Opinion: The real issue in NJ-12 is not criticism of Israel. It is the repackaging of anti-semitism

OPINION

There is a purposeful deception being played out in the June 2, 2026, Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district. While some portray this race as a routine passing of the torch after Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman’s retirement, that is not what is actually happening. This primary has become, like several others around the country, a test of whether antisemitism can be repackaged in the language of “social justice,” “anti-colonialism,” and “human rights” and sold to mainstream Democratic voters as moral progress.

The issue is not whether Israeli government officials, policies, or actions can be criticized. Of course they can, and when criticism is warranted, it can be voiced. Nor is the issue whether many Palestinians are suffering. They plainly are. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed, injured, displaced, or forced to live under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Any decent person feels sympathy for innocent civilians caught in the horrors of war.

Nor is the issue whether Democrats must support every decision made by an Israeli government. They need not. Democracies are strengthened, not weakened, by honest criticism and debate.

The real issue is whether that very real suffering is being used to sell a profoundly distorted understanding of why this war began, who bears responsibility for it, and what values are actually at stake.

That is precisely why the deception has been so effective. It does not begin with a lie. It begins with real suffering, real tragedy, and real human loss. Then it uses those realities to sell a profoundly distorted understanding of what is happening, why it is happening, and who is responsible.

That is the first move in the deception: focus the reader’s eyes entirely on Gaza.

Many of us are horrified by the images emerging from the war, as any decent person should be. Seeing neighborhoods reduced to rubble, hospitals overwhelmed, and families searching collapsed buildings for survivors, and families displaced into overcrowded and unsanitary conditions should disturb any human being.

But images, no matter how painful, are not the same as context.

That missing context is not accidental. The public is shown the suffering in Gaza while being encouraged to forget what Hamas did on October 7, why the war began, what Hamas openly believes, and how Hamas deliberately built its military strategy around Israeli civilian trauma and Palestinian civilian suffering.

And the same moral reaction should follow from the images and videos Hamas terrorists made of their own attack. Anyone who watches the footage recorded and distributed by Hamas and other terrorists on October 7, sees families hunted and murdered in their homes, young people massacred at the Nova music festival, hostages dragged into Gaza, or the evidence of torture, sexual violence, and mutilation documented by the Civil Commission should be horrified and sickened as well.

The issue is not whether suffering should move us. It should. The issue is whether only one side’s suffering is being shown, while the suffering that caused this war, and the ideology that produced it, are pushed out of view.

Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, not long after dawn on the Sabbath that coincided with Simchas Torah, the holiday marking the conclusion of the High Holiday season and the annual cycle of Torah reading, thousands of Hamas terrorists and their supporters breached Israeli communities in a coordinated assault that murdered approximately 1,200 people, wounded thousands more, and kidnapped more than 250 hostages into Gaza.

These terrorists burned families alive in homes, massacred young people at the Nova music festival, committed acts of torture, mutilation, and abuse of bodies, sexual violence, and kidnapping, and documented many of the atrocities themselves using body cameras and mobile phones.

None of this means that Israel is beyond criticism or that Palestinian suffering should be ignored. Israelis themselves fiercely debate Netanyahu, settlements, military strategy, and the conduct of the war. The issue is not honest criticism of Israel or concern for Palestinian civilians.

The problem is the way those concerns are increasingly being manipulated into something much broader: an ideological attack on the legitimacy of Jewish national self-determination itself.

Before accepting the conclusion that Israel is uniquely evil and that Jewish self-determination itself is illegitimate, people should understand what Hamas actually is, what many of the slogans being chanted around the world actually mean, and how a broader propaganda ecosystem has spent years shaping public understanding of the conflict through selective history, emotional manipulation, and relentless repetition.

That ecosystem includes organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Democratic Socialists of America, social-media influencers like Hasan Piker, and political figures such as Dr. Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Chris Rabb in Philadelphia, Maureen Galindo in Texas, and similar political figures around the country who package these ideas in softer liberal-democratic language for mainstream American audiences.

The rhetoric matters. But voters should also examine the judgment, associations, and worldview that the candidate’s record reveals.

In Dr. Hamawy’s case, the concern is not limited to rhetoric.  In 1996, Dr. Hamawy told the Newark Star-Ledger that he volunteered in Bosnia with the Benevolence International Foundation, an organization whose Sarajevo and Zenica offices were later identified by U.S. authorities as part of an al-Qaida-linked network. The 9/11 Commission Report described bin Laden’s network, including a Benevolence International Foundation office in Sarajevo, as an “impressive array of offices” that “covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities”. Both the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.N. Security Council designated Benevolence International for terrorism-related activities.

None of this establishes what Hamawy knew at the time, and it would be irresponsible to claim otherwise. But neither is it irrelevant background.

Additionally, Dr. Hamawy was a follower of the teachings of Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” and traveled with him in the early 1990s, before the Iraq War military service that is now central to his public biography. Abdel-Rahman was no obscure cleric.

Trial testimony later described him as advocating attacks against Americans and Jews of any nationality, and a federal appeals court described his worldview as treating the United States as an oppressor of Muslims, active in assisting Israel and largely controlled by the “Jewish lobby.” Dr. Hamawy also translated Abdel-Rahman’s Arabic press release into English at a Jersey City news conference two months after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Dr. Hamawy does not dispute these facts. When asked about them by the Philadelphia Inquirer, he stated, “I would disagree that after he was a suspect, I did anything for him,” adding, “Just the translation.” He also defended the episode by saying, “A blind man has a piece of paper and says, ‘What does it say on there?’” Abdel-Rahman was later convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with plots to bomb the World Trade Center and New York City bridges and tunnels.

None of this proves that Dr. Hamawy shares Abdel-Rahman’s ideology, and it would be irresponsible to claim otherwise. But voters are entitled to ask questions about judgment, credibility, and worldview before entrusting any candidate with public office.

That same standard should apply to the broader story being told about Israel, Gaza, and Jewish self-defense. The deception does not merely omit facts from the present war. It also rewrites the past so thoroughly that Jewish self-defense begins to look like aggression and Jewish survival begins to look like oppression.

That inversion depends upon historical erasure and revisionism.

Few Americans realize that, in the years following Israel’s creation in 1948, nearly one million Jews who were driven from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere across the Middle East and North Africa. Across the region, Jewish communities that had existed for centuries were subjected to riots, killings, bombings, confiscation of property, loss of citizenship, imprisonment, and systematic persecution that ultimately forced hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee countries where their families had lived for generations.

The same historical amnesia extends to the Land of Israel itself. The 1929 Hebron massacre, the destruction of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, and the massacre and destruction of Gush Etzion during the 1948 war are rarely, if ever, discussed in contemporary debates about Israel and Zionism. When Jordan took control of the eastern part of Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, Jews were driven out of their homes, barred from access to the Jewish Quarter and many holy sites in Jerusalem, while synagogues and cemeteries were desecrated or destroyed. Hebron’s ancient Jewish community was erased during the 1929 massacre, only to be reestablished in 1967. The contrast is striking. Modern Israel maintains legal protections and access for Muslims, Christians, and Jews at their respective holy sites, even amid ongoing conflict. In fact, Jews remain restricted in their ability to pray openly on the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, in order to preserve the status quo governing the Al-Aqsa compound.

The result of this revisionism is a deeply distorted narrative in which Jewish self-defense is portrayed as uniquely aggressive or illegitimate because the history that made Jews believe self-defense was necessary has been erased.

Modern antisemitism rarely presents itself honestly as hatred of Jews. Few people today openly declare, “I hate Jews.” Instead, it often appears in a more socially acceptable form: “I have no problem with Jews. I only oppose the racist, colonial, apartheid state.”

That formulation is not accidental. It allows people to insist that their hostility has nothing to do with Jews while directing it toward the one state in the world where Jews exercise national self-determination.

And when the conversation does turn explicitly to Jews, it is usually framed in terms like these: Why should there be a state “only for Jews”? Why should Jews have a nation-state rather than a supposedly neutral secular democracy with equality for everyone? But this standard is almost never applied consistently to other people or nation-states. It is applied uniquely to the Jewish state.

That double standard becomes impossible to ignore when the discussion moves from slogans to survival. Israeli civilians are not being asked to debate an academic theory. They are being asked to live under rockets fired deliberately at homes, schools, hospitals, and cities.

The numbers are staggering. During the first 600 days of the war that began on October 7, nearly 30,000 projectiles were launched at Israel, including approximately 10,100 launches from Gaza and 17,150 from Lebanon. And even those numbers understate the scale of the threat because they do not include projectiles that fell short of Israeli territory or Hezbollah anti-tank missiles. Iran’s direct attacks added another layer: in April 2024, Iran launched approximately 170 drones, at least 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles at Israel; in October 2024, it launched more than 180 ballistic missiles; and during the 2026 war, it launched some 650 ballistic missiles at Israel, many carrying cluster munitions.

Without Israel’s layered air-defense system, including Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, together with significant support from U.S. forces and naval assets, the death toll would almost certainly have been measured in the tens of thousands. Iron Dome itself is an Israeli-designed system backed by substantial American funding, technology-sharing, and later U.S.-Israeli co-production; it detects incoming rockets, calculates whether they are headed toward populated areas or critical infrastructure, and launches interceptors only against those threats. U.S. forces also helped defend Israel directly, including in April 2024, when American warplanes and sea-based air-defense systems destroyed more than 80 Iranian drones and at least six ballistic missiles, and during the 2026 Iran war, when the United States reportedly fired more than 200 THAAD interceptors and more than 100 SM-3 and SM-6 missiles to help defend Israel.

In other words, the reason tens of thousands of Israeli civilians are not dead is not because Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran lacked the intent to kill them. It is because Israel and its allies built the defensive systems needed to stop them.

And yet many people aligned with Dr. Hamawy politically have demanded cuts to American support for Iron Dome, despite the fact that it is an entirely defensive system designed to intercept rockets headed toward populated areas and critical infrastructure.

That demand reveals the deeper double standard at the center of this entire debate. No country, nation, or people on earth would be expected to absorb years of rocket fire without defending itself. America supports NATO collective defense and provides air-defense systems to Ukraine because nobody expects Ukrainians to sit defenseless while Russian missiles target their homes, schools, hospitals, and cities.

Yet when the civilians being protected are Israeli Jews, suddenly defensive systems become controversial.

That double standard does not remain confined to missile defense. It extends to the very existence of a Jewish state.

At a certain point, it has to be said plainly: holding the world’s only Jewish state to a standard no other country would ever be expected to meet is not principled universalism. It is blatant hypocrisy. And when that double standard is applied uniquely to Jews and the Jewish state, it crosses into antisemitism.

The same double standard becomes even clearer when the conversation turns from defending Israel’s right to protect its citizens to questioning whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state at all, as suggested by Dr. Hamawy. He has publicly endorsed a “one-state solution,” a phrase that sounds benign to many Americans because it evokes images of a single constitutional democracy with equal rights for everyone. In practice, however, it would mean replacing Israel as a Jewish state with one political entity stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in which Jewish national self-determination would disappear.

That phrase is intentionally packaged in the language of liberal democracy. It is designed to sound humane and morally uncomplicated. But people need to understand what it actually means in practice. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. It is also the only country in the world whose existence is routinely debated as a moral problem. There are dozens of Christian-majority countries, twenty-two Arab League states, and roughly fifty Muslim-majority countries around the world.

Imagine telling Greeks that Greece should cease being a Greek state, or that Japan should cease being Japanese, or that Armenia should abandon its Armenian national identity and dissolve itself into a larger regional entity. Most people would immediately recognize those demands as discriminatory or absurd.

Yet Dr. Hamawy and others are effectively arguing that the one place on earth where Jews exercise collective self-determination should cease to exist as a Jewish state, a demand that would be considered discriminatory if directed at virtually any other people.

Many Americans hearing these slogans for the first time imagine a stable secular democracy resembling the United States, where centuries of ethnic, religious, and national conflict can supposedly be resolved through constitutional guarantees, elections, and good intentions. But that vision bears very little resemblance to the actual political movements and realities operating on the ground in the Middle East. The problem is not that the vision sounds attractive. The problem is that it ignores the actual ideologies, institutions, and historical realities that would shape such a state.

These are not abstract classroom debates. The modern Middle East has been shaped by war, terrorism, sectarian conflict, authoritarianism, civil wars, and repeated attempts to destroy Israel militarily. And, unlike theoretical discussions conducted safely inside American universities, Israel was not “created” in a vacuum. The Jewish state was reestablished in 1948 in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland after centuries of persecution, expulsions, massacres, statelessness, and ultimately the Holocaust.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews across the world have prayed facing Jerusalem. Jewish liturgy repeatedly invokes Zion, Jerusalem, and the return to the Land of Israel. Jews pray for the return to Zion three times every weekday. The Grace After Meals includes prayers for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. At the end of the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur, Jews declare, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” and traditional Jewish weddings still include rituals mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, such as the placing of ashes on the head of the groom and the breaking of a glass at the end of the ceremony.

By any honest reading of Jewish history, modern political Zionism did not invent the Jewish connection to Israel. It transformed a two-thousand-year-old religious, cultural, and national attachment into a modern political movement aimed at restoring Jewish self-government in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, after centuries of exile and persecution.

By this point, the pattern should be clear: many people in the Western anti-Israel movement hear slogans like “From the River to the Sea” and imagine a peaceful civil-rights movement seeking coexistence inside a shared democracy.

That is not how Hamas describes its own goals. And Hamas’s own words matter because many of the slogans now repeated casually on American campuses and social media originated in, or were popularized by, movements openly committed to Israel’s destruction.

The 1988 Hamas Charter explicitly rejects permanent peace with Israel and frames the conflict as an existential religious struggle against Jews themselves, not merely against Israeli policy.

Article 7 quotes the antisemitic hadith declaring that “the last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them,” and that stones and trees will cry out: “O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.”

This is not rhetoric about borders, settlements, or military policy. It is explicitly about killing Jews.

The 1988 Hamas Charter further declares: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” invokes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and states that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”

The supposedly more moderate 2017 Hamas document still rejects “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” Former Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal declared publicly in 2012: “Palestine is ours from the river to the sea.”

In context, the slogan is not a call for peaceful coexistence or a secular democracy with equality for all. It is a call for the elimination of Jewish statehood between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Some now defend the phrase by claiming they “didn’t know” what it meant or intended something more benign. But society does not normally accept that excuse when other hateful slogans are involved. If someone chanted a slogan historically associated with the Ku Klux Klan, few would argue that the words should be divorced from the ideology and history attached to them simply because the speaker claimed a different personal intent. Why should the standard suddenly change when the target is Jews?

The same pattern appears in the slogan “Globalize the Intifada.” Its defenders often insist they merely mean resistance or solidarity. Yet the Second Intifada was marked by suicide bombings, shootings, and attacks that killed more than a thousand Israelis. When a slogan derives its meaning from a campaign of violence, people do not get to erase that history simply because the slogan has become politically fashionable.

And Hamas is hardly alone. The Palestinian Basic Law declares Islam to be the official religion of Palestine and Islamic sharia to be “a principal source of legislation.” Fatah itself emerged from decades of terrorism and armed struggle, including the Munich Olympics massacre, the Maalot massacre, and the Coastal Road massacre.

Even after signing the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority continued publicly honoring “martyrs” and prisoners. In 2026, the State Department reported that the PA continued providing payments and benefits through multiple mechanisms despite supposed reforms to the “pay-for-slay” system.

Once the actual ideology and stated goals of Hamas and other rejectionist movements are understood, the accusation that Israel is committing genocide becomes much easier to evaluate honestly and in proper context.

To accuse Israel of genocide is not merely wrong; it is the height of intellectual and moral dishonesty. Genocide is a specific legal term requiring the deliberate intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. The Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the Srebrenica genocide, ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidis, and the Holocaust were genocides because extermination itself was the goal.

Whatever criticisms one may have of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, the actual evidence cuts strongly against the claim of genocidal intent. Israel repeatedly issued evacuation warnings, established humanitarian corridors, paused operations during hostage negotiations, and invested enormous resources into precision targeting and civilian-warning systems while fighting an enemy that deliberately embedded military infrastructure beneath civilian areas and operated from hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential neighborhoods.

Those facts matter because genocide requires exterminatory intent. A military genuinely attempting to destroy an entire people does not repeatedly warn civilians to evacuate, create humanitarian corridors, pause operations for aid deliveries and hostage negotiations, or expose its own soldiers to greater danger through costly ground operations.

War is horrific. The loss of innocent human life, Israeli or Palestinian, is always a tragedy. But Hamas deliberately chose to launch the October 7 massacre, openly promised to repeat it, embedded itself among civilians, and turned densely populated civilian areas into battlefields. Hamas’s strategy has consistently relied upon maximizing civilian suffering and international outrage while placing Palestinian civilians directly in harm’s way.

The suffering in Gaza is tragic. But civilian suffering, however heartbreaking, is not evidence of genocidal intent.

Had Israel’s objective truly been extermination rather than dismantling Hamas, it possessed overwhelming military superiority from the first days of the war and could have inflicted vastly greater destruction without evacuation warnings, humanitarian corridors, or costly ground operations. The distinction matters because the law of armed conflict judges military conduct by intent, actions, and available evidence, not by the emotional power of photographs.

Major John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has argued that Israel has taken “unprecedented” civilian harm mitigation measures while fighting in one of the most difficult urban combat environments in modern military history.

Americans should ask themselves a simple question: what would the United States do if a neighboring territory invaded the country, massacred civilians, kidnapped hundreds of hostages, embedded military infrastructure beneath apartment buildings and hospitals, and openly promised to repeat the attack again and again?

No serious country confronted with mass murder, hostage-taking, and openly declared intentions to repeat those attacks simply chooses passivity.

One may disagree with Israeli policy. One may believe Israel has made grave mistakes. But genocide is not simply a word for “a war that has gone too far.” And the evidence does not support that charge.

And yet astonishingly, much of the anti-Israel political, academic, and media world now applies the language of genocide not to the movement openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, but to the state defending itself after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

That inversion is possible only because so much of the underlying history, ideology, and context has been erased or distorted.

In this framework, terrorism becomes “resistance,” Jewish self-defense becomes uniquely suspect, and the world’s only Jewish state is treated not as a nation entitled to the same rights as every other country, but as a uniquely illegitimate exception.

Dr. Adam Hamawy and the broader ideological movement surrounding him are not merely criticizing one Israeli government or one military campaign. They are helping normalize the idea that Jewish national self-determination itself is uniquely illegitimate, that Jewish self-defense is uniquely criminal, and that the world’s only Jewish state should be treated as a moral aberration whose existence must constantly be justified.

That is not a movement for equality or peace. It is the repackaging of antisemitism in the moral language of contemporary progressive politics.

For all of these reasons, Democratic voters should reject Dr. Adam Hamawy’s candidacy and the ideological movement surrounding it. A political movement that treats Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate, excuses or sanitizes openly eliminationist movements, and applies standards to the Jewish state that would never be applied to any other nation is not advancing justice, peace, civil rights, or authentic progressive values.

And leaders such as Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman deserve especially sharp criticism for helping normalize these ideas. Even while declining to formally endorse a successor, she publicly singled out Brad Cohen largely because of his unapologetic support for Israel and his refusal to embrace the rhetoric now dominating parts of the anti-Israel movement.

The message that sends is unmistakable: within parts of progressive politics, support for the Jewish state itself is increasingly being treated as politically disqualifying.

Democrats who genuinely believe in pluralism, equality, democracy, and human rights should say so clearly. That means rejecting Dr. Hamawy’s candidacy, not because he criticizes Israel, not because he cares about Palestinians, and not because Democrats must agree with every decision made by any Israeli government. It means rejecting his candidacy because the ideas he is helping normalize go far beyond ordinary criticism of policy. They deny the Jewish people the same right to national self-determination that progressives defend for every other people. They sanitize slogans and movements tied to eliminationist violence. They turn Jewish self-defense into a moral crime while excusing or minimizing the ideologies that produced October 7.

That has no place under the banner of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for pluralism, civil rights, democracy, equality, minority protection, religious freedom, and opposition to bigotry in all its forms. It cannot credibly claim to stand for those values while making room for a politics that treats the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate, Jewish vulnerability as irrelevant, and Jewish self-defense as uniquely suspect.

This is the line Democratic voters must draw. They do not need to support Netanyahu. They do not need to support every Israeli policy. They do not need to ignore Palestinian suffering. But they do need to reject candidates and movements that use the language of justice to launder hostility toward Jewish peoplehood, Jewish history, Jewish safety, and Jewish self-determination.

The Democratic Party does not need to become the party of Netanyahu. But it must remain the party of truth, pluralism, liberal democracy, civil rights, and universal human dignity.

Ours is not supposed to be the political movement that traffics in alternate realities, historical erasure, or selective moral outrage depending upon who the victims are. We should leave that to others.

If the Democratic Party is going to remain true to its own ideals, then it must reject this ideology before it becomes fully normalized within the party itself.