Opinion | How Abdul El-Sayed Can Win Michigan

I confess that I never expected to see an American election where the choice of candidates in more than a few districts will be a democratic socialist versus a Republican monarchist — but live long enough and you’ll see everything.

As I listen to these democratic socialists and King-Trump-right-or-wrong Republicans, one of my favorite movie lines keeps coming to mind. It’s from the 1997 film “As Good as It Gets,” when Jack Nicholson, playing a misanthropic writer, answers his door to find a neighbor asking him to walk a dog and offering cheery advice about opening window curtains to see “God’s beautiful work.”

Nicholson says to her, “Where do they teach you to talk like this?” He adds: “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”

How I wish I could say that to both these extremes: We’re all stocked up on crazy in American politics. Sell it someplace else.

Because this is the only country I have, because the midterms will be razor close and because I am convinced that two more years of Donald Trump completely unchained — controlling the House, the Senate and tacitly the Supreme Court — could bring about the end of America as we have known it, I have to think about how to make the best of some not great choices.

The case most deserving of attention is in Michigan, so here is some free advice for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate there. Why him? Because his victory or defeat could determine whether Trump continues to be able to rule as a monarch without any congressional oversight.

Sir, if you want to win over Jewish and centrist voters in Michigan, increase your odds of victory, be true to your pro-Palestinian, Arab-American roots and stick it to AIPAC, the pro-Israel organization whose super PAC spent $32 million trying to defeat you in the primary, you need to thread your political needle very carefully. There is a way.

El-Sayed says Michigan Jews should not be worried about him — insisting that his commitment “to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.” That’s commendable, but many American Jewish voters are not just looking for stronger police protection from their elected representatives. They are looking for recognition of the right of Jews to self-determination, like any other people.

Yes, many American Jews, especially young ones, now agree — as I do — with Israel’s former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, who in 2023 denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for bringing “horrible racist parties” into the country’s highest cabinet offices, describing them as “a lot worse” than the Ku Klux Klan.

But don’t confuse that with the belief in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state: That is still something very dear to most American Jews — just as much as Palestinian statehood beats in the heart of most Arabs and Muslims. Israel is part of their identity, and El-Sayed is not swaying American Jews when he simply tells them he will protect their synagogues.

He needs to stress his even more commendable and constructive position — which I just heard him describe to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins — that he believes “in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

That is a very good perspective and it is different from that of the democratic socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who has argued that Jews are not entitled to self-determination in a state of their own — a Jewish state in their biblical homeland.

As Jay Michaelson, a contributing columnist to The Forward, has pointed out: “Already, El-Sayed’s statement is a useful contrast to Mamdani’s. He is not pontificating about the abstract legitimacy of Israel or Palestine; on the contrary, he is insisting on the pragmatic view, that I share, that ‘what the ultimate peace should be’ must be decided by both Palestinians and Israelis — a position rejected by both the Zionism-is-colonialism crowd on the left and the Jewish supremacists on the right.”

But when El-Sayed campaigns with the far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has said that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel, it is not surprising that Jewish voters wonder what his real position is on their right to a state of their own like every other people.

Let’s be very clear: Hamas is a terrible organization, first and foremost for Palestinians. The free pblock that it has been given by some pro-Palestinian progressives — who criticize Israel and never Hamas, as if it has no agency — is shameful.

I know something about Hamas’s agency. In February 2002, in this column, the Saudi crown prince at the time, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, for the first time, called on the Arab League to offer peace and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for Israel’s full withdrawal from Palestinian land to the 1967 lines. That call that led the Arab League to hold a peace conference the next month, on March 27 and 28, in Beirut to do just that. It issued what was called the Arab Peace Initiative. Do you know what Hamas’s response was to that first Pan-Arab peace initiative laying the groundwork for a two-state solution?

The night that Arab summit opened, a Hamas suicide bomber walked into a Pblockover Seder at an Israeli hotel in Netanya and detonated, killing 30 people and injuring more than 140. That’s Hamas — two decades before the Gaza war.

I normally would not even get into these weeds, but it is too distressing to watch how the democratic-socialist left has pulled so many young Democrats away from America’s longstanding Middle East position of two states for two people — self-determination for both Jews and Palestinians. Any other position is a geopolitical loser for America and a loser for Palestinians, Israelis, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans, and every other American.

El-Sayed should just keep stressing what he told CNN — that he believes “in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike” and he’d support any peace agreement they mutually agreed to.

And then go back to talking about the Midwest and leave the Mideast alone.

Being for any other exclusivist position — that only Palestinians or Jews are entitled to a national homeland between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — is a prescription for a forever war, because approximately seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews now live in that area and neither group is leaving. Anyone advocating either of the above is an enemy of peace and will alienate the centrist voters who will decide this election.

That said, I can understand that El-Sayed is bitter about AIPAC spending $32 million to defeat him in the Michigan primary and will no doubt spend more to try to defeat him in the Senate race. But he can’t let it get the best of him and cost Democrats a Senate seat, leaving the country with two more years of Trumpian monarchy.

It is not only El-Sayed, though, who needs to draw clear redlines. American Jews have let AIPAC drive them over a cliff.

As readers of this column know, I have been a longtime AIPAC critic. (The true pro-Israel and pro-American lobby is J Street.) Drunk on its own power, AIPAC lost its way years ago when it had a choice regarding how to be pro-Israel — to put American interests and values first or Netanyahu’s interests and values first. AIPAC chose to be pro-Netanyahu.

When Netanyahu walked away from the two-state solution, AIPAC went along for the ride. When Netanyahu abandoned Israel’s standard bipartisan approach to American politics, stiff-armed Democrats and aligned Israel exclusively with Republicans and evangelical Christians, AIPAC went along for the ride.

When Netanyahu urged Republicans to try to block President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, AIPAC saluted and went along for the ride. AIPAC chose to ignore the fact that, as a onetime head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Uzi Eilam, wrote: “While the P.M. made his opinions known loud and clear, many senior Israeli military and intelligence officers, nuclear experts and strategic ***ysts were quietly arguing that this was a good deal for Israel that would actually make us much safer.”

Sure, AIPAC’s website states that it seeks to “broker Israeli-Palestinian peace, including a credible pathway to a two-state agreement.” Show me one statement AIPAC has made criticizing the Netanyahu government’s settlement expansion project, the most aggressive in Israel’s history, that seeks to make it physically impossible on the ground in the West Bank to build “a credible pathway to a two-state agreement.”

I repeat — this is not complicated. El-Sayed can be pro-American, pro-Michigan, pro-Palestinian, pro-Muslim, pro-Israel, pro-Jewish people and expose AIPAC for the Netanyahu front organization that it has become: Just keep being for two states for two peoples. Then just talk about Michigan.

Trust me, his Republican opponent will not like that. And if it upsets the far lefties in his own party, that’s a bonus for him and the rest of us.

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