AMERICA ALWAYS VINDICATES ITS VALUES IN THE LONG RUN:

By the time Ilhan Omar walked onto the national stage, a lot had changed, and not much at all. Since 2006, we've seen three devastating and overwhelmingly one-sided Israeli assaults on Gaza, the massive expansion of settlements in a brutal and seemingly endless occupation, the collapse of U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations and anything that could be called an Israeli "left," a widening gulf between Israeli and American Jews, and an Israeli prime minister who went out of his way to embarrass a popular Democratic president and to embrace the neo-fascist right. Ever-larger cracks are appearing in the defensive wall the U.S. media has for years erected around Israel: Critical voices--even Palestinian ones--are increasingly making it into the op-ed pages. Space for debate is finally opening up. And the controversy that blew up around Omar is a foretaste of how bitterly that space will be contested. [...]

Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership rebuked Omar. Chuck Schumer jumped in on Twitter, as did Chelsea Clinton. Omar apologized on Monday without exactly backing down, reaffirming "the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA, or the fossil fuel industry." The following day, President Trump demanded she resign. Mike Pence called for "consequences." For a minute it seemed like it would be 2006 all over again, only potentially far uglier, since neither Mearsheimer nor Walt wore a hijab.

And then, suddenly, it didn't anymore. Leftist Jews rushed to Omar's defense, taking to the pages of the Guardian, Jacobin, and The Nation to declare that Omar was right about AIPAC, and that accusing her of anti-Semitism was opportunistic and absurd. Prominent liberal Jewish commentators refused to join the anti-Omar pile-on. Peter Beinart focused on "the sick double standard" of the attacks on Omar. Her tweets had been "irresponsible," he wrote, but her "fiercest critics in Congress are guiltier of bigotry than she is." Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf, who had shown little mercy to Mearsheimer and Walt, tweeted that while Omar's words had been "ill-considered," it was "vitally important we distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism." And Jeremy Ben-Ami, chair of AIPAC's liberal rival J Street, dismissed the whole affair as "overblown," issuing a statement warning politicians to "refrain from labeling all criticism of Israeli actions or policies as 'anti-Semitic,' in a transparent effort to silence legitimate discussion."

By Wednesday, the story was no longer Omar, but the schism within the Democratic Party that the controversy had revealed. CNN, Slate, Politico, Time, and the The Washington Post all ran stories on the Democrats' Israel split, pointing out that only one of the seven Democrats vying for the presidency voted for Rubio's anti-BDS bill, and citing poll after poll finding Democratic voters' allegiance to Israel slipping.

That story has been developing for years, but what happened in Washington this week was something we haven't seen before. The imputation of anti-Semitism, an old and much-used tool, was suddenly revealed to be blunt. Critics of Israel have long understood that speaking too loudly would get them silenced and shunned. But Ilhan Omar is still standing. Let the arguing begin.

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