it be crazy if somebody was asking, “Hey, do you think Egypt has the right to exist?” People would be, like, “Egypt exists.”
If somebody wanted to change the nature of Egypt, do you think the United States should be spending all of its money to make sure, or any of its money, to make sure that that happens? And people [would say,] “I don’t know … that seems like a different country’s issue.”
I’m just saying that you can both say that “Israel exists,” but it doesn’t have a right to my tax dollars.
Fifteen years ago, El-Sayed did want to change the nature of Egypt and leverage American aid to that end. (I did too.) He did so because Egyptians deserve self-determination, as do Israelis and as do Palestinians. That realizing these principles in the Middle East has proven exceptionally hard, and that the power of American aid is limited, is not reason to give up and say that’s a “different country’s issue,” especially when washing our hands of it won’t do anything for American education and health care.
El-Sayed is correct to say Israel “doesn’t have a right to my tax dollars.” Israel only deserves aid insofar as it serves to protect the principle of self-determination. The Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu has shown no interest in Palestinian self-determination. That strengthens the case for conditioning American aid and being more assertive in exerting leverage. But as horribly murderous as Israelis have been to Palestinians, so have Hamas’s legions been to Israelis. Cutting off all military aid, even for defensive weapons, is not likely to reduce violence any more than Truman’s arms embargo did. The hatreds run too deep.
Moreover, El-Sayed glibly saying “Israel exists” just as “Egypt exists” is no different an evasion than when Republican Supreme Court nominees would assure Democratic senators that they acknowledge Roe v. Wade was a settled case. That left open the possibility that they wanted to unsettle Roe and would, if given the power to do so, which they did.
Nobody has good answers for ameliorating the hatreds cultivated over multiple generations. But deflecting the question of whether Israel has a right to exist by saying you believe in self-determination for all peoples elides acknowledging that very principle means that Israelis, as well as Palestinians, have a right to exist–on terms of their choosing.
Since the current terms of desired existence for Israelis and Palestinians deeply conflict, humanity—as well as global stability—demands we intervene to help them find common ground, however painstaking, elusive, and expensive. But our help from above must be informed by what is called for on the ground. For El-Sayed and other like-minded politicians to acknowledge the right of self-determination but not acknowledge that, for Israelis, that means Israel must exist as a Jewish state, shows a failure to truly commit to the principle.
