Haley Stevens nearly won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan in August, then immediately endorsed the winner Abdul El-Sayed. She has spent the months since then vacillating, expressing doubts about his campaign while maintaining her support. But last week her fiance said he intends to vote for El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, and now she has followed, endorsing the Republican just two days before the election.
Stevens’ dramatic reversal met with immediate cries of opportunism or political stupidity. But Stevens seems instead to be following through on a principled objection to El-Sayed’s rhetoric and associations that threaten the state’s Jewish population. The trouble is that her application of those principles is misguided, undermining the values she claims to uphold. Before this weekend, Stevens could credibly accuse El-Sayed of overlooking the bigotry of his allies out of political expedience. Now she, too, is guilty of that very sin.
I grew up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a heavily Jewish suburb of Detroit, and have many friends and family who still live in the state. Every Jewish Michigander I know has serious concerns about El-Sayed. Their issue is not only that he refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist, it’s that he elevated anti-Zionism into the centerpiece of his primary campaign, treating the Israel lobby as the singular force lying behind every economic and political problem afflicting America.
During the campaign, he has energized an activist cohort whose rhetoric habitually goes beyond mere criticism of Israel, or even anti-Zionism, and extends into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. He campaigned with Amir Makled, a candidate for University of Michigan’s Board of Regents who had reposted some of Candace Owens’ anti-Semitic tweets. More notoriously, he attached himself to Hasan Piker, a Marxist-Leninist who has repeatedly employed anti-Semitic rhetoric. When a network of anti-Israel protestors was charged with plotting to intimidate local Jews, El-Sayed questioned the indictment, telling reporters, “It’s a lot more about what you’re advocating for that gets you indicted or not indicted, rather than what you did.”
El-Sayed has made some concessions to the Jewish community. He apologized for his response to a terrorist attack on a Jewish nursery school (“hurt people hurt people”), which he acknowledged minimized the pain felt by the attack’s targets. But for the most part he has tried to strike a very careful balance, assuaging liberal Jews without alienating any elements of his anti-Zionist base. After the left-wing media personality Cenk Uygur released an advertisement blaming Israel for the cost of groceries, Stevens demanded he renounce it. El-Sayed took days to reply, finally stating, “I do not agree with the contents of that ad,” without describing it as offensive.
As the American left has grown more fixated on Gaza, it is becoming more common for progressive organizations and cultures to treat Zionism in any form—including liberal Zionism that harshly criticizes Israel’s government—as a racist ideology, and to ostracize anybody who refuses to renounce it. American Jews rationally fear that El-Sayed is not only willing but eager to import this norm into the Democratic Party, functionally excluding the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population.
Jewish Democrats who have a more deft touch than Stevens have tried to work through their reservations, with little success. Josh Whinton, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, wrote an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press conveying his fears about El-Sayed’s rhetoric and political alliances and El-Sayed’s apparent lack of interest in allaying them. Whinton wrote that he has “said, again and again, that there is a way forward together that does not ask him to abandon his values. He has not yet responded.” Jordan Acker, a Michigan regent whose home was vandalized in the middle of the night by anti-Israel activists, told The New Yorker, “My top issue is the safety of my children, and nothing I’ve heard from the El-Sayed campaign suggests they take that seriously at all.”
Both Whinton and Acker, despite their reservations about El-Sayed, have ruled out endorsing Rogers. Stevens did too, before abruptly reversing course after El-Sayed disinvited her from a pre–election unity rally. This decision by El-Sayed, which undercuts the most essential function of a unity rally, is characteristic of his preference for refusing to break ranks with his most left-wing fanatically anti-Zionist supporters. Whether or not you agree with El-Sayed’s ethic—I do not—one must acknowledge he is willing to follow it even at some risk to his chances of winning. In this way, El-Sayed, like Stevens, appears to care more about putting his own stamp on the Democratic Party than defeating the Republicans.
Stevens seems to have principles as well. The trouble is that her principled opposition to religious and ethnic intolerance does not extend to Muslim and Arab communities.
During the same period of time that El-Sayed has been winking at a political movement inflected with anti-Semitism, he has been targeted by a political message that is not merely inflected with racism, but saturated with it. Donald Trump has made hysterical attacks on El-Sayed, such as “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” and accused him of planning to impose Sharia law, among other wild charges. Rather than use his first name, he has sneeringly called El-Sayed “Muhammed,” as if to erase all doubt that his objection is not to any position El-Sayed has taken but to his religion.
Rogers has not repudiated any of this rhetoric. Instead, he has charged El-Sayed with refusing to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood, even after El-Sayed did precisely that.
Perhaps the party of Trump is so deeply corrupted by racism that hoping a Republican would renounce it is absurd, like asking a shark to apologize for mauling a swimmer. But Stevens is not a Republican or a Trump supporter. And she has thrown herself behind Rogers without making any demands of him.
Tolerance cannot be the ethical rationale for doing so. It’s impossible to construct any standard of behavior toward religious minorities that El-Sayed fails but Rogers passes.
And so, whatever message Stevens imagines she is conveying, it is not what is coming across. Perhaps she is expressing a less-than-exalted notion, Nobody puts Haley Stevens in a corner, lashing out in humiliated defiance of El-Sayed for marginalizing her in the campaign’s final days. Or, even worse, she is communicating that prejudice against Jews is unacceptable but prejudice against Muslims and Arabs is not.