In most election cycles a minority of American Jews consider Israel’s safety and security to be a priority issue at the ballot box, but the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7 of last year and the wave of antisemitism that followed have changed people. An increasing number of Jews will set aside traditional partisan loyalties tomorrow to vote for candidates they perceive as “pro-Israel” allies.

However, who gets their vote depends on how they are defining what it means to be “pro-Israel.”  

Traditionally, the label “pro-Israel” has been earned through consistent congressional votes supporting foreign aid, including funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system. Most members of Congress in both political parties check this box. 

“Pro-Israel” has also been associated with opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and, particularly over the last year, with vocal opposition to the vilification of Israel in the media and at the United Nations. Fewer, but still a fair number, of our political figures meet this criteria.

Votes and vocal support matter, but there is an argument to be made that they aren’t sufficient anymore when evaluating a candidate’s “pro-Israel” bona fides. Incoming missiles and bad press are not the only serious challenges Israel faces today.

We live in a “woke” world where a global, leftist, Marxist movement seeks to gain control over the West. It has deployed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and identity politics to create an anti-American narrative in the identical way it has created an “anti-Israel” one. 

It divides Americans by group identity and assigns collective guilt to disfavored populations for their “crimes” against the aggrieved in the same way that it pitches the Palestinian Arabs as the eternal victims of white, colonialist, Israeli aggression. It promotes unaccountable, centralized, government power and targets free people in democracies with censorship, discrimination, demonization and violence.

That which poisons America poisons Israel. Politicians who fail to provide the cure may not be as “pro-Israel” as they seem.

Those who vote to fund Iron Dome and also to defund their local police do Israel no favors in the long run. A generation of young people educated to view all law enforcement as perpetrators of state violence will see every IDF soldier as a war criminal and behave accordingly.

Those who applaud open borders in America but vote to send money to Israel to protect her borders won’t be able to convince a class of Congressional freshmen why both decisions are in America’s best interest. It will only be a matter of time before the halls of Congress are filled with those who wonder why any country should have any border at all.

Allowing the American judicial system to practice open lawfare against political opponents makes it harder to criticize the International Criminal Court when it does the same to Israelis. The failure of our courts to practice blind justice is an invitation for the rest of the world to ignore that ideal as well.

American Jews who consider themselves part of the “pro-Israel” community need to rethink whether voting for a candidate who is outspoken about Hamas’ brutality but silent about the drug cartels’ is in America’s — or Israel’s — interest.

If “pro-Israel” is measured only by votes and vocal support for Israel, Senator Schumer of New York would qualify — and indeed he has for many years, collecting checks and receiving support from the Jewish community because of his traditional “pro-Israel” record. 

Exactly no one should be surprised by recent disclosures that he advised the embattled former president of Columbia University, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, to do nothing but wait for the controversy surrounding Hamas parades and harassment of Jewish students on her campus to blow over. Having checked the two classic “pro-Israel” boxes required of him, his work was done.

Telling the oppressed not to break into buildings or to spit on fellow students in pursuit of “justice” probably never occurred to the self-proclaimed “shomer Israel”  — guardian of Israel. He had already satisfied his “pro-Israel” constituency and was working on satisfying another one deeply anchored in DEI.

This matters because today’s college students are tomorrow’s legislators. The ideological framework Mr. Schumer failed to challenge, and pandered to, will shape future congressional votes on Israel-related issues. It matters because according to the traditional definition of “pro-Israel,” Mr. Schumer is still a poster boy, even as he harmed the cause.

Resisting the leftist ideological takeover of the United States should be added to the list of “pro-Israel” criteria for politicians. Those who fail to check this box are generally on the Democratic side of the aisle this time around, which is a bitter pill for the majority of Jews who are there as well, but one day, this might be a Republican problem.

Tomorrow’s task for those who are concerned about Israel is to care about American principles like free speech, rule of law, national sovereignty, justice and individual freedom and to vote for candidates who demonstrate that they do as well, no matter their party. Those values make our lives here better, and they protect Israel’s future too.