Bernie Sanders, the leading candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination (ahead of Super Tuesday, anyway) called AIPAC – the pro-Israel lobby in the US – bigoted, and said he would not participate in its conference. So what? Sanders calls Netanyahu and his government bigoted all the time, and has never participated in any AIPAC conference whatsoever.
The problem is different, deeper and more significant. Sanders and his ideological allies have been conducting an aggressive campaign to delegitimize anything Zionist. AIPAC is not a party-bound lobby; its members are right- and left-wing, Orthodox and Reform. It includes all of the different shades and hues of the Jewish-American community. For Sanders, however, they are not legitimate voters – they are bigots who should be shunned. Why? Because they support Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
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This is as much as to say to the great majority of the Jewish-American community that for him they are illegitimate. When Sanders speaks of the Middle East conflict he never says "Jews" but rather "Israelis" and "Palestinians," as if to emphasize what he sees as an absolute distinction between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry.
This campaign is not unrelated to the general atmosphere. Nor is this the first attempt on the part of the radical left-wing camp in the US to delegitimize the Jewish community. Movements such as Jewish Voice for Peace call on Jewish students to "return the Birthright," or, in other words, boycott the Taglit-Birthright Israel project. They are joined by IfNotNow, which plants anti-Israeli activists in Taglit trips, who then walk out in political protest and raise up a storm.
IfNotNow's tactic is a brazen attempt to present one of the unifying experiences of Jewish-American youth as illegitimate. It has nothing to do with left and right – Taglit-Birthright's aim is to strengthen the connection to Judaism and Israel, and its participants come from all parts of the political spectrum. The IfNotNow campaign has one objective: to paint the institutions of the Jewish-American community as loathsome. And if the campaign is led by Jewish radicals, all the better. After all, they can't be accused of anti-Semitism.
Private schools operating in the Jewish community have also been subject to virtual attacks lately. The Jewish magazine Forward published an anonymously-written article arguing that Jewish schools encourage dual loyalty among their pupils. In other words, they teach their pupils to be loyal to Israel to an equal or greater degree than they are loyal to the US This is clearly an invention, which is perhaps why no one was prepared to sign his name to the item.
The Jewish-American community is in a no-win situation. On the one hand, it is, for the most part, a well-established and influential community. On the other hand it continues to be subject to attacks from all sides and is marked by various parties as "not loyal enough" to America, too loyal to Israel, in control of the media and the politicians. In general it fits in well with every existing anti-Semitic stereotype.
