Joshua Scheer
Democracy for Us, a Religious State for Them
Democratic leaders insist that America belongs to everyone. No religious test for citizenship. No ethnic claim to superior rights. No government that treats one community as the rightful owners of the country and everyone else as tolerated guests.
Then someone applies that principle to Israel, and suddenly equality becomes a scandal.
Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed exposes that contradiction. According to The New York Times, Mamdani supports Israel as a state with equal rights rather than religious privilege. El-Sayed rejects organizing any country around an ethnic, racial or religious group. These are positions Democratic leaders should be capable of debating without treating equal citizenship as a threat.
Instead, podcast host Donny Deutsch characterized their opposition to Israel’s existence as a specifically Jewish state as antisemitic. Pelosi called the position wrong and distanced it from the congressional Democratic consensus.
What, precisely, is wrong? The demand that a government belong equally to everyone it governs? The refusal to make religion a qualification for national belonging? Democrats routinely invoke those principles when confronting Christian nationalism in the United States. Their credibility collapses when they treat those same principles as offensive abroad.
Jewish people have an unquestionable right to safety, religious freedom, cultural life and equal citizenship. So do Palestinians. Neither people’s rights should depend on the other accepting permanent subordination. Protecting Jewish life does not require treating every argument for a different constitutional order as an attack on Jews.
“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic, as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Deutsch said.
“Who says that?” Ms. Pelosi asked. Mr. Deutsch named Mr. Mamdani and Dr. El-Sayed, adding that he considered their views “concerning.”
“It’s more than concerning: It’s wrong,” Ms. Pelosi said. “And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress.”
Nancy Pelosi is right about one thing: Mamdani and El-Sayed are challenging the Democratic establishment’s consensus on Israel. That is precisely why their voices matter. Democrats who have held power for decades must answer for the military aid and diplomatic protection that have allowed Israel’s settlement expansion and violence against Palestinians to continue year after year. The current genocide of Gaza is the horrific culmination of policies those leaders helped sustain.
Now voters are electing people willing to challenge that prevailing wisdom—and the response is to cast their positions as antisemitic, as they always have, angry now that it falls on more and more deaf ears as we open our eyes. Because opposition to Israel’s government, its state ideology or its treatment of Palestinians is not, by itself, hostility toward Jewish people. Demanding equal rights does not become bigotry because it threatens an establishment consensus. Pelosi’s rebuke exposes a party leadership more prepared to discipline those challenging its record than to reckon with the consequences of that record.
A state’s political structure is a legitimate subject of criticism. Otherwise, every government could wrap its institutions in a community’s identity and declare opposition to those institutions bigotry. That would make equality impossible to demand wherever inequality had acquired a national flag.
The timing makes Pelosi’s intervention especially revealing. Days before an election, with Democrats asking voters to unite against Republican power, she publicly rebuked her party’s Senate nominee in Michigan. Her subsequent appeal to elect El-Sayed deserves acknowledgment. But the endorsement does not erase the rebuke. Party unity apparently leaves room for senior Democrats to undermine a nominee’s legitimacy while expecting everyone else to fall into line.
Pelosi later backtracked to suport a big bluie wave which would inculde El-Sayed saying “Make no mistake: Democrats are united in a big blue wave For The People,” Ms. Pelosi wrote on social media. “To lower costs, protect healthcare and defend our democracy, we must elect a Democratic House and Senate.”
The New Republic reports that Haley Stevens, whom El-Sayed defeated in the primary, also demanded that he condemn an advertisement produced by an outside group. The nominee was being pressed to answer for speech his campaign did not produce while trying to win the election his party says is essential.
Democratic voters chose a candidate. Some Democratic leaders seem determined to keep him on probation.
Pelosi’s reference to El-Sayed as “this new person in Michigan” captures the condescension. He has a name. He won a primary. The people who selected him are entitled to more than a dismissive assessment from a party elder policing the boundaries of acceptable opinion.
Democrats cannot credibly campaign against religious supremacy in America while demanding that their candidates endorse religious privilege in Israel. They can defend that exception, or they can defend equal rights as a universal principle. They owe voters an honest explanation of which they mean.
And if defending democracy is truly the emergency they describe, they might start by respecting their own voters—and stop treating a demand for equality as the offense that requires an apology.
Sources
- The New Republic: Edith Olmsted, “Why Are Moderate Dems Bashing Abdul El-Sayed Right Before Election?” October 30, 2026. The New Republic
- The New York Times: John Yoon, “Pelosi Splits With Mamdani and El-Sayed on Israel.” October 30, 2026.
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