Op-Ed: Dominique Hoffman: We must win both Israel’s war for survival and America’s battle from within
Only our shared enemies abroad will profit from an America divided and alone, Dominique Hoffman explains.
The tragedy that united Israel fractured the American Right, revealing the ideological and spiritual war consuming the West from within.
October 7th, 2023 is a day akin to the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 for Americans, and it will forever change Israeli politics, the way war is fought in the Middle East, and the war calculus of the IDF.
A profound shift also occurred in American politics that day. Whereas the tragedy unified a bitterly divided Israeli political consensus, the question of Israel has bitterly divided the American Right.
Following the October 7th massacre, the American Left swiftly mobilized across major U.S. cities and universities in an organized chaos reminiscent of the BLM riots of 2020. Many far-left student organizations, including the infamous Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), appeared almost prepared, launching anti-Israel protests before most of the world could make sense of what was actually happening on the ground.
The neo-Marxist social-justice Left has long championed the Palestinian cause; it stands as the moral symbol of liberation for all other social-justice cleavages in the West. At the core of what appears to be an ideological oxymoron, such as “Queers for Palestine,” is the belief that once the Palestinians are liberated from their colonizers, all other identities will also be free of oppression.
As disturbing as it was to see rhetoric shift from “Free Palestine” to “Globalize the Intifada,” and open support not just for Palestinian statehood but for Hamas itself, the radicalization was almost predictable given how extreme the American Left has become.
Although women and men were brutally raped and mutilated before being murdered — and nearly every human right was violated on that horrific day — the Left has largely used Israel as an example of moral evil in its postmodern religion, which seeks to overthrow Western capitalism and white supremacy, of which Israel is seen as the principal example.
This ideological possession explains the alarming cognitive dissonance: the human rights of women only seem to matter when they are Palestinian; casualties of urban warfare have been reframed as victims of “genocide,” despite the true intentions for genocide being on display on October 7th.
This manipulation of reality has come to define the “Woke Left,” which interprets political life entirely through an oppressor–oppressed lens. The oppressed are people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community — systematically subjugated, they argue, by a ruling class of patriarchal, capitalist white supremacists. For anyone paying attention to American politics over the last five years, this should sound like a familiar — and increasingly exhausting — framework.
October 7th also had far-reaching consequences for American politics, creating the perfect window for grievance and reaction. The radical Left provoked an equally radical countermovement on the Right — a dialectical response in Hegelian terms, where every thesis births its antithesis. Another way to describe it: reactionary radicalism.
The last two years have seen the rise of the “Woke Right,” a movement that borrows from the Left’s logic while redefining the oppressor–oppressed paradigm in reaction to an anti-White, anti-Christian narrative that has dominated American culture for a decade. Radical movements are often born in such storms — of grievance, disillusionment, and perceived betrayal.
For a conservative Christian living in America in 2023, the 2020 election still stung, and many Republicans endured what history may regard as one of the weakest presidencies in American history. They had been labeled “fascist” for voting for President Donald Trump in 2016, for believing there are only two genders, for rejecting the notion that white supremacy defines modern America or disenfranchised black communities, and many lost jobs for refusing vaccine mandates during the pandemic.
Compounding these frustrations were the policies of the Biden administration, which saw the cost of living skyrocket, homelessness and crime surge, and American hegemony decline around the world — wars funded by taxpayer dollars while domestic crises mounted. By the time October 7th occurred, the United States was already fatigued by Ukraine. Foreign aid began to feel like a betrayal of domestic survival and the commitments of our politicians to their constituents.
This grievance-based politics on the Right gave rise to the radicalism the Left had long accused it of. The anti-war “America First” sentiment, amplified by figures like Tucker Carlson, offered emotional catharsis but little strategy. “Why send money to Ukraine or Israel” they ask, “when our own cities are falling apart?”
Two fallacies drive this logic. The first conflates local municipal/state failure with U.S. grand strategy. The second is that “America alone” would not mean sovereignty — it would mean surrender to China. In a globalized world, isolation is not independence; it is abdication to anti-liberal countries that seek our demise.
To make America great — the very premise of the MAGA movement — it must remain the world’s stabilizing power, capable of countering China, Russia, and Iran. Yet the new Woke Right insists America is on the brink of World War III and simultaneously argues for retreat.
Historically, support for Israel has been a cornerstone of Republican foreign policy. Today, it’s a fault line. The new Right scapegoats Israel as the cause of America’s decline, mirroring the Left’s anti-Zionist rhetoric. Both sides now feed the same illusion: that the Jews, Zionists, or “neocons” are manipulating the world order to subjugate the oppressed classes.
This is a dangerous and entirely fabricated paranoia that has become a rallying cry in certain Republican circles. It paints AIPAC, the CIA, and the U.S. government as institutions of Zionist deception. In a post-COVID era, where elite missteps eroded public trust, many voters are primed to believe that if one conspiracy proved true, all must be.
The consequences are dark. Medieval anti-Semitic tropes — blood libels, satanic accusations, and the claim that Jews are Christianity’s chief enemy, replaced by the Church as the Chosen People — are resurfacing as commonly held beliefs on the Right. A heavily funded Qatari lobby is actively working to distract American Christians from the shared threat of Islamic jihad and Sharia dominance now eroding parts of Europe.
October 7th did not just reshape Israel’s security doctrine and realpolitik — it exposed the moral fracture of the West itself. In the face of the worst tragedy against Jews since the Holocaust — the very event that gave birth to the idea of universal human rights — America’s political extremes chose to use that tragedy to advance their ideological ambitions, converging in a shared hostility toward the Zionist cause. Each side now mirrors the other in a cycle of radicalization that erodes the very civilization they claim to defend.
Two years later, as a deal looms near, the new front line is no longer Gaza — it is the Western mind and the battle for the heart of America. A society that cannot distinguish between victim and aggressor, truth and propaganda, or call out extremism on both sides will ultimately undermine the liberal values that characterize Christendom, the bedrock of Western civilization.
If October 7th taught us anything, it is that a host of anti-Jewish enemies — namely the neo-Marxist Left, the neo-fascist Right, and the Islamist world — thrive on the division and deceit that fuel radical politics seeking to scapegoat this small ethno-religious minority.
Unless America rediscovers the moral clarity that once made it the guardian of the free world and the governor of a Pax Americana world order, the ideological war that Israel represents will consume the West from within — and only our shared enemies abroad will profit from an America divided and alone.
Dominique Hoffman is the Associate Director of the Philos Leadership Institute.